From our Kitchen: Chicken and Dumplings

I saw this recipe on Natalie's blog several months ago and had been wanting to try it since then. I love Chicken & Dumplings and knew if Natalie approved, it would be good :) 

First, you sear chunks of floured chicken in a small amount of oil to brown. The recipe calls for boneless chicken thighs, but I substituted with chicken breasts and they worked just fine. Remove the browned chicken and cook the vegetables (carrots, celery and onions) in the pan along with poultry seasoning, salt and pepper until they are soft. Then add chicken broth, water, peas and chicken and simmer. It looks like this:

Then, you make the dumplings. Use pastry flour (see note below), all-purpose flour, baking soda, salt, poultry seasoning and buttermilk (see note below). It gets all sticky like this:
Finally, drop the dumplings by the tablespoon into the simmer, cover, and let cook for 15 minutes until the dumplings are cooked.  Here is the final product. 
It is delicious!!! And healthy!! Less than 500 calories per serving and it makes 6 generous servings. Enough for a few meals :) 

Regarding the flour: I researched pastry flour as this recipe specifically called for it. I guess pastry flour has less protein than all-purpose. The recipe would not turn out correctly if you just use all all-purpose. I found a bag of pastry flour at the grocery store (and am happy to see that you can use it for any recipe that uses baking soda as a levening agent - cookies, etc.), but if you can't find it, you can try 1/2 all purpose flour (high protein content) and 1/2 cake flour (low protein content) as a substitute.

Regarding the buttermilk: If you don't want to buy buttermilk for this recipe, you can make your own. Use 1T vinegar or lemon juice to each cup of milk. We always have lemons on hand, so it's super easy!