Yum Yum Down-Home Cookin': Thyme-Baked Chicken and Blueberry Pie

This evening, I decided to make Betty's Thyme-Baked Chicken and Bear Grylls Blueberry Pie recipe from People Magazine. Both were absolutely delicious and simple.

Thyme-Baked Chicken: Instead of using a whole chicken as advised in the recipe, I used drumsticks per Chef Linda's advice. I baked the chicken 15 minutes at 375, then added a TON of cut up veggies. It kind of took forever to cut up the three baking potatoes, 6 carrots, 4 celery stalks, and 2 onions that went into the recipe. I would like to thank onions for already being partially cut up. I would never make it through cutting up an onion if it weren't for that! They make my eyes water like a b!^%&! Over the top of the chicken and veggies, I drizzled 3 tablespoons of melted butter mixed with a teaspoon of thyme. It turned out soo delicious. Not too dry, like I thought it might be, and it had a good buttery flavor, not too herby.

This recipe said it would make 6 servings but it made way more than that! I had a ton left over to freeze. Freezing works out better for me than putting the leftovers in the refrigerator, because then even if we plan on eating the leftovers that week, they are not wasted if we don't finish them all! Plus then you can have a delicious meal that you slaved over on a day when you just chilled out :).

Bear Grylls Blueberry Pie: I subscribe to People (a weekly guilty pleasure :) and every week they publish a couple of "celebrity" recipes. Usually I don't trust them... I mean who would trust Paris Hilton when wondering how to make lasagna? But this week in addition to Paris Hilton (who People swears loves to cook...I guess she might??) lasagna, there was a recipe for Bear Grylls Blueberry Pie. If you haven't heard of Bear Grylls, he's the star of Man vs. Wild. A crazy show where he hangs out in the wilderness and drinks cactus water and eats owl poop and stuff. He says he craves blueberry pie when he returns from his adventures, and the recipe looked simple enough, so I tried it! I also thought it went great with our all-American chicken dinner.

I mixed 6 (yes, six!) cups of frozen blueberries with a cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 1/3 cup of quick-cooking tapioca, a tablespoon of lemon juice and a teaspoon of cinnamon. I mixed that up and poured it into a pie crust, affixed another pie crust on top (forgot to add the butter before I did that!) added sugar to the top of the crust, and baked it covered with tin foil for about 40 minutes, then about 10 more minutes uncovered to make the crust GBD (golden brown delicious :). We let it cool for an unreasonably short amount of time then ate about a fourth of it. It's soo good! I think the butter would have made it too rich. Next time I think I could make the pie crust. I feel better when I know what's in things...