Chicken Pot Pie Soup -- The Bowl That Started With My Mama and a Sunday Rotisserie Chicken

My name is Sarah Mitchell. I am twenty-three years old, I live in a two-bedroom rental house in Antioch, Tennessee, and right now it is five in the morning and Jayden is finally back asleep after waking me up at 4:15 for reasons I will never fully understand because he is thirteen months old and does not yet have reasons. He has impulses. He has needs. He has a spectacular ability to locate the one drawer in the kitchen that will fall completely off its track if you yank it hard enough, and he has zero remorse about it.

I have been standing at this stove for about twenty minutes now, not really cooking anything, just standing here with my hands wrapped around a coffee mug, looking at the burners like they might tell me something. The kitchen is small — I mean genuinely small, the kind of small where if I open the oven door all the way it bumps the cabinet across the room — but it’s mine. The whole house is mine, technically, mine and the kids’, and I pay for it myself, and that still means something to me even on the mornings when it feels like the walls are breathing down my neck.

I don’t know exactly why I’m writing this down. A girl I work with at the Waffle House — Keisha, who is one of the funniest and most no-nonsense people I have ever met in my life — told me I should start putting my recipes somewhere because every time I bring leftovers to work the whole break room turns into a thing. Last week I brought the tail end of a chicken and rice casserole and our manager Terry ate two helpings before his shift started and then tried to act like it didn’t happen. Keisha said, “Sarah, you need to write this stuff down before it disappears forever.” So here I am. Writing it down.

I am not a chef. I want to be really clear about that. I grew up in this same neighborhood, in a house that was maybe five minutes from this one, and most of what I learned about cooking I learned because somebody had to. My dad left when I was nine and my mama, Lorraine, was working two jobs to keep the lights on. I was the oldest girl, which meant I was the one standing at the stove at eleven years old trying to figure out what you were supposed to do with a pound of ground beef and a box of Hamburger Helper when your little sister was hungry and your mama wasn’t home yet. You just… did it. You figured it out.

Mama learned to cook from her mother, who was a woman named Earline. I never met Earline — she passed before I was born — but I feel like I know her, because Mama talks about her the way people talk about someone who shaped everything. Earline grew up on a farm in rural Alabama. She cooked on a wood stove. She kept a cast iron skillet that Mama still has, a big black thing that weighs about as much as Jayden does, and when Mama taught me to make cornbread she said, “This is Earline’s recipe, and don’t you put sugar in it, because Earline said sugar in cornbread is a Yankee crime.” I have never put sugar in cornbread. I never will.

What I’m trying to say is that food has always been the thing in my family that holds everything else together. It’s what we do instead of talking sometimes. It’s what we do when we don’t know what to do. Last Sunday, Mama showed up at my door at six in the evening with a Kroger rotisserie chicken and a look on her face that said, “I am worried about you but I am not going to say so directly because that is not how Mitchells operate.” She handed me the chicken and sat down at my little table and held Jayden while I sliced it up, and we ate together — me and Mama and Chloe, who is four and currently going through a phase where she has Opinions about everything, including socks and whether the chicken pieces are too big — and it was quiet in the best way. Lorraine Mitchell does not say “I love you” all that often. But she drives ten minutes in the January cold with a rotisserie chicken, and she sits at your table, and that’s the same thing.

The next day I had about half a chicken left and it was cold — real cold, that January cold that settles into Nashville and makes you feel like you will never be warm again — and Chloe had been asking for something “hot and good, Mama,” which is her request for anything that involves broth and doesn’t have vegetables she can see. She’s four. We’re working on it.

I did not have the energy to make an actual pot pie. I have made pot pies exactly once and the crust situation was a disaster I would rather not revisit in detail. What I had was that leftover chicken, a carton of broth, some carrots and celery I needed to use before they gave up on me, a bag of frozen peas, and about thirty minutes before Jayden was going to lose his mind from hunger. So I made soup. Thick, creamy, pot-pie-flavored soup, no crust required, and it was — I’m just going to say it — exactly what January in Antioch needed.

Chloe ate two bowls. She picked around the peas at first, the way she does, but by the second bowl she was getting them on the spoon on purpose. I didn’t say anything. I just let it happen. Sometimes you let the win be quiet.

Jayden ate his off the tray of his high chair in the way that thirteen-month-olds eat, which is to say that most of it ended up on his shirt and some of it ended up on my shirt and a small amount of it ended up in his actual mouth. But he seemed happy about it. He’s happy about most things, honestly. That drawer full of grocery bags was the greatest moment of his young life. I don’t know how he stays that cheerful. I’m choosing to see it as a gift.

Here’s what I want you to know about how I cook: I am not trying to impress anyone. I am trying to feed my kids something warm and real on a Tuesday when I’ve already worked eight hours and my feet hurt and the kitchen is the size of a hallway. I clip coupons. I buy the store brand. I use frozen vegetables without a single drop of shame because frozen vegetables are vegetables and vegetables are good and anyone who disagrees with me can come to Antioch and say that to my face.

The recipes I’ll share here are the ones that live in my actual rotation — the ones that stretch a budget and feed a family and make the kitchen smell like something good is happening, because sometimes that smell is the only thing that makes a hard day feel manageable. When I was little and things were bad, I knew they weren’t as bad as they could be if the kitchen smelled like something cooking. That’s still true. That will always be true.

So. Chicken pot pie soup. No crust. No disaster. Just the thing itself — creamy and thick and full of vegetables and made with whatever chicken your mama brought you on Sunday. This is where we start.

On the night I decided this was going to be our first recipe, I’d had a day that made the kitchen smell like the only good thing left — and that’s exactly when I made this soup. It’s the kind of meal that asks almost nothing of you and gives everything back: cheap ingredients, one pot, and that thick creamy smell filling up even a hallway-sized kitchen until the hard parts of the day start to feel smaller. Here’s how I make it.

Chicken Pot Pie Soup

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 30 minutes | Total Time: 45 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 medium yellow onion, diced
• 3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into coins
• 3 stalks celery, sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
• 2 cups whole milk (or 2%, whatever you have)
• 2 1/2 to 3 cups cooked chicken, shredded (rotisserie is perfect here)
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1 cup frozen corn
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• Biscuits, crackers, or cornbread for serving (optional but strongly encouraged)

Instructions

1. Melt the butter. In a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, melt your butter. Don’t rush this. Let it foam and settle.
2. Cook the vegetables. Add the onion, carrots, and celery to the pot. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 7 to 8 minutes until the onion is soft and translucent and the carrots have started to give a little.
3. Add the garlic. Stir in the minced garlic and cook for one more minute. It’ll smell incredible. That’s normal.
4. Make the roux. Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and stir to coat everything. Cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly, until the raw flour smell cooks off. This is what gives the soup its body.
5. Add the broth. Pour in the chicken broth slowly, about a cup at a time, whisking or stirring as you go so no lumps form. Once all the broth is in, bring everything to a gentle boil.
6. Add the milk. Reduce the heat to medium-low and pour in the milk. Stir to combine. Let the soup simmer for about 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until it thickens up into something that looks like it means business.
7. Add the chicken and frozen vegetables. Stir in the shredded chicken, frozen peas, and frozen corn. No need to thaw them first — they’ll warm right through in just 3 to 4 minutes.
8. Season and taste. Add the thyme, garlic powder, and salt and pepper to your liking. Taste it. Adjust. This is the important step people skip. Don’t skip it.
9. Serve. Ladle into bowls and serve with biscuits, crackers, or a big piece of cornbread if you’ve got it. The cornbread is not optional in my house. Just saying.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 318 | Protein: 26g | Fat: 11g | Carbs: 27g | Fiber: 3g | Sodium: 610mg