Home-made chicken pie

Would you believe that my family has been craving for home-made chicken pies for a very long while? It has been quite some time since we embarked on this baking expedition.

It wasn't for lack of time that we hadn't done so. The reason was that it was now almost impossible to find ready-made pie pastries in the supermarkets.

Previously all that we had to do was to stock up on the pastries and whenever we felt like it, my wife would cook the filling and I would roll out the pastry.

So for at least three years now we hadn't been baking any chicken pie at all. It reached a stage where I was being pestered continually by my 22-year-old son till the point where my wife and I agreed to make pies today. But frankly, we were yearning for the chicken pies ourselves....

The first challenge, however, was to learn how to make the pastry from scratch. Our chicken pies are all double-crusted, by the way. The usual self-doubt questions nagged at us. What if the pastry flopped? What would we end up with?

I found a pastry recipe on the Internet. Actually, the Internet was full of pastry recipes and I had a rather difficult time deciding which one to use. Eventually, I did end up with one but now, my refrigerator is filled with excess baking material such as flour and shortening.

There's one lesson to be learnt from the experiment today. I discovered that if the recipe asked for a cup of *anything*, I've to make sure that the cup was filled to the brim with it or otherwise, like what happened to me, I ended up with not enough pastry.

Apart from that, everything else went smoothly and we had a real satisfying and filling lunch today. Burp....