Chicken and Apricot Filo Pie

I enjoyed making this meal for two reasons: 1. I like making meat pies and 2. I proved to myself that I kinda know what I'm talking about in the kitchen. Being right is probably my favorite state of existence! I'm an only child...

This was pretty easy to make and like the Chicken with Lemons and Olives, I think it would be a good meal to make to impress people but with very little effort. I say this considering that I took a shortcut, had I followed the recipe exactly, I might be singing a different tune.

The ingredients

1/2 cup bulgur wheat. I used the quick cook kind that cooks in 10 minutes but the recipe called for the same amount of cooking so maybe I just bought into marketing. Well played, Central Market.

6 tbsp butter

1 onion, chopped

1 lb minced chicken. I used ground chicken. 

1/4 cup ready-to-eat dried apricots, finely chopped. I don't know the difference between ready-to-eat dried apricots and just regular dried apricots...Also, I ended up buying Turkish dried apricots because that's all my store had; they were $14.59/lb. Thankfully I didn't need a lot. When browsing at another grocery store, they had dried apricots for $3.99/lb so maybe look for non-Turkish dried apricots.

1/4 cup blanched almonds, chopped. I had a small bag of sliced almonds so I used that just to get rid of them.

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground allspice

1/4 cup Greek yogurt

1 tbsp snipped fresh chives. I forgot to buy this, oops.

2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley. I used dried parsley flakes because that's what I had. When using dried herbs in a recipe that calls for fresh, use double the amount.

6 large sheets of filo pastry. I couldn't find filo pastry at my grocery store so I used puffed pastry sheets. 

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees and prepare the bulgur wheat by putting it in a bowl of boiling water and let it soak for 5-10 minutes. The quick cook option said to boil water and add the wheat, letting it sit for 10 minutes. Same thing to me.

Melt 2 tbsp butter in a pan and fry the onion and chicken. Stir in the apricots, almonds, and wheat and cook for two minutes. Remove from the heat and add spices, yogurt, chives, and parsley. The filling looks, um, boring. I mean, I wasn't expecting to look at this filling and it blow my mind but, I don't know, I was underwhelmed. 

The next few instructions are from the book in case you want to use filo. 

Melt the remaining butter. Unroll the filo and cut into 10 inch rounds. Keep the rounds covered with a damp cloth to prevent drying. Line a 9 inch flan tin with three of the rounds, brushing each with butter. Spoon in the mixture, cover with three more pastry rounds, and brush with butter. Crumple the remaining rounds and place them on top of the pie, brush with remaining butter. Bake for thirty minutes.

So since I didn't have filo, I used puffed pastry. I've used puffed pastry a few times before and I had an inkling that it was going to cause my pie to blow up. Foreshadowing! I rolled out each sheet a bit to minimize the amount of puffiness. I laid one sheet on a buttered pie dish, filled it with the filling, and covered it with another sheet and then rolled the edges in. I could have trimmed them but I was hoping for extra puffiness. 

Thirty minutes later this came out of my oven. I literally laughed out loud when I saw it. James saw it first because he turned off the oven and he said "Yeah, I saw it and thought, she's going to be worried" but I wasn't because I fully expected this to happen. So yeah, puffed pastry gets puffed.

Here's a shot of a slice on my daughter's cool Darth Vader plate. Neither of the girls were interested in the filling but they did eat the crust. 

I felt it was a little dry but James liked it. I expected it to be tastier due to the apricots but they didn't really enhance the flavor at all. I think the yogurt contributed to it being dry so if I do make this again, I might add a little chicken stock. It was still fun to make and again, I ended up being right, and being right always taste better than dry meat pie.