Whenever we get our new issue of Food & Wine in the mail, I immediately flip to the recipe glossary and see which recipes have been marked as a Staff Favourite. Through experience, I know that I’m always guaranteed something delicious if I make a one of these recipes.

This starred Chicken and Leek Pie recipe by Curtis Stone was no exception. In fact it is one of the best things that I have made in the kitchen lately. The pie filling was rich and creamy with a nice edge from the leeks and fresh tarragon, and who doesn’t love some puff pastry as a pie crust! It goes perfectly with a nice arugula salad with aged balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

Speaking of the puff pastry, this ingredient was the most expensive component of the meal at $4.99. If you can make your own puff pastry, I recommend you do so to cut costs. But after reading about Kathleen Flinn’s attempts to make puff pastry at Cordon Bleu in the great book The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, I don’t feel like I’m quite up to that challenge yet! I just bought a pack of frozen Sara Lee puff pastry and after letting both sheets thaw, I rolled them together to make one sheet large enough to cover my 9×13 inch casserole dish. This method worked well and the two sheets didn’t split apart when the pie was cooked.

While the puff pastry might be a tad expensive, this recipe uses chicken quarters that are one of the cheapest cuts of chicken, and in my opinion, one of the tastiest cuts as well. This recipe takes a long time to make since you have to roast the chicken legs and let them cool before you put them in the sauce. One option to prevent the 9:00pm dinner that we had the night I cooked this pie is to roast your chicken legs in advance, remove the skin, and just have the shredded meat ready to go for when you want to make the pie.

Food & Wine states that the Chicken and Leek recipe feeds 4, but we easily got 6 servings out of the recipe, especially when paired with a green salad. We calculated that at 6 servings this recipe costs only $2.06 per serving, which is a bargain for just how good this pie is!

The recipe doesn’t say to clean your leeks before cutting them up, but be sure to do so! Leeks are notoriously sandy in their inner layers and you don’t want that grit ruining your pie. The best way to clean leeks is to cut them in half lengthwise and then run them under water to get rid of the sand.

The cheap but tasty chicken quarters. Another option is to find a cheap whole chicken to roast so that you can have a mixture of dark and white meat in the pie.

The creamy sauce waiting for the puff pastry cover.

The pastry crust puffed up beautifully and tasted incredible. I liked the way the way the recipe called for you to roll the puff pastry over the edge of the casserole dish, so you would get these big crispy bits of pastry with which you could scoop up the filling.

The finished Chicken and Leek pie–perfection! We reheated leftovers the next night and even though the pastry crust wasn’t as fluffy as when we took it out of the oven, it still tasted great.

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