What We Fed the College Kids

Every Sunday night of the college year, different families from our congregation sign up to host a dinner in our homes for our college students (we have a large university in town). We live 45 minutes out, so when we sign up we have fewer than usual come, since it takes so much time away from studies to get here and back.=)

One or two other families will sign up to help as well, and then there is another family who have really done something amazing. Mrs. M. bought around a hundred melamine plates and bowls sometime back. She keeps them in three or four totes with lids. Whenever anybody hosts the dinner, her husband brings them the dishes and leaves them there (so we don't have to use disposable), and then, what really makes this lovely, is that they ask that you merely rinse the dishes, not wash them, and return them to the M. family, where they will run them through their own very good quality dishwasher on high heat to be sure they are well sterilized. Then they are ready to go to the next college dinner the following week. Isn't that a lovely idea? That's a creative and unique act of service I had never heard of or thought of before, and it's something to keep in mind.

So I had the totes of plates and bowls, and I had another family providing a side dish and helping to serve, and had a freezer full of stuff.

I made six very generously filled roughly 9X13 pans of chicken pot pie (recipe below, it's one I have posted before). A couple of the pans were larger- I had a stoneware deep baking dish, for instance, and a couple of disposable foil pans as well. We served it with plenty of green bean casserole provided by the other family helping us. For desert we had peach cobbler and ice-cream, because a friend of ours who got married this weekend had five gallons buckets of ice-cream leftover from her wedding reception and she didn't want to keep it.

We had approximately 30 people here (including my own family with the wonderful sons-in-law) and we completely depleted four pans, and had one or two scoops out of a fifth. That leaves the sixth leftover for lunch.=)

I made only three pans of peach cobbler, and they were wiped clean, with a small amount salvaged for the HM's lunch.

So about the chicken pot pie recipe- Boy, am I embarrassed. When I copied the original recipe, either Mrs. Chancey made a mistake or I actually adapted it for my large family and multiple guests as I copied it. When I put it here on the blog, I did not notice that there really is way too much liquid in the soup/chicken broth mixture.

Sunday afternoon while making up six pans of this stuff for the college students from church to have Sunday evening, I realized my error when I started adding 18 cups of liquid to six cans of cream of chicken soup. Oh, the shame, humiliation, and embarrassment. There was also more than a bit of teary panic and frustration in my kitchen as I had to fix my mistake without benefit of additional creamed soups- three of which I'd borrowed from my mother anyway.

See, I don't usually buy cream soups, but in order to make things easier on us and tidier in the kitchen, I decided to go with cream soups. And then I messed it up so that I had to figure out how to thicken my mess to the consistency it should be, which involved whisking in some cream of potato soup 'starter' I had in the fridge and bringing some of it to a boil and whisking in some white bean flour, and by guess and by golly this and that, an offering of more salt tears to the kitchen god, an incantation over the sauce, a muttered curse (not the swearing kind, the imprecatory kind) about my own stupidity, the sacrifice of an hour where fifteen minutes should have sufficed, and 6 extra pots and bowls to clean where one should have sufficed.

Below is the corrected version that I sort of used, but after all that, our top crust was so thick (delicious, mind you, but still, rather a lot of it) that I wonder if this would have worked as it was written after all.

I originally copied this recipe from the LAF site, it is from Mrs. Chancey where it appears like this:

Easy Chicken Pot Pie(Serves 8-10)
This is an great way to prepare a delicious
meal. It also travels well to socials. I usually serve this with a big veggie
salad and rolls. ~ Mrs. Chancey
Cook and shred four chicken breasts ahead of
time. Place cut chicken in the bottom of a 13"x9" casserole dish. In a bowl, mix
3 c. chicken broth with 1 can cream of mushroom or cream of chicken soup [I think this has to be a mistake. I made it last night using ONE CUP of broth to each can of cream soup, and that seemed right). Pour
over chicken. Add 3 c. frozen mixed vegetables (peas, carrots, corn, etc.). Salt
and pepper all to taste. Now mix 1 1/2 c. milk, 3/4 c. butter, and 1 1/2 c.
self-rising flour. Blend until smooth, then pour over chicken and veggies. Bake
1 hour at 350 degrees.

Now self-rising flour is a thing I have purchased perhaps twice in a quarter of a century of cooking and baking, and cans of cream soup are things we used to shun, too. So usually I don't follow the recipe except in general terms.

Usually I boil four chicken breasts, reserving the liquid for my broth. I dice the chicken and spread it in the bottom of a 13"x9" pan. Or use boullion cubes to make the right amount of chicken broth and used leftover chicken from some other recipe. Or boil a chicken carcasss for the broth. This week chicken breasts were 1.59 a pound, so I bought nine pounds, my wonderful husband diced them for me, I baked them with a bit of fat and some amino acids, and then later we spread them in the bottom of the pan. I used chicken broth powder from Frontier foods to make the broth.

Usually I make one thick recipe of white gravy (2 T. butter; 2 generous T. flour; 2 scant cups of milk; seasoning to taste- melt the butter, stir in the flour, gradually stir in the 2 cups of milk while stirring continuously over high heat. Do not boil).

In a bowl, mix 1 cup of the reserved chicken broth with 1 batch of white gravy. Pour over chicken. There are other ways to make a substitute for cream of chicken soup as well.

Add 3 c. frozen mixed vegetables (peas, carrots, corn, etc., or just add 1 1/2 cups peas and 1 1/2 cups corn if you don't like cooked carrots, and we don't)

Last night I used two bags of frozen mixed vegetables and I added two frozen bags of shelled edamame to our mixed vegetables as well as two grated cooked potatoes (because this is what I had and I wanted to thicken up the filling for the college students). Salt and pepper all to taste.


Now mix 1 1/2 c. milk; 3/4 c. butter; 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour; 2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder; 1/8 teaspoon salt [salt is optional]

I had my husband buy self-rising flour and just used Mrs. Chauncey's recipe, 1 1/2 cups milk, 1 1/2 cups flour, and then I used 3/4 cup melted lard because I was increasing the recipe by a factor of six, so I would need 4 1/2 cups of butter, adn that seemed extreme. Incidentally, I chose this recipe because in addition to the 1.59 price on chicken breasts, my husband brought home two gallons of milk for a dollar and they needed to be used up.

Blend all until smooth, then pour over chicken and veggies. Bake 1 hour at 350 degrees- or divide the recipe into three pie pans and bake for about half an hour.

The peach cobbler recipe looks very similar so far as the batter goes- 1 1/2 cups each flour and milk, and baking powder, so probably self-rising flour would work, but we used whole wheat flour. We used margarine instead of butter, and I could seriously tell a difference. I think this stuff is rich golden ambrosia from Mt. Olympus most of the time, but made with margerine it just seemed blah to me. Happily, the college students just want to be fed real food, the starchier the better, and they loved it.

I was made very happy when the students lined up for their food, and one of the new boys looked at the chicken pot pies and his face lit up and he exclaimed, "You made them from scratch!! Oh, wow! When you said pot pies, I figured it would be from the store, this is awesome!" and then one of the 'older' boys, one who comes out a few times a year and has for about three years, assured him, "These people make EVERYTHING from scratch, don't worry."

Grin. Okay, no, we don't make everything from scratch. But it's nice to have that reputation.