There is a particular smell that stops a house in its tracks, and it comes out of a cast iron skillet with biscuits browning on top of it. This is that dinner, and the whole thing happens in one pan.
No rolling pin, no bottom crust, no dough to chill. The filling gets built right in the skillet — butter, onion, carrots and celery, a spoonful of flour to hold it together, broth and a little milk — and the biscuits go on top and into the oven.
It turns on one move, and it happens in the first two minutes. The seasoning goes into the hot butter before the flour does. Anything With Wings is a sage-and-thyme poultry blend, and forty-five seconds in fat is what spreads it through the entire filling instead of leaving it sitting on the surface.
Carrots, celery and yellow onions are all coming in across the Carolinas this month. If you have a sweet potato from the harvest sitting on the counter, dice up a cup of it and send it in with the rest.
Skillet Chicken Pot Pie with Anything With Wings
One-skillet chicken pot pie with a flaky biscuit top, carrots, celery and peas, seasoned in the butter before the flour goes in with organic poultry seasoning. Serves six.
Ingredients
For the filling
- 3 Tbsp unsalted butter
- 1 medium yellow onion, diced
- 3 medium carrots, diced small
- 2 ribs celery, diced small
- 8 oz cremini mushrooms, sliced (optional)
- 2 Tbsp plus ½ tsp Anything With Wings organic poultry seasoning
- ⅓ cup all-purpose flour
- 2½ cups low-sodium chicken broth
- ¾ cup whole milk or half-and-half
- 3 cups cooked shredded chicken (a rotisserie bird works beautifully)
- 1 cup frozen peas
- 1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves, or 1 tsp dried
For the biscuit top
- 1 can (16 oz) refrigerated flaky biscuits, 8 count — or a batch of drop biscuits, see the notes
- 1 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
- ½ tsp Anything With Wings, for brushing
To finish
- Kosher or flaky sea salt, to taste
- Crushed red pepper, to taste (optional)
- A handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 400°F with a rack in the center.
- Melt the butter in a 12-inch oven-safe skillet — cast iron is ideal — over medium heat. Add the onion, carrots and celery, and the mushrooms if you are using them, and cook, stirring now and then, 6 to 8 minutes, until the onion has gone translucent and the carrots have softened at the edges.
- Add the 2 tablespoons plus ½ teaspoon of Anything With Wings and the thyme. Stir constantly for 45 seconds. The herbs need to hit the hot butter and wake up, and they will scorch if you walk away from them.
- Sprinkle the ⅓ cup of flour over everything and stir for a full 2 minutes, until the vegetables look pasty and the raw-flour smell is gone. Raw flour tastes like paste no matter how long it cooks afterward.
- Pour in the broth about a cup at a time, whisking smooth after each addition before the next one goes in, then stir in the milk. Bring it to a gentle simmer and cook 3 to 4 minutes, until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
- Stir in the shredded chicken and the peas, then take the pan off the heat. Taste the filling now. This is your last chance to adjust it, and it should taste finished before a single biscuit goes on.
- Separate the biscuits and lay them over the filling, leaving a little room between each one so steam can get out. Brush the tops with the melted butter and dust them with the remaining ½ teaspoon of Anything With Wings.
- Bake 20 to 24 minutes, until the biscuits are deep golden and cooked through in the center and the filling is bubbling up around the edges. If the tops color before the middles set, tent loosely with foil for the last 5 minutes.
- Let it rest 10 minutes before you serve it. The filling needs that time to settle from soup into pot pie, and it will run across the plate if you rush it.
- Taste it and add salt only if it asks for it. Scatter the parsley over the top, and put the crushed red pepper on the table for whoever wants it.
The seasoning goes in before the flour
This is the whole recipe in one move. Forty-five seconds of Anything With Wings in hot butter pulls the flavor out of the sage and thyme and carries it into the fat, which then carries it into every spoonful of filling. Stir it in after the broth and it sits on top of the dish instead of running through it.
Why the roux ratio matters
Three tablespoons of butter to a third of a cup of flour to about three and a quarter cups of liquid lands between gluey and runny — thick enough to hold a biscuit up, loose enough to spoon. If yours comes out tighter than you want, thin it with a splash of broth before the biscuits go on, not after.
Make your own biscuits, and season the dough
The can is a fine shortcut on a Tuesday. But if you have twenty minutes, whisk 2 cups of flour, 1 tablespoon of baking powder and 1½ teaspoons of Anything With Wings together, work in 4 tablespoons of cold cubed butter until it looks like coarse crumbs, stir in 1 cup of cold milk just until the dough is shaggy, and drop it over the filling in heaping tablespoons. Seasoning the dough as well as the pot is the difference between a good pot pie and one people ask about.
Rotisserie chicken is the shortcut worth taking
Three cups is roughly one grocery-store rotisserie bird, meat pulled off and shredded while it is still warm. Leftover roast chicken or turkey works just as well, which makes this the best thing to do with the Thursday bird on Saturday.
What is good right now
Carrots, celery and yellow onions are all coming in across the Carolinas this month, and the thyme and parsley are still going in the garden. The North Carolina sweet potato harvest is on, and a cup of small-diced sweet potato in place of one of the carrots is very good here — add it with the other vegetables so it has time to soften. Mushrooms are at their best now too. The peas are honestly from the freezer, and that is fine.
Feeding a crowd, and the day after
This doubles into a 9x13 baking dish: build the filling in a skillet, pour it in, top it with 12 biscuits and bake it 25 to 30 minutes. Leftovers set up firm overnight. Reheat covered at 325°F rather than in the microwave, which turns a flaky biscuit into a damp one.
One seasoning doing the whole job
Anything With Wings is our USDA Certified Organic poultry blend — small batch, no MSG, no fillers, no anti-caking agents. The seasoning itself is gluten free and kosher; the biscuits and the flour in the filling are not, so swap both if you need the dish to be. Use low-sodium broth as written so the seasoning sets the salt level instead of fighting it, and keep the salt on the table. The 5 oz resealable pouch is the one to buy — better value, and it reseals between Sundays.
More of the same seasoning
If this is the pan you reach for in October, Harvest Sheet Pan Chicken with Sweet Potatoes and Apples uses the same blend on one sheet pan, and Cast Iron Chicken Thighs is the thirty-minute version. For the big table there is Anything With Wings Thanksgiving Turkey — and this pot pie is what to make with what is left of it. On a Sunday with time to spare, Dutch Oven Pot Roast is the beef answer to this one.