Southwest White Chili

I have a confession to make. I cheated. Two weeks ago when I made Jeff & Brigid's Peanut Butter Chicken I was really supposed to make Sue Haug's Southwest White Chili. But between all the meat I'd been making, including Sarah Pascarella's admittedly awesome Black Bean Lime Chili not three days before, I just couldn't face yet another pot of flesh and beans. And as I'd just broken things up with Tilzer's Pumpkin Bread and had some other cakey-dessert-y thing going bad in the fridge, I couldn't really rationalize the making another sweet under the 'intermixing is okay' rule.

So I broke my rule. I skipped a recipe, and not because I had a vegetarian or something coming to dinner. I just couldn't do it. So I jumped ahead to the next un-chili item, the Peanut Butter Chicken. I am a bad, bad girl. But damn it, it had to be done. And I would do it again.

I have since recovered. I spent last week repenting by eating the kitchen-full of leftovers from the Yom Kippur break-the-fast dinner I made for Sean, Bekah, Josh and me (delicious traditional family recipes, which included the beloved Ellie Baker's Knishes, but no new Recipe Book items). Then we went to Washington for Josh's cousin's wedding (awesome), which included plenty of restaurant food.

So now I'm purged and ready. Last night upon our return I hit the ghetto grocery in preparation for what I pray to the sweet little baby Jesus is my very last chili of the book, Sue Haug's Southwest White Chili. Sue is a Huntington family friend from way back and the current head of the music school at Penn State, if you want to get fancy and impressive about it. What with her having been an Iowan for many a year, one could reasonably expect her chili would be hearty. That, and it's chili.

After all the chili and variations on the chili theme I've made for the Recipe Book, what strikes me at this point is how different they all are. Dorothy Lewis's Vegetarian Chili is pretty traditional - red, soup, a slew of different beans, beer, and a million other ingredients. It basically says, 'Serve me in a Tex Mex restaurant with cheese & sour cream.' Sarah P's Black Bean Lime Chili was different - dark, more like meat in a sauce, served on couscous, and a more atypical flavor. Sue's Southwest White Chili is another variation - with chicken instead of meat, white beans instead of a mixture, it is indeed a pretty light colored chili. Like Sarah's it is less soupy (was it supposed to be?), but like Dorothy's it was served in a bowl like a soup and not a saucy meat.

I think of the three, my favorite was Sarah's (no dis to the Iowans). Josh, of course, loved Sue's chili and cleared his bowl right up. All I know is there is way more variation in chili than I ever realized before this project, which is pretty cool. Mostly, though, I'm just hoping this is the last one for a while. After all, man cannot live on chili alone.

Welcome home

Sue Haug's Last But Not Least Southwest White Chili

1 tbsp olive oil
1 lb boneless chicken breast
1/4 cup chopped onion (Or, you know, one onion. Whatevs.)*
4 oz can chopped green chiles (Or something like that, since you accidentally bought the 7 oz can and you were just eyeballing 'half-ish'.)
1 tsp garlic powder (Or use real garlic and cook w/ chicken)
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp oregano and 1/2 tsp cilantro
1/4 tsp ground red pepper
19 oz can or jar undrained white kidney beans (cannellini)
shredded Monterey Jack cheese
sliced green onions

Pull bag of uncooked chicken breasts left over from previous recipe out of freezer. Wonder exactly how much chicken is in here, but decided not to bother figuring it out. Hell, it's close enough to 1 lb. Defrost.

Heat olive oil in 3 qt saucepan (or usual thick cast-iron chili pot) over medium heat. Add chicken. Realize you probably used high heat, which might be why all the olive oil burned up and the chicken started to stick to the pot. Cook 4-5 minutes, stirring often. Remove chicken with slotted spoon, cover, and keep warm. Or just dump in bowl and not worry about it; it's going back in anyway and it will warm up then.

Add chopped onions, chiles, garlic, cumin, oregano, cilantro and red pepper. Rue the fact that you aren't using your fresh oregano from the garden because you no longer have fresh oregano from your garden because some evil raccoon/skunk/possum/whatever dug up your entire herb garden while you were in Monterey two weekends ago and it's now just a fenced off pile of dirt. Asshole wild animals.

Simmer for 30 minutes. Or 10 minutes at which point you confirm that everything is burning up, despite the fact that you added more oil to the pot. Stir in cooked chicken and beans and simmer for 10 minutes, or rather more like 20 minutes to split the difference. People are all over the place with how long they simmer chili anyhow.

Serve - with garnish of cheese and green onions.

Sue notes: I never make a single batch, because it's great the second and third day - if it lasts that long. Come home from work, put this on to cook, then sit down with a drink and rela, knowing that you'll have a great dinner.

*Chopping method: Mike Milch's + SqueakyKitty's, which sadly didn't work as well this time because you used a sort of old half of lemon that you'd saved in the fridge in a ziploc bag and had started to dry up. Turns out that the fresh lemon juice is pretty crucial.