How to Prepare a Gourmet Meal

Recently, my wife went somewhere and I had to feed my daughter and myself. This was an excellent opportunity for me to prepare a real gourmet meal. It's not hard. You can do it, too. Here's what I did along with some instructions and illustrations.

First choose a gourmet meal. I chose Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie, a delectable mix of chicken, vegetables, crunchy crust and some weird creamy yellow goo to hold it all together.



The first thing you do is turn on the oven to 400 F. While the oven is heating up, open up the boxes and place the pot pies on a tray. Then you tear off little strips of tin foil and wrap them around the edges of the pot pies. This keeps the outer edge of the crust from drying out while you're trying to bring the bulk of the food from rock hard frozen up to steaming hot. When the oven hit's the desired temperature, in they go.



Now comes the hard part. Set the timer for 60 minutes and go work on the Sunday Cross Word puzzle. You're supposed to cook then for 65 minutes, but you'll need 5 minutes to fix a couple of glasses of milk.

OK, times up. Open up the oven and give them a look. They should have a nice golden color. They should look like this.



Now comes the really hard part, the Flip. The real test of the gourmet preparation of a pot pie is a successful Flip. Basically, you have a fragile crust holding a flowing magma of goo and your job is to flip the whole thing over onto the plate and keep it all intact. Of course, the successful Flip must include a good release of the pie from the container. Nothing is worse than a good Flip, followed by tearing away the pie bottom and releasing the pie's contents before its time. If you do it right, it looks like this.



Bon Appetite!