Friday Favourites + a delicious and easy Chicken Pot Pie recipe

Woo hoo for Friday! I’m so excited because tomorrow I’m heading to the BlogPodium conference at the Royal York in Toronto. I went last year for my first ever blog conference. It was such an amazing experience that I knew I had to go back this year. Not only am I going to meet up with fellow bloggers and take in some great seminars, but I’m also hosting a roundtable discussion. If you’re coming to the conference, please come by and say hi!

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Taking Care of Business: For this year’s conference, I made a few small updates to my business card but mainly just darkening the brushstroke behind the title and updating my contact info on the back. I’m really pleased with how they turned out and I highly recommend Vistaprint if you’re looking to do business cards. Not only are they reasonably priced (with frequent discounts and promotions), their turnaround was really fast. I had these cards in hand less than 48 hours after I ordered them.

Last Dog Days of Summer: After being sick for a couple of days last weekend, I rallied in time to take Whiskey and Cola to Newbarket, the annual dog festival in Newmarket, Ontario. For the past few years, we have met our friends there to look around at the vendors, pick up some free treat samples, look at cute dogs (like the one above) and most importantly – go for a swim in the public pool.

The highlight of the festival is the pool. It is so much fun to see all the dogs running around have having fun. This year one of the lifeguards had to jump into rescue a big old chocolate lab who has having a tough time swimming to shore after diving off the deep end.

Our own little dogs got tossed in the water for a couple of laps in the shallow end. It was so warm and sunny out that they quickly got dried off and were running around again.

Our friends’ dog Keela is a total water dog and was quite happy to spend the whole time in the water. She befriended a little girl who eagerly tossed the tennis ball in the water over and over and over again, which gave the rest of our arms a break, ha!

Goal Setting: One night this week, Garrett and I got talking about all the things that we still want to accomplish in 2014. In the day-to-day hustle, sometimes those bigger picture goals get lost or pushed aside. Together we picked three main goals and broke them down into little pieces.

Sitting down together to brainstorm and talk about it was so helpful. It really reset our focus for the next few months and it made us accountable to each other. I took that scrap paper and typed it all up to put on our fridge, so we literally see it every day.

They could really be any kind of goals whether they’re personal, career related, your health, etc. One of ours was to train the dogs better. We have some behavioral issues going on and when we got talking about it, a huge thing we needed to fix was consistency in our training. So we wrote out a realistic daily plan that broke down all the behavior we want to fix and we’re going to tackle a new one each week and build from that. We also started a new training system that I’m really excited about and I’ll be sharing in the next few weeks.

Chilly Fall Nights: Yesterday it really started to feel like fall is coming. I texted Garrett on my lunch break about having chicken pot pie for dinner and got an enthusiastic answer back, so I brainstormed a recipe idea and picked up the few things that I needed on my way home (including these mini pumpkins that just happened to jump in my cart).

By the time he walked through the door, the whole apartment smelled amazing. On a chilly night, there is nothing quite like homemade comfort food to warm your soul…especially when it takes less than ten minutes to put it all together and then thirty minutes later it comes out of the oven piping hot and ready. In those 30 minutes I gave the dogs baths, washed the kitchen floor and tidied up the living room. I felt so productive!

We both had generous helpings and there was still lots left for lunches the next couple of days. I love my regular made-from-scratch Chicken Pot Pie recipe (and my vegetarian one too), but this one was sooo easy to do and that’s what I needed last night.

Easy Chicken Pot Pie

Makes 6 servings · Printable Version

• 4 cups fresh chopped vegetables or thawed frozen vegetables. (I used mushrooms, zucchini, finely chopped onion and carrots, but just about any vegetable would do, even those bags of frozen mixed vegetables.)
• 2 cups chopped cooked chicken or turkey (I had leftover baked chicken but you could also use a rotisserie chicken)
• 2 cans of cream soup (any “cream of” soup would work – mushroom or cream of chicken would be good I went with mushroom and garlic for the first can and cream of celery for the second)
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 tsp curry powder
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 cup Bisquick mix (or a homemade alternative below)
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 egg, beaten

Preheat the oven to 400°F, grease a small dutch oven or casserole dish. Mix the veggies, chicken, soup, broth and seasonings together in a large bowl and pour it into the pot.

In a small bowl, mix up the Bisquick, milk and egg until well blended. Pour the batter over the pie filling. Bake for 30 minutes.

If you don’t have any Bisquick here is a quick solution: Whisk together 1 cup flour + 1-1/2 tsp baking powder + 1/4 tsp baking soda + 1/4 tsp salt. Cut in 1 tbsp shortening or cold butter until it is a crumbled mixture. This substitutes 1 cup of Bisquick.

I have a feeling this dutch oven isn’t going back on the shelf for a while. Bring on the fall soups and stews.

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Any plans for the weekend? Is it too soon for apple picking?…because I feel like that is something we should all be doing right now. I’ve got a yummy apple dish coming up on the blog in the next couple weeks that I am already daydreaming about.