Greek Chicken Roulade

Today is February 29th, which only happens every four years, which means this day technically doesn’t exist most of the time, which is exactly how I feel about my life right now. I am eighteen years old and I am somewhere between who I was and who I’m supposed to become, and I am standing in my mother’s kitchen in Norfolk, Virginia, watching her stir something on the stove, and I am thinking: I need to write this down before I lose it.

My name is Rachel Abernathy. I’m a senior at Granby High School. I have a whiteboard in my bedroom with 77 written on it in red dry-erase marker — that’s how many days until graduation — and I update it every single morning like a prisoner marking the wall of her cell. Spring break ended yesterday. Eleven weeks of beige hallways and cheerleading practice and a future I can’t quite see the shape of yet. Eleven weeks, and then whatever comes next.

Here is what I know about myself: I have lived in Norfolk, Virginia; Jacksonville, Florida; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Bremerton, Washington; and then back to Norfolk. Seven schools before high school. I can make friends in a week and let them go in a weekend. I can pack my entire bedroom into boxes in an afternoon and feel almost nothing about it, because feeling things about it doesn’t change anything, and military kids learn that early. What I cannot do, apparently, is figure out what I want to major in at college, or whether I even want to go, or why everyone else my age seems to know exactly where they’re standing when I feel like I’m somewhere between here and not-here, which is, I realize, exactly where I’ve always been.

My dad is Kevin Abernathy, Staff Sergeant, U.S. Navy, retired. Twenty-two years of service. Three deployments. One IED outside Kandahar in 2009 that changed the shape of him permanently, that turned the loud-laughing man who used to throw me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes into someone quieter and farther away. He’s been home for four years now. He works at a defense contractor, goes to the VA on Tuesdays, and — I still cannot say this without smiling — has taken up gardening. My father, who once field-stripped a rifle in under sixty seconds, now kneels in the backyard talking to his tomato plants about sun exposure. I love him for it. I love him in general, but the tomatoes specifically make me want to hug him until he gets uncomfortable, which takes about four seconds.

My mom is Donna Abernathy, and she is, without question, the most competent human being I have ever known. Dinner in our house is at 1800 hours. Always has been, always will be, regardless of what time zone we’re in, regardless of whether the moving boxes are still stacked against the wall, regardless of whether dad is home or deployed. 1800. You could set your watch by it. You could set your life by it, which, for a long stretch of my childhood, we basically did.

During deployments — and there were a lot of deployments — my mother held this family together the way you hold a bag that’s about to split. Quietly, carefully, with more strength than anyone was giving her credit for. She didn’t cry in front of us. She cooked. That was how she managed it. That was how she kept the floor from falling out. She had a binder of recipes — still has it, three binders now — organized by “things I can make anywhere with anything.” Casseroles. One-pot meals. Sheet pan dinners. Crockpot recipes that could survive a twelve-hour unpacking day. The recipes of survival, not luxury. The recipes of a woman who knew she might be in a different kitchen in six months and needed food that traveled.

I have been absorbing these recipes my entire life. Not on purpose, exactly — more the way you absorb the smell of a place or the sound of someone’s voice. Standing in the kitchen while she cooked. Watching her hands. Learning that you check onions by smell, not sight. Learning that a casserole is done when it sounds a certain way — a low, satisfied bubbling that she can hear from the living room. I’ve been her shadow in every kitchen we’ve ever had, and I never thought of it as learning. It was just being near her. It was just being home, wherever home happened to be that year.

Lately I’ve been paying more attention. I don’t know how to explain it except that graduation is 77 days away and I feel this low-grade panic, this awareness that I am about to leave the only kitchen that has ever been mine. That the warm, particular safety of this house — the 1800 dinners, the smell of something in the crockpot, my dad walking in from the backyard with dirt on his hands and a tomato update nobody asked for — is not something I can pack in a box. I can pack the recipe, though. I’m learning that. I can write it down before it slips away.

Last week, my mom had a long day. A really long day — the kind where she came home from her errands and sat down at the kitchen table and just looked tired in a way she doesn’t usually let us see. And I thought: I can do this. I’ve been watching you do this for eighteen years. Let me do this.

So I made the crockpot BBQ chicken.

It is, objectively, the simplest thing my mother makes. Five ingredients. A slow cooker. Six hours of patience. That’s it. My mom has made it in our kitchen in Norfolk and our kitchen in Jacksonville and the tiny galley kitchen we had in Bremerton that barely fit two people. She’s made it the night before a big move and the night after a rough phone call with my dad’s unit. She’s made it when the budget was tight and the freezer was almost empty and dinner needed to happen regardless. It is not a flashy recipe. It is not the kind of thing that impresses anyone. But it shows up. It is reliable. In our family, reliable is not a small thing. Reliable is everything.

I put the chicken in the crockpot at noon. I mixed the sauce the way she does — BBQ sauce, a little Italian dressing, brown sugar, garlic powder — and I poured it over the chicken, and I put the lid on, and I turned it to low, and I walked away. That’s the whole secret of slow cooker cooking, my mom always says. You do your part and then you trust it. You let it work. You don’t keep lifting the lid to check on it every twenty minutes because every time you lift the lid you add time and you let the heat out and you ruin the whole thing. Just trust it and walk away.

I’ve thought about that a lot, actually. In relation to my life. Doing your part and trusting it and not lifting the lid every five minutes in a panic. I’m working on it.

By the time my mom came downstairs at six o’clock — 1800, naturally — the kitchen smelled like something she’d made a hundred times. She stopped in the doorway and just looked at me standing there with two forks, shredding the chicken in the pot, and she said, “You made dinner.”

“I made dinner,” I said.

She didn’t make a big thing of it. That’s not how Donna Abernathy operates. She just nodded and set the table and called my dad in from the backyard, where he had been having a very serious conversation with the zucchini. We ate dinner at 1800. The chicken was good. My dad had two servings and said it tasted like Mom’s, which is the highest compliment he knows how to give.

I’m writing this down because in 77 days I’m going to leave this kitchen, and I don’t know where I’m going yet. I don’t know what comes after the whiteboard. But I know this: wherever I end up, I’m going to need to eat. I’m going to have hard days and tight budgets and small kitchens, and I’m going to need food that shows up even when I don’t have anything left. My mom figured that out twenty years ago and built a whole life around it. I’m just now starting to understand what she was doing.

I’m going to start writing it down. The recipes. The stories. The things I’ve learned in the kitchens we’ve had and the kitchens that are coming. Because I think that’s how you carry a home with you — not in boxes, not in furniture, not in the particular shade of the light in a certain kitchen at 1800 on a Tuesday — but in the food. In the knowledge of how to make something good out of what you have.

My mom has been teaching me that my whole life. I just wasn’t taking notes until now.

So this is where I’m starting: with a recipe that feels like it shouldn’t work in a kitchen you barely know. Greek Chicken Roulade — chicken pounded thin, stuffed with feta and oregano and lemon zest, rolled up tight and roasted until golden. It’s the kind of thing my mom would have made on the second or third night in a new place, once the crockpot meal had gotten us through the worst of it, when she wanted to prove to herself that this kitchen could make something worth sitting down for. Fifty minutes, a handful of real ingredients, and suddenly the room smells like somewhere you’d want to stay. Here’s how you make it.

Prep Time: 30 min | Cook Time: 20 min | Total Time: 50 min | Servings: 6

Ingredients

4 large boneless skinless chicken breasts (about 2 pounds total)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided
2 cloves garlic passed through a garlic press
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 ounces crumbled feta cheese
2 tablespoons minced fresh oregano, plus additional for garnish
Lemon zest from one lemon
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 cup chicken stock
1 tablespoon butter
One lemon cut into wedges for garnish

Instructions

Preheat. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Prep the chicken. Pound out each chicken breast to 1/8th inch thickness.
Cook the garlic. In a small sauté pan over medium heat, sauté garlic in 1 tablespoon of the olive oil for 1-2 minutes. Do not brown. Set aside.
Stuff the breasts. Sprinkle each chicken breast with salt and pepper. Spread feta evenly between the four breasts, leaving the two long edges clear. Sprinkle the oregano, lemon zest and cooked garlic and oil equally between the four breasts, leaving the edges clear.
Roll and tie. Roll like a jelly roll and finish seam side down. With butchers twine, tie off each end and then make one or two ties in the center depending on the length of the roll.
Brown and roast. In a large oven proof skillet, over medium high heat, place the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil and heat to hot. Add the four chicken rolls and brown turning to brown each side, about 2-3 minutes per side. After you turn the chicken to the last side, place the pan in the oven and roast for 5-10 minutes or until an internal thermometer inserted into the center of the largest roll reaches 140 degrees.
Rest the chicken. Remove the pan from the oven and leave the oven mitt on the handle to remind you that the handle is hot. Remove the chicken to a platter to rest.
Make the pan sauce. Heat the pan over medium high heat and add the lemon juice scraping up bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the wine and cook to reduce wine to almost the point of total evaporation. Add the chicken stock and cook to reduce by half. Add the butter and stir just until melted. Add any liquid that has accumulated on the platter.
Slice and serve. Slice cooked rolls on the bias and place back on your platter. Pour pan sauce over top and reserved minced fresh oregano. Garnish platter with lemon wedges.

Nutrition (per serving)

Greek Chicken Roulade — The Recipe That Taught Me Cooking Is Just Another Way of Coming Home