I’ve been making these chicken potpies since my girls were little, and, over the years, I started getting special requests for the fillings in the pies. My husband wanted extra peas and pearl onions but no potatoes, one daughter is allergic to carrots, another liked the original version, and it became fun, and a special treat, to ‘customize’ the potpies. I marked the top of each with the initial of the person whose pie it was using a small cookie cutter (and often had help from the girls with this part). It’s a good idea to involve kids in cooking so they begin to learn about food and nutrition, understand the effort required to make a meal, and experience the pleasure of doing it. People who cook for themselves tend to eat more healthfully, so getting kids engaged in food prep is setting them up for a lifetime of healthier eating.

Potpies take some advance preparation, but if you have leftover roasted chicken to use, that will save you a step. The rest is a matter of assembling the vegetables and cooking the filling. The pastry dough I use for these pies is a little heavier than most pie dough, but what you lose in flakiness you make up for in sturdiness. This is like a Cornish pasty dough – you can pick up one of these pies and eat it with your hands – a great grab-and-go lunch or after-school snack. I used a large muffin tin to make this batch, but you can also make them in individual ovenproof bowls if you’d like to serve larger portions. This is a good meal to assemble in double or triple batches to freeze, because it doesn’t take much longer to make more, and they freeze really well. (The leftovers are also pretty good eaten while standing in front of an open refrigerator at midnight.) It’s a great do-ahead, cold weather treat. Enjoy!

Serves: 6 

Prep time: 90 minutes 

For the filling: 

For the pastry dough: