With all seasonal vegetables and the meat from laying hens (also called soup-chickens), this twist on a classic comfort food comes in eco-friendly, delicious, and hearty little packages. You can use the soup-chicken meat directly after you made it or, as I did, you can defrost some previously made portions. And here you can find the recipe for the soup-chicken basics. So let’s begin with the chicken pot pies!

Ingredients (8 small forms à 2 dl or one big 1.5 l cake form):
2 sheets of puff pastry (pâte feuilletée, storebought)
1-2 onions (chopped)
1 garlic clove (finely chopped)
400g potatoes (waxy, in 1 cm cubes)
1 whole, medium sized leeks (outer layer removed, thoroughly washed and chopped)
3 medium carrots (in cubes)
200g champignons (in quarters)
100g peas
400g of cooked chicken, in small pieces
50g of butter
4 tablespoons of flour
1dl white wine
4dl chicken stock
2dl of (semi-)cream
1 bunch of parsley (chopped)
1-2 teaspoons of salt
Pepper (to taste)
Egg-wash (1 egg with a bit of milk)

Preparation:
Heat the butter in a big pot, add the onions and garlic and sautée until soft. Add the potatoes and carrots, mix with butter and sautée for ca. 10 minutes or until you can easily put a fork into your potatoes (they should be almost cooked). Add the leek and the mushrooms, sautée for another 5 minutes. Deglaze with the white wine and let it cook down.
Add the flour and thoroughly mix it with all the vegetables. Add the chicken stock (with me, it was leftover chicken stock from the laying hen chicken soup) and the cream and bring everything to the boil, cook for 2 minutes. Your sauce should thicken to a gravy-like consistency. Add chicken, reduce heat and let everything simmer. Add peas, parsley and season with salt and pepper. – and you’ve got your filling.

Fill your moulds evenly with your filling and let everything cool before topping it with your puff pastry.

Once cold, preheat the oven to 210° and take your puff pastry out of the fridge. Cut circles out of your puff pastry and make a hole or a little cross in the middle. The circles should be a couple of cm bigger then the tops of your moulds so that you can make a nice edge.
Note: Puff pastry is easier to cut and handle when it is cold.
Brush the edges of your molds with the egg-wash, place the puff pastry circles on top, fold your edge once and press into nice shapes (see pictures below). This takes a bit of practice, but even if they don’t look like this, they will still taste amazing! And they tend to lose their shape in the oven anyways, so don’t despair!

Place your chicken pot pies in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. When they’re done, the top should be brown and the filling should have bubbled up.

– and enjoy!