Chicken Not Pie

Tonight the carpool and I decided that we all needed to eat out, mostly because we've been doing training and opening and stuff for the past three weeks or so and no one has any actual groceries in their apartment. I've had macaroni and cheese four nights in a row because there is nothing else in the apartment besides my lunch supplies, and since I'm taking that in to work every day I at least want a different meal at dinner.

Fortunately for us, a new restaurant opened within walking distance, a combination Italian and Southern place. The combination seemed a little sketchy to me, like one of those restaurants that tries to do a little of everything and ends up doing nothing well, but Jeannie swore that it was good so Anna and I just kind of shrugged and went along.

I ended up getting the chicken pot pie, something I didn't eat when I was little. It was one of those dishes that seemed fraught with danger, because it came all sealed up. What if some of the chicken was dark meat? You couldn't tell because it was sealed inside. What if it had onions in it? Were they small onions, or big hacked off chunks of onions that you'd bite into and get that combination of crunchy and slimy that makes onion so gross? There was no way of knowing. Anything could be inside the pie crust, any number of gross things that you didn't want to eat but might get tricked into eating because you couldn't see. Potpie seemed a sinister, conniving sort of food.

Besides, the brother liked it, so it had to be inherently evil.

As I've gotten older, though, I've actually started eating vegetables, and branched out into every once in a while eating a piece of the chicken that's not snow white (but not with bones in it! Oh, God, I'm so not ready for that still), so potpie suddenly sounded good.



The potpie left me unhappy.

It tasted good. I cleaned that plate, and contemplated asking for a spoon to scrape up the leftover, but at the same time, that's not potpie to me. I know about trends toward deconstruction and reinvention and all of that in food, but I don't want a piece of pastry floating on a bowl of potpie filling. If I order a potpie, I want a pie, damn it. This was more like a potpie stew and pastry crouton, which is fine, but not what the menu suggested. When I order pie, I want pie.

I would have ordered some for dessert, but I was afraid of getting a bowl of apple pie filling with a cookie floating on top.