Chicken Baked Ziti

Day seventeen of ninety. I am keeping the X marks on the calendar. The household has settled into the quiet kind of steadiness that the next eleven weeks are going to require. Cody at the auto-body shop. Mama at her shifts. Me at school and at the Sonic. The kitchen running. The bills getting paid. The house staying clean.

I want to write about Saturday because Saturday was the day of the visit. The probation officer for the presentence investigation, Ms. Ellis, came at ten in the morning the way she had said she would. I had been awake since six because the nervousness I had been managing for a week peaked Saturday morning. I had vacuumed the living room twice on Friday night. I had wiped down the kitchen counters and the front of the fridge. Mama had washed the curtains in the kitchen window for the first time in two years. The house was the cleanest it has been in maybe my whole memory of it, and I am writing that down because I want to be honest about the fact that we cleaned for the visit. Mama had said, when Ms. Ellis first called, that the house did not need any preparation because Mama keeps a clean house, which is true, and which is also not the same as the house being ready for a probation officer to look around.

So we cleaned. I want to put that on the page. We cleaned because we were nervous, because we wanted Ms. Ellis to see the version of our house that we want the world to see, because we have not had many chances in our lives to be looked at by people who decide things, and we wanted the looking to go well.

Ms. Ellis was younger than I had expected. Thirty-five, maybe thirty-six. She had on a blue button-down shirt and dark jeans and she carried a clipboard and her face was the kind of face that social workers have, which is kind and careful at the same time, which is doing two jobs at once. She shook Mama’s hand at the door. She shook my hand. She said, thanks for having me, Mrs. Moreland, and Mama said, thank you for coming, ma’am, and Mama led her to the kitchen table.

I made coffee. I poured three cups. Then Mrs. Patel had told us beforehand, at her office Wednesday afternoon, that the home interview was just for Mama, that I should not stay at the table during it. So I went to my bedroom with my own cup of coffee and I sat on my bed and I tried to read history. I was not actually reading history. I was listening to the murmur of voices through the wall — Ms. Ellis’s voice steady and low, asking questions; Mama’s voice steady and low, answering them. The interview lasted forty minutes.

At the end of it, there was a pause, and then I heard footsteps coming down the hallway, and then Ms. Ellis knocked on my bedroom door. She asked through the door if she could ask me a few questions. I said yes. She came into my bedroom and she sat at the foot of my bed, which she asked permission for first, and she opened her clipboard and she said, Kaylee, your mother says you are the household’s cook. Is that right? I said yes.

We talked for fifteen minutes. She asked me about Cody. About the year before the arrest. About what I had seen, what I had known, what I had not known. About what is different now. About the auto-body job. About the way the family is at dinner. About what Cody is reading. (She wrote down To Kill a Mockingbird.) About whether I trusted my brother. About whether I thought he was different now. About whether I would be honest with her even if the answer was hard.

I told her the truth. I have been thinking about this on the page for a week and I want to put it on the page now: I told her the truth. Not the dressed-up truth, not the minimized truth, not the truth that would have made everything sound better than it was. The actual truth, in the words I had for it, in the kind of language a fifteen-year-old in Broken Arrow has when she is sitting at the foot of her own bed talking to a stranger with a clipboard about her brother.

I told her about the eight days he was gone in July. I told her about the loaded potato soup the night he came home from the jail. I told her about the composition book on the kitchen counter. I told her about the GED class he had to drop and the auto-body shop he picked up and Mr. Garcia’s two-dollar raise. I told her about the Sunday morning he came to church with Mama. I told her about the way he reads at the kitchen table after his shift. I told her that I thought my brother was different now and I did not know whether the difference would last and I was hoping with everything I had that it would.

She wrote in her notebook the whole time. She did not interrupt. She nodded sometimes. At the end she closed the clipboard, and she looked at me, and she said, Kaylee, you are an unusually clear-eyed young person. Your brother is lucky to have you. And I said thank you, and she stood up, and she shook my hand again, and she walked out of my bedroom and down the hall and she said goodbye to Mama and she left the house at eleven forty-five.

Mama and I stood at the kitchen window watching her drive away. Mama said, I think that went okay. I said, I think it did, Mama. And we did not say anything else, because we are not going to know until January.

And then there was the rest of the weekend. I made a chicken baked ziti Sunday afternoon as the Sunday batch-cook. Halloween was Monday. The household was going to need dinners that did not require thinking. The recipe was a Chicken Baked Ziti from Averie Cooks — rotini noodles in a tomato cream sauce with shredded chicken from a markdown thigh pack and mozzarella melted on top, baked at 375 for thirty minutes.

The math on this one. A pound of rotini, eighty-nine cents at Aldi. A 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes, $1.49. A half cup of heavy cream — about ninety cents’ worth from a small carton I bought specifically for this. A package of chicken thighs from the markdown rack at Walmart, $2.79. A bag of shredded mozzarella, $1.99. Garlic, an onion, salt, pepper, dried oregano from the rack. Total: $7.80 for a pan of nine generous servings, $0.86 a serving. Back in the cheap range, even with the cream.

The technique on this one is the cream sauce. You make a regular tomato sauce on the stove — olive oil, minced onion sweated, garlic, the can of crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper, oregano, simmered for fifteen minutes — and then, off the heat, you stir in a quarter cup of heavy cream. The cream rounds out the acidity of the tomatoes. The sauce goes from a regular red sauce to a slightly pinkish, slightly silky, slightly luxurious red sauce, and the difference is the kind of difference you cannot taste in pictures. You only know if you eat it.

You boil the rotini to about three minutes shy of done. You toss the noodles with the cream sauce and the shredded chicken (which I had pre-cooked in a small skillet with salt and pepper and a clove of garlic, then shredded with two forks). You pour the whole thing into a 9x13 baking dish. You top with shredded mozzarella, hand-heavy. You bake at 375 for thirty minutes, until the cheese is bubbling and brown at the edges.

I served it Sunday night. Mama’s first bite stopped her at the table. She said, baby, what did you put in this sauce. I said, cream, Mama, and she said, that is the trick I never knew. Cody had two helpings. The leftovers carried us through Tuesday and Wednesday.

The other thing that happened Sunday afternoon that I want to write down is that Cody carved a pumpkin on the back porch while the ziti was in the oven. I want to put on the page that my brother has not carved a pumpkin since the year before Daddy left, which makes the last pumpkin he carved 2014, which makes this the first pumpkin he has carved as a sober person in two years. The pumpkin came out crooked and a little lopsided. The eye-holes were uneven. The grin was off-kilter. He put a small candle inside it and put the pumpkin on the front porch step at six o’clock when the sun was going down, and the lopsided pumpkin glowed orange on the porch and Cody stood next to it for a minute looking at it.

The Hendersons three doors down knocked on the door at seven. Mrs. Henderson asked if their grandson Eli could come over and see Mister Cody’s pumpkin. Eli is six and was visiting from Stillwater for the weekend. Cody answered the door himself. He took Eli to the front porch and the two of them sat on the porch step for fifteen minutes looking at the pumpkin together. I could hear Cody’s low voice through the screen door, explaining something about the pumpkin’s teeth. I could hear Eli laughing every couple of minutes the way six-year-olds laugh, big and unguarded. I do not know what specifically they were saying. I know that my brother sat on a front porch step at seven o’clock on a Sunday night in October and explained a pumpkin to a six-year-old and that is a thing I had not seen in two years.

Mrs. Henderson came back to pick Eli up at seven-fifteen. She said, thank you, Cody, that was so kind of you, and Cody said, any time, Mrs. Henderson, and they went home. Cody came back inside and sat at the kitchen table and he did not say anything for a minute and then he said, I forgot kids did that. He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. Mama, at the sink doing the dishes, said, I am glad you remembered, baby.

Halloween is tomorrow. The bag of candy corn is on the kitchen counter, $1.99 from Walmart. The lopsided pumpkin is on the front step. The X marks on the calendar are at seventeen. Eighty-three to go. The ziti is in the fridge. We are still working for the deferred.

The recipe is below, the way Averie Cooks wrote it. The trick I want you to take from my version is the heavy cream stirred into the tomato sauce off the heat — a quarter cup is enough to change the whole sauce. Make this on a Sunday for a week of Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday dinners. The pan reheats well in the oven on low while you do whatever else you needed to do that night.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 50 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

12 oz ziti pasta
2 1/2 cups shredded cooked chicken (rotisserie works perfectly)
2 cups marinara or tomato pasta sauce
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese, divided
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish (optional)

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Lightly grease a 9x13-inch baking dish and set aside.
Cook the pasta. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook ziti according to package directions until just shy of al dente, about 1–2 minutes less than the package states. Drain and set aside — it will finish cooking in the oven.
Mix the filling. In a large bowl, combine the shredded chicken, pasta sauce, chicken broth, ricotta, 1 cup of the mozzarella, 1/4 cup of the Parmesan, garlic powder, Italian seasoning, salt, and pepper. Stir until well combined.
Combine with pasta. Add the drained ziti to the bowl and fold everything together until the pasta is evenly coated.
Assemble. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish and spread into an even layer. Top with the remaining 1/2 cup mozzarella and 1/4 cup Parmesan.
Bake. Cover the dish with foil and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the foil and bake an additional 15 minutes, until the cheese on top is melted and lightly golden and the edges are bubbling.
Rest and serve. Let the baked ziti rest for 5 minutes before serving. Garnish with fresh parsley if desired.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chicken Baked Ziti — The Sunday Bake the Week the Probation Officer Came to the House