Easy Chicken Shawarma

The house smells like pinto beans because that’s what we have. I got home from the bus stop at three-thirty, dropped my backpack by the door, and went through the pantry inventory I do every afternoon — not hopeful, just honest. Bag of dried pintos. Half a box of Jiffy cornbread mix. A can of tomato sauce that’s been on the shelf since before the tornado, which would make it almost three years old, which means it’s probably fine, which is the kind of math I do without thinking now.

My name is Kaylee Dawn Moreland. I’m fourteen years old. I live in a rented house in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, with my mama and my brother, on a street where nobody’s lawn looks like a magazine and most of the cars in the driveways have at least one thing held on with duct tape. My birthday is in June. I’ll be fifteen in about ten weeks. I am writing this in a spiral notebook from the dollar bin at Walmart, blue cover, ninety-nine cents, because I needed somewhere to put the things I think about that nobody in this house has the time or the energy to listen to.

I want to be clear about who’s in this kitchen with me, because the rest of what I write is going to keep coming back to them. My mama is Shelly. She’s thirty-eight years old and works at Dollar General as a cashier, sometimes assistant manager when somebody else doesn’t show up, which is most of the time. She gets up at five-thirty. She comes home some nights at six and some nights at nine-thirty and on Sundays, when she actually has a day off, she sleeps until ten and then washes everybody’s clothes at the laundromat because our washer has been broken since February. She is the hardest-working person I have ever met and I have not yet met very many people, but I am willing to bet money I do not have that she would rank.

My brother is Cody. He’s sixteen, two years older than me, and right now he’s somewhere I’m not going to write down because I have not decided what I think about it yet. There’s a house on North Peoria with the windows painted black and a porch light that stays on day and night, and that’s where his new friends live, and that’s where he goes after school three or four days a week now. He used to come home and we’d eat dinner and watch a show. He doesn’t do that anymore. I made his favorite last Tuesday — chicken and dumplings, the kind Mama’s mama used to make, the kind I’m still figuring out — and he didn’t come home until almost midnight, and the dumplings had gone gummy in the fridge by then, and I threw them out the next morning before Mama saw because I didn’t want her to know. That’s a thing I do now. I protect her from the small things so she has more room for the big ones.

My daddy was Travis Moreland. I say was because he went out to buy cigarettes a year ago this month and didn’t come back, and I have decided that’s past-tense behavior whether the world agrees or not. He was a roofer when he was sober and a problem when he wasn’t. The problem won most weeks. I’m not going to tell that whole story today, partly because it’s long and partly because I don’t want to. I will tell you that the day after he left, Mama got up at five-thirty and went to work, and I made breakfast, and Cody sat at the table and didn’t talk, and the world kept moving in the way the world keeps moving whether the people in it are ready or not.

So that’s the kitchen I’m standing in. That’s the family I’m cooking for. That’s why dinner has been mine for about a year now, even though nobody officially handed it over. It just slid sideways onto my plate the way most things in this house slide sideways onto somebody’s plate eventually.

I am cooking pinto beans tonight. I want to tell you what they cost, because I keep track of everything in a column at the back of this notebook and the numbers are starting to feel like a thing I’m proud of. Bag of dried pintos at Walmart, two pounds, $1.79. I used about a third of the bag, so call it sixty cents. Half a yellow onion, fifteen cents. Two cloves of garlic from the bottom of the basket, sprouting but still fine, free because they were already in the kitchen. A long shake of cumin from the spice rack, a teaspoon of salt, a pinch of black pepper. Total bean cost: under a dollar. Cornbread mix, one box, sixty-nine cents at Dollar General, plus an egg and some milk. Together, the whole pot of beans and a pan of cornbread will cost me less than a dollar fifty and feed three people for two nights if Cody comes home and one person for four if he doesn’t.

I am writing those numbers down because I have started to suspect that the way we eat in this house is not the way most of America eats, and I want a record of it. I read magazines when Mama’s waiting in the dentist office and I sit in the waiting room with her, the kinds of magazines with food on the cover, and the dinners in those magazines do not look like my dinners. The dinners in those magazines have ingredients I would have to save for. The dinners in those magazines have words on them like artisanal and locally-sourced and weeknight elegant, and I do not know what any of those words mean except that they are clearly not for me.

But I read them anyway. I read them like a person from another country reading a travel brochure. And about three weeks ago, in the waiting room at Dr. Hawthorne’s, I read a recipe for chicken shawarma in a copy of Family Circle from October that was sitting on the table next to a fake plant and a year-old issue of Highlights. I read the whole thing twice. I read it because the picture looked like the kind of food a person makes on purpose, with intention, in a kitchen that smells like spices instead of off-brand cleaner. And I read it because everything about it — the lemon and the cumin and the smoked paprika, the yogurt sauce, the cabbage slaw, the marinade that has to sit in the fridge for eight hours minimum — was the opposite of how I have been forced to cook, which is fast and cheap and from whatever is already in the house.

I tore the page out. I want to be honest about that. I tore the page out of Family Circle in the dentist’s waiting room while Mama was in the back getting her tooth cleaned, and I folded it into my pocket, and I felt about it the way I think people in books feel about stealing a single piece of fruit from a vendor in a market. Guilty and not, both at once. I came home and taped that page into the front of this notebook with masking tape, and I wrote underneath it, in pencil: For when I’m grown.

I cannot make chicken shawarma yet. I want to be clear about that too, because I am not going to pretend in this notebook. The chicken alone, three pounds of boneless skinless chicken, would cost me eight or nine dollars. Fresh parsley would cost me three. Greek yogurt is a dollar more than regular yogurt. Smoked paprika I do not own and would have to buy. The marinade has to sit for eight hours, which means I’d have to plan a whole day around it, and the days in this house do not get planned around dinners. The dinners get planned around the days.

So the page sits in the notebook. It sits there next to my column of pinto-bean costs and my list of what’s in the pantry and a recipe I copied off the back of the cornbread box. It sits there because I read it once and could not stop thinking about it, and I have decided that wanting something I cannot have yet is not the same as being foolish. It might be the opposite. It might be the only honest reason to keep going.

The beans are good. They are simmering on the stove with a half onion and two cloves of garlic and a long shake of cumin, and the cornbread is in the oven, and in about forty minutes the kitchen will smell like the kind of dinner my mama’s mama made on a budget that would make a financial advisor weep. Mama will eat at nine when she gets home. I’ll wrap a plate in foil for Cody and put it in the fridge. Tomorrow morning I’ll make the leftovers into something else — refried beans on a tortilla, probably, with whatever cheese is left.

And the chicken shawarma page will still be there in the front of my notebook. Not as a plan. As a promise. Because I am fourteen years old, and the pantry inventory says pintos, and I am cooking what I have, and one day — one day, when there is room in the budget and time in the schedule and a kitchen with counter space — I will make this shawarma exactly the way the page says, fresh parsley and all, and I will write the date next to it in pencil, and I will know I got there.

Someday. For now, the beans.

I am leaving the recipe here the way I taped it into my notebook — the whole thing, exactly as it was printed, because I want it to be ready for whoever needs it on the day they finally have a budget that can hold it. Maybe that person is grown-up me, ten years from now, in a kitchen I can already picture even though I have never seen it. Maybe it’s you. The marinade does the heavy lifting; the yogurt sauce takes five minutes; the cabbage slaw is just cabbage and parsley and lemon. None of it is hard. The hard part is the part nobody writes on a recipe card, which is the part where you can finally afford to make it. That day is coming. The recipe is here for when it does.

Prep Time: 500 min | Cook Time: 15 min | Total Time: 515 min | Servings: 6

Ingredients

For the Chicken:

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic (finely minced, or 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder)
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon cumin
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons salt (I use coarse, kosher salt)
1/2 teaspoon black pepper (I use coarsely ground black pepper)
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (use more if you want more heat)
3 pounds boneless skinless chicken breasts (or chicken thighs)

For the Yogurt Sauce:

1 cup plain Greek yogurt
1 garlic clove (finely minced, or a hefty pinch of garlic powder)
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Salt and pepper (to taste)

For the Cabbage Slaw:

5-6 cups thinly sliced red cabbage (1 small head of cabbage or 1/2 head of large cabbage)
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice or red wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt (I use coarse, kosher salt)
Pinch of black pepper

For Serving:

Flatbread or pita bread (see note)
Diced tomatoes
Diced cucumbers

Instructions

Marinate the chicken. In a small bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, oil, garlic, coriander, cumin, smoked paprika, salt, pepper, and cayenne. Place the chicken in a shallow dish or in a gallon-size ziploc bag. Add the marinade and rub over the chicken to make sure each piece is coated. Refrigerate for at least 8 hours or up to 24 hours.
Make the yogurt sauce. Whisk together all the ingredients and refrigerate until ready to use (can be made up to several days in advance).
Prepare the cabbage slaw. Place the cabbage and parsley in a large bowl. Whisk together the olive oil, lemon juice (or vinegar), salt and pepper. Pour over the cabbage and toss to combine. Refrigerate until ready to serve (can be made several hours in advance). Season to taste with additional salt and pepper to taste, if needed.
Grill the chicken. Preheat an outdoor grill (see recipe note for cooking in an oven) to medium- or medium-high. Grill the chicken for 4-5 minutes per side until an instant-read thermometer registers 165 degrees at the thickest part of the chicken. Let the chicken rest for 5 minutes or so before slicing.
Serve. Serve the chicken with the flatbread, yogurt sauce, cabbage slaw, diced tomatoes and cucumbers.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Chicken Shawarma — The Recipe I Tore Out of a Magazine and Taped Into My Notebook