By The Fourth of July fell on a Monday this year and the Sonic Drive-In on 71st Street was open and was slammed, and I worked an eleven-to-seven shift inside a kitchen that, by the second hour, was ninety-five degrees and rising.
I want to start there because I want to be honest about why this recipe is going to wait until fall. I am writing it down now, on Tuesday morning, because the recipe is good and because the day I copied it I knew I wasn’t going to make it for at least four months. White Chicken Chili from Family Circle, which was sitting on Mrs. Tilford’s coffee table when I dropped off a thank-you card on Saturday afternoon — she had told me to come by and pick a magazine if I wanted, and I had picked the November issue, and the white chicken chili recipe was the one I copied that night onto the back of an algebra worksheet at the kitchen table.
White chicken chili is a fall dish. I want to put that on the page. The whole point of white chicken chili is that it is the kind of stew that keeps you warm when the wind is coming through the gap under the front door and the heat is trying its best and the temperature outside has dropped below forty for the first time in October. White chicken chili is not a July dish. White chicken chili is what you make when the leaves are starting to turn and the air smells like burning leaves and the kitchen needs to fill with steam from the back burner of the stove.
So before I tell you about the recipe, let me tell you about the day. The shift started at eleven and the rush started at twelve-fifteen and the rush did not stop. I have not seen anything like a Sonic on the Fourth of July. The drive-up stalls were full all afternoon. The orders kept coming. Cherry limeades, large and small. Chili dogs. Chili cheese tots. Hot dogs with mustard, hot dogs with everything, hot dogs with extra ketchup for the kid who wanted it, the ones with onions for the dad. Corn dogs. Tater tots, well done, with extra salt. Slushies. Ice cream cones. The kitchen got to ninety-five degrees by two o’clock and stayed there until I clocked out at seven. The wall AC, vintage 1997, wheezing the way an old man wheezes, was no match for the grill and the fryers and the heat lamps and the eight bodies in a small kitchen.
Carlos brought us bottles of water from the cooler every hour. He went up to the front and grabbed them himself, three at a time, and walked them back to whoever was farthest from the cooler. He didn’t make a thing of it. He just put them on the counter where you were working and said, drink, kid, and walked back to the front. Brittany kept her hair up in a tight braid. By the end of the shift her face was so red she looked sunburned. Hailey, who is twenty and has a son at home, was running point on the drive-up because Brittany and I were too inexperienced for the Fourth of July rush by ourselves. Hailey did not lose her cool once. She is the kind of woman I am going to keep watching, because she is the kind of woman I want to be when I am twenty.
I made $52 in tips. The car-hops do most of the tip-collecting and the car-hops split with the inside-kitchen crew on big days, and the Fourth was a big day. $52 was the most I had made in a single shift. I held the wad of ones and fives in my hand at the back of the kitchen at the end of the night and I thought about Mama on her one Saturday off this month, sleeping until ten, and I thought about how I was going to tuck twenty of this fifty-two into the savings envelope and ten into the household envelope on the kitchen table and twenty back into my wallet, and I felt the heat of a long shift settle into my bones the way satisfaction does when satisfaction is also fatigue.
I walked home at seven-forty in the wet polo and the slip-resistant shoes that had stopped feeling like shoes about two hours into the shift and started feeling like clay molds of my feet. Mama was at the kitchen table with a glass of iced tea, watching the TV in the living room. The local news was running their pre-fireworks segment about safety. She put down her iced tea. She got up and got me one of my own. She pulled out the chair across from her and she said, baby, take your shoes off, those feet need to come up, and she put my feet on the chair across from her, and we sat that way for an hour while the news ran the parade footage.
We did not eat real dinner. Mama had eaten earlier. I had eaten a chili cheese tot on my break. By the time I got home neither of us was hungry in any real way except for something cold. So I cut up the half watermelon I had bought at Walmart on Saturday afternoon for $3.49 — half a watermelon, marked down because it had a soft spot on one end — and we ate cold watermelon out of bowls while the news showed the fireworks across the country. The watermelon was sweet and cold. The air conditioner was running. Mama’s feet were up on the coffee table next to mine. We did not say much.
Around nine o’clock I went to the kitchen for another bowl of watermelon and I saw the magazine on the counter, the November Family Circle, with the white chicken chili recipe at the top of the page I had marked. I read it again. Boneless skinless chicken breasts, simmered in chicken broth with white beans, green chilies, cumin, oregano, garlic, sour cream stirred in at the end. The recipe is gentle. The recipe is steamy. The recipe wants to be made on a fifty-degree October Sunday after a long walk in the leaves, when the kitchen needs the heat from the stove to fill it. The recipe does not want to be made on a ninety-five-degree July fourth when the cook just got off an eight-hour shift in a Sonic kitchen.
So I copied it onto the back of the algebra worksheet. I taped that worksheet into the back of my notebook in the section labeled For When It Cools Down, which is a section I have started keeping for recipes that need a different temperature outside the window than the temperature we have right now. The pear salad is in there. The white chicken chili is in there now too. The pears are September. The chili is October. Everything has a season. The trick is knowing which season is yours, this week, and saving the others for when the world swings back around to them.
Cody is on day five of being gone. Mama has stopped saying his name out loud during the day. I have started checking my phone every twenty minutes for a call from a number I don’t recognize. I will not write any more about Cody this week because I do not yet know how to write about him on a holiday when the rest of the news was watermelon and tips and the AC running. The chili stays in the back of the notebook. The day stays the day it was. We are still here, both of us, on the Fourth of July, with cold watermelon in bowls, and the news on, and the fireworks somewhere downtown that we did not go see.
The recipe below is the original White Chicken Chili from A Family Feast, exactly the way they wrote it. I am putting it here because somebody reading this in October might need it, and the October me probably will too. Make this when the windows stay closed at night. Make this when you finally pull the heavy blanket out of the closet. The chili is the kind of dinner that turns a cold living room into a warm one, which is exactly what white chicken chili was invented to do.
Slow Cooker White Chicken Chili
Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 6 hours | Total Time: 6 hours 10 minutes | Servings: 7
Ingredients
- 2 lbs bone-in chicken thighs (skin removed)
- 2 cans (15 oz each) great northern beans, drained and rinsed
- 1 can (4 oz) diced green chiles
- 3 cups low-sodium chicken broth
- 1 medium yellow onion, diced
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
- 1/2 tsp dried oregano
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- Sour cream for serving (optional)
Instructions
- Layer the base. Place the bone-in chicken thighs in a single layer in the bottom of a 6-quart slow cooker.
- Add everything else. Pour the drained beans, green chiles, chicken broth, onion, garlic, cumin, oregano, salt, and pepper directly over the chicken. Give it a gentle stir to distribute the seasoning.
- Cook low and slow. Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 7 hours, or on HIGH for 3 to 4 hours, until the chicken is completely tender and pulls away from the bone easily.
- Shred the chicken. Remove the chicken thighs to a cutting board. Discard the bones. Use two forks to shred the meat into pieces, then return the shredded chicken to the slow cooker and stir it back into the broth.
- Taste and serve. Taste for salt and adjust if needed. Ladle into bowls and top with a dollop of sour cream if you have it. Leftovers keep in the fridge for up to 4 days and reheat well on the stovetop or in the microwave.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 272 | Protein: 27g | Fat: 7g | Carbs: 23g | Fiber: 6g | Sodium: 540mg