Fleur de Sel

Day 24 of Spicemas

Happy Christmas Eve to you!

The final spice of the Advent calendar is another salt. This one is a minimally-processed, flaky but also a bit sticky, salt, perfect for use as a finishing salt. For applications where the salt fully dissolves, as in a soup or a stew, there’s no point in using this salt. For something where the salt is an edible glitter, so to speak, this one is fantastic for texture and taste.

And tonight… I used it to elevate a fast and easy supper. This Christmas is my first Christmas without any of my children home, and I have been working (will work tomorrow as well) as I don’t have holidays off. It feels less like Christmas than any other year I can recall. Rather than dwelling on this, or trying to recreate traditions which will ring hollow and sad, I’ve been focusing on some quiet and quality time with my husband. I’ve been out in the garden because the gift of rain was falling today. I’ve been contemplating the many blessings in my life. I’ve been staying busy with household tasks.

This evening was a meal prepping night, since this last weekend turned into a much busier time than I’d planned for. I broke down what was left of the very fatty lamb from the ribs and pulled the meat to make a proper Shepherd's Pie soonish - or may freeze for later. Broke down the roasted chicken into meat for tonight's pot pie, meat for the noodle soup this week, carcass for the stock for same. Will have some meat that will be frozen in excess to immediate needs which will become chicken salad, or soup, or chicken n'dumplings or something. Butchered out the 11 pound pork shoulder roast to make a massive amount of char siu for tomorrow, as my husband was sad our local Chinese (and Vietnamese) takeout place doesn't make barbecue pork, so the pork in their fried rice is just regular white pork. I'll have enough to freeze loads for semi-regular batches of fried rice for him. Tonight, though, that is marinading, and tomorrow I grill.

Food, our lives revolve around good food, it seems. I told my husband that I plan for this coming month to be buying very little groceries, other than the perishables of milk and such, because I want to go through the pantry and eat up all the oddments left from life-with-children. Also, how and what we eat is changing, so getting stuff moved out that we wouldn’t normally eat, but keep pushing back into corners forgotten… I don’t want to waste it, so it’s going to be a month of using it all up.

Tonight’s meal, then, was in aid of that goal, and since I’d been so busy in the kitchen with preps, I didn’t want to fuss over dinner. This is very fast to throw together with pantry staples, bits from the freezer, and in my case a container of fridge biscuits that really needed used up.

Chicken Pot Pie - Easy Mode

Preheat your oven to 375F.

• 1 can cream of chicken soup

• 1 bag frozen veg - I used a mix of carrots, peas, corn and beans which was very nice in this.

• 2 c diced cooked chicken

• 1 can biscuits

• egg white

• Fleur de Sel

I heated the frozen vegetables up for part of the recommended time, but you can bake them from frozen if you don’t have time to fuss. A can of mixed veg (or two) would work, but drained before using. Mix this, the soup concentrate, and chicken all together and pour into the bottom of a casserole (or just dump it all in there to start and mix). I used a 4-quart round casserole, or this would fit in a 9” square baking dish as well.

Place the biscuits in a single layer on top of the filling. Brush them with beaten egg white, and sprinkle with finishing salt, lightly. This has plenty of salt already, so a light hand with the salt will suffice.

Bake at 375F for 20-25 minutes, until the top of the biscuits is nicely browned a crispy.

You really do want to brush this with the egg white, it gives it a crisp crust you don’t get without it. A very nice crunch of texture with an otherwise soft meal. The salt could be omitted, although I liked it here. A finishing salt is really nice on a crust of a savory pie, or a loaf of bread, or pretzels of course! I didn’t add any other salt to the dish, knowing that with the Fleur de Sel on the crust, the saltiness of the soup would take care of the filling, and added salt would be too much.

I’ll leave you with a message for the season. My sister and I collaborate fairly often on these, she does daily verses, and I provide photos or artwork to serve as backgrounds. It’s a beautiful thing to work on together.