Chicken Pot Pie
It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and every grocery store with a sense of the season has among its offerings chicken pot pie. For those of us who are challenged in the culinary arts or who are just tired (or both), the grab-and-bake chicken pot pie is a beautiful solution for a parent craving an easy-potpie-peasy lemon-in-the-vodka-squeezy night.
Today, as I race through Costco, I count myself among these parents and grab a chicken pot pie large enough to feed the cul-de-sac, which is ideal* since my 11-month-old will likely not eat any, my 2 ½-year-old will eat a bite or two at best before she covers her mouth with her hands to thwart any further attempts at nutrition, and my five-year-old…well, it just depends on what kind of day she’s having. (*So, no, it’s not.)
At a glance, our afternoon seems normal. My kindergartener changes clothes and eats an apple. By eats, I mean she eats the skin off of the baby Honeycrisp and throws the rest away.
“Can I have another apple?” she asks.
“No, you should’ve eaten all of the other apple you had first.” All of the little apple that comes in a bag of $6.99 apples. Apples grow on trees, but money doesn’t.
“Please?”
“Ask your dad when he gets home,” I say kicking the can down the road.
Less than half-an-hour later, my husband gets home from an interview. My older daughters race to greet him while the baby naps on my chest. From the laundry room, I hear, “Daddy, can I have an apple?”
“Sure!” he says, eager to please.
She does not have an apple. The trouble starts when my beloved makes to attack the sad remaining vestiges of Halloween candy that sits in a bowl on the kitchen counter. The offender is a pack of Starburst mini-chewy candies. I’m not sure how it happened, but in distributing the candies, my five-year-old doesn’t get the color of her choice and starts to throw a fit.
I’m inspired to interject with one of my favorite phrases, which comes from Pinkalicious—You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.
Damn straight. My five-year-old’s crying jag pitches as my husband, now punishing rather than appeasing, appropriates her candies. She wails evermore as she’s asked to sit on the couch for a time-out.
With one child in timeout and the other two pottering around, my husband and I go to our bedroom to change into our stretchy pants. I’m pantsless when hysterics ensue from the den. I summon my daughter and suggest she take her timeout in her bedroom until she calms down. This recommendation goes about as well as shaving with a fork does, but whatever. Sometimes, it helps her to be away from all of the stimuli and because I can’t hide in my room until she calms down, asking her to regroup in private has proven to be an effective strategy.
Her door closed, I pad down the hall, through the den, and into the kitchen. I start the lower oven at 375 on convection bake. I can’t remember the last time I baked in the lower oven. I used to cook all of the time. I used to make pasta from scratch. Once upon a time, I would recoil in horror at the idea of buying a premade meal from the grocery store and cooking it and calling it a win. Heck, there was a time that I’d balk at buying a premade sauce and putting it on my spaghetti. I know, I literally sucked. But on the plus, times change. Priorities get themselves together. Three small children and a husband who’s been sick for the past two months as doctors prod and noodle-scratch in a fuzzy quest for lymphoma will do that to a woman.
After turning on the oven, I go to change the baby’s diaper. When I return, white smoke pours from the oven vent, and I know that whoever last used the lower oven hasn’t clean the damn thing. I can’t recall the last time the oven was used. I look inside and am greeted by the bubbling smolder of a grease puddle. Of what? I close the door. It will resolve itself. I know I can use the upper oven, but I want a convection-baked Costco chicken pot pie. Because standards, pathetic though they are. We’re people of discerning tastes, dammit. If I’m not making the thing from scratch, the least I can do is give my family a crispy pastry crunch on all sides.
My husband, who cannot stand a smoky oven comes in and is horrified. He flings open windows despite the 40-degree chill. The children start coughing, and so we usher them to my daughters’ bedroom where my five-year-old is still allegedly in timeout.
My husband into the oven through the door, “It’s on fire,” he announces.
I look down through the window. A base of red-hot blaze supports dancing orange stalagmites. “What do we do?” I ask.
He stares back at me, wide-eyed, mouth agape. “I wish we had a fire extinguisher,” he sidesteps.
“I don’t think that works on a grease fire,” I reply walking idiotically into the laundry room where a fire extinguisher should be if we had one. But yes, we should have a fire extinguisher. “Where’s my phone? I’ll Google it.”
My children swarm. “Go back to the bedroom,” I order.
“Is the house on fire?” my five-year-old asks.
“No. Where’s my phone? Go back to your room?” I pace into the den then go back to the kitchen. “Where’s your phone? Google it.”
I lug the baby into the bedroom and put her down to play. She promptly starts crying. I dashed back to the kitchen.
“What does Google say?” I ask.
“Umm,” my husband leans over over to open the oven.
“Close the door!” He looks at me. I flap my hands. “That’s oxygen! You can’t put oxygen on a fire. It will make it bigger.” He hesitates then closes the door.
Together, we get the kids, who’d followed me back to the kitchen back to the bedroom. The five us are now enclosed in a seafoam green rectangle of a room adorned with construction paper art strategically pasted to the walls with a glue stick. My husband reads from his phone, “Leave the door closed and smother the fire. If that doesn’t work, we should call 911.”
“Okay, does it say how long to let it go before we call?”
“No.”
I leave our safe room and scuttle back to the kitchen. The fire smolders on in the overs. If the house catches on fire, all of these things on the granite counter surrounding the oven will burn. I snatch my laptop off the counter where it’s charging and carry it back to the bedroom.
“Mommy! Mommy!” my five-year-old shouts leaping around.
“Not now.”
Typing, I enter into Google the warning now pulsing red on our oven. GE Oven warning F22.
Findings: F2, F22. Every finding…F22. But on top of the findings…
“Mommy, is this going to burn?” My five-year-old thrusts a baby doll in my face.
“Not now! Go sit down!” We will all die in a real emergency, I think.
“Honey…” my husband’s voice is laced with trepidation and tentative authority.
“Flour can be used to extinguish a grease fire if it’s not too big,” I announce.
“Do you have flour?” he asked. Our eyes meet, as we silently ask whether or not we can douse the fire fast enough while introducing oxygen. Maybe.
“I’ll be right back,” I hurry back to the kitchen and remove the industrial-size bag of flour from a recent Costco trip. I heft it out of the pantry and slump the sack by the counter in front of the blaze. I glance at the fire through the lower oven window.
Back to the bedroom. “I’ve got a big bag of flour,” I confirm. “The fire is smaller,” I add.
The smoke being mostly cleared, I hold the baby and follow my husband back to the kitchen. He looked at the fire. A few minutes later, it extinguished itself entirely.
The crisis is over. The children are summoned back into the primary living areas—our den and our kitchen. My husband and I look at each other. I laugh. He looks a tad afraid.
“Our house just almost caught on fire, and we are in our 30s, and we both virtually looked around for the adults like, '‘okay, where are the real grown-ups? We have a problem!’.” I laugh again because it seems wholly irresponsible to get into the wine quite yet. I’m moderately proud that we didn’t have to call the fire department or adultier adults. Overall, a successful evening.
I acquiesce to cooking the pot pie in the top oven. The evening isn’t going to be a total loss.
Despite several more quarrels on the children’s part, we make it to dinner. The flavor of the potpie itself is perfectly average; however, it is remarkable because as we are saying grace, our 2 ½ year-old announces, “I have carrots!” I was afraid she’d notice, but then she ate her carrots. Ate them with gusto. The baby ate peas and carrots. It was a chicken potpie fire day miracle.
And so now, I will not associate chicken potpie with nearly losing my beautiful five-range GE two-door oven to a fire. I will instead associate it with that one magical time my 2 1/2 -year-old ate carrots, and we all seemed, even if for a brief moment, to be okay. No maybe or maybe not cancer. No bickering. No pickiness. Just…content.