David Burtka's Punny Twist On Chicken Pot Pie

If you've yet to catch David Burtka's show on the Cooking Chanel, "Celebrity Dish," you're missing out on some seriously good ideas. And in his cookbook "Life is a Party," Burtka offers not just party-planning tips, but also a range of recipes for elevated, party-ready takes on comfort food classics. 

These are the types of dishes that your friends will love but that come together quickly, easily, and using some sometimes unexpected ingredients, as is the case with his Chicken Tot Pie.

That's right. Rather than serving up a standard chicken pot pie, which has been done more times than you can likely count, Burtka makes his chicken pot pie's crust with a genius ingredient that's so obvious, you'll wonder why you didn't think of it. As he shared with the "Rachael Ray Show," his take on the dish swaps out the normal, doughy top crust with tater tots. (Yes, really.)

You love tater tots, and you love chicken pot pie. But the reason the two work so well together may be because David Burtka's concoction closely resembles the regional Midwestern favorite hot dish. 

If you're not familiar, hot dish is basically a casserole that includes a meat, starch, veggies, and creamy sauce, along with tater tots. Burtka's chicken tot pie, which was featured on the "Rachael Ray Show" website, ticks all of these boxes. There's chicken, carrots and peas, a creamy, stock-based sauce, and those requisite tots, cooked ahead of time and then added to the top of the mixture before a final bake.

But while Burtka might not be reinventing the wheel (or, rather, the casserole) with his punny twist on chicken pot pie, he does have a few suggestions for personalizing this dish. As he told the "Rachael Ray Show," you can put an Asian twist on the pie by adding sriracha and edamame to the pie instead of peas. For a Tex Mex-inspired pie, he suggests adding chiles.