Southern style Chicken & Pastry. Lunch with Dad and Jonathan.

 I am spending some time with my Mother as she recovers from chemo treatments. My father mentioned last evening that he would like some Chicken and Pastry. My nothern friends call it Chicken and dumplings. This is not the same thing as I have experienced from the North. Their dumplings seem to be made with corn meal. These are made of flour.  Dad made things easy for us today by making a trip to the grocery store and getting some of the premade frozen pastry. Anne's pastry is wonderful and she is from our area! She is a sweet christian lady which was brilliant to come up with the idea of selling premade pastry for home cooks. The pastry is also wonderful baked as crackers. Just sprinkle on a little kosher salt and olive oil bake until cripsy and and serve with ranch dressing!!!

I have made pastry dough from scratch like my grandmother use to make. She shared a tip with me a long time ago and that was to use canned biscuits. She would crack open the can of biscuits and knead them all together.  Sprinkled a little flour on them and rolled the dough out very thin and cut them in strips. After the stewed chicken was done, she would pull out the chicken and de-bone it. Then layer in the pastry strips with  layers of shredded chicken to keep them from clumping together. She would cook this until the pastry was very tender.  She used a whole chicken and put half of the stewed chicken in the pastry and the other half she would make  a bowl of chicken salad.  My mother would do this same thing. Now we can make it much easier by skipping all of that and purchasing the box of pastry strips.My dad purchased some organic chicken broth because he had a few chicken legs for us to cook up. This gave us a richer pot of Pastry since we didn't use the whole chicken! My grandmother would serve her pastry with a pot of cabbage or collards and some fried corn bread.  I miss her so much! Both of my grandmothers were wonderful cooks! My Mother is also a wonderful cook. I want her to get well so she will feel like eating again.

Southern style Chicken & Pastry. Lunch with Dad and Jonathan.