Chicken tenders with pan sauce

I'm utterly beating a dead horse, but last night I had yet another meal inspired by Thomas Keller's ad hoc - pan fried curry chicken breasts with pan sauce. Honestly, though, the curry and the paprika and the white wine and even the chicken broth are optional. If you just fried up some chicken breasts and poured butter over them, preferably with an herb sauteed in it, that would be a tasty meal too.

Simply slice chicken breasts in half length wise, and season with plenty of yellow curry powder and paprika (I used smoked, Keller says sweet). Refrigerate. Sautee on both sides until well browned in canola oil, put the cooked breasts in a pan in the oven to keep warm and wipe the pan clean. Add butter and shallots, and once the latter are cooked, add white wine, chicken broth and butter. Swirl around to make a sauce. Serve.

A freezer clear-out

Ever since my mother delivered a giant pile of the most perfect middle eastern pita to us from a bakery in DC, our freezer has been a little short on space. At least, for anything other than pita. So I surveyed the contents on Saturday morning to think about what I could do to clear out other things that were stealing space from my prized loaves. Initially, things weren't promising:

1/3 pound lean ground turkey

small tub of cream infused with button mushrooms

6 chicken thighs that I had already used for kebabs

After a bit of pacing around between my kitchen (this is really all I have? ) and the cooking section of my bookshelves, I thought I would make a chicken pot pie a la keller in the Ad Hoc cookbook. Broadly speaking, the method was as follows:

1. cook carrots, pearl onions and potatoes in stock for 8 minutes until tender.

2. make pie crust (I used, yurp, fake non-trans fat stuff, because that is all I had). The recipe would have also been fine as a cobbler, I guess, with no bottom crust and just biscuits on top. Put lower crust into a pan.

3. Make bechamel (a cheat, in my case, as I already had the flavored cream - I just added roux to thicken).

4. Strew stuff inside pie crust and season. Add bechamel.

5. Add top crust and give an extremely generous egg wash.

6. Bake at 375 for 50 minutes.

7. Profit.