Chicken & Mushrooms in Pastry with Pesto-Glazed Veggies

It's What's Cooking Wednesday time, again. Good thing...gets my butt in gear and forces me (usually) to start posting again. I don't know...I think sometimes I get bored listening to myself blog.

So, here we have another lovely dinner brought to you by that wiz. of the "Dinner Fix", Sandi Richard. This recipe comes from her latest book (and I own them all except for, "Getting Ya Through the Summer" which I borrowed from the library and found it didn't have very many vegetarian/flexitarian substitutions, which all her books to follow have had lots of). The grammar and run-on sentences are just incredible so far aren't they?

Anyway,

here is what you need to make Chicken & Mushrooms in Pastry with Pesto-Glazed Veggies ....

Ingredients:

1. 2 Tbsp butter
2. 10 mushrooms
3. 2 Tbsp flour
4. 1 cup milk
5. 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
6. 2 cups cooked roaster chicken (from the deli)
7. 1 cup frozen peas
8. 1 pkg of 6 frozen puff pastry patty shells (300 g), ex. Tenderflake
9. cooking spray
10. 1 red bell pepper
11. 1 yellow bell pepper
12. 2 medium zucchini
13. 1 Tbsp basil pesto

Directions:

1. Melt butter in a med. stove-top pot on low heat. Wash and slice mushrooms, adding to pot as you cut. Stir and remove from heat.
2. Gradually whisk flour into pot until combined. Slowly whisk in chicken broth and milk. Return to heat and simmer on low. Stir in Worcestershire sauce and spice.
3. Remove meat from chicken and cut into cubes. Add to sauce. Fold in peas.
4. (meanwhile....) Place pastry shells on a cookie sheet and bake in preheated 400F oven. Set timer for 20 minutes.
5. Spray a large nonstick fry pan with cooking spray and heat at medium. Rinse peppers and zucchini and cut into large chunks, adding to pan as you cut. Dab with pesto and toss until tender.
6. When timer rings for pastry, remove from oven. Remove top center disk using a fork and set aside. Gently lift out the soft pastry from the inside of the shell and discard, leaving the bottom intact.
7. When you are ready to serve, place a shell on each plate and fill with sauce. Put a pastry disk on top of the sauce. Serve alongside veggies.

Verdicts:

Nice and easy to prepare. I just love this idea of using roaster chickens to make something else. I mean, they are about 8 bucks and they are already cooked! It's great. And, Dave hacked this one up so the yuck factor was taken out of the cooking for me. Everything looked very pretty and it came together very quickly. And...most importantly...yep, it tasted really good. Dave gave it 7.5 out of 10 and said he'd eat it every couple of weeks. That is "steady" rotation around here and rates the "Good Enough to Eat" seal of approval. The girls also liked it, but would have preferred the veggies sans the basil pesto: a little too fancy-smancy for them.

{oh and, yes, Dave got his knickers in a twist when he saw me adding peas to the pot. He said, "Well, now you've just ruined it". I knew he would be a baby about the peas so I was trying to just sneak them in there. After dinner I asked if he would have liked it better without the peas and he said, "Actually, I didn't even noticed them. It was fine". It's hard to convice someone who ate a lot of canned peas as a child that fresh or frozen peas are not the same thing. But, he is coming along} ;-)

For more ideas on what to make for dinner (or desert! or for a snack!) please head on over to the Fairy Blogmother's site right HERE (and you can check out both Shan and Mike's award winning creations - although...Mike had to cheat to beat Shan...but...you know...whatever...) ;-)