Chicken & rice
with Mom's secret ingredient
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My mom is an excellent cook but not a fancy cook. She cooks simple food correctly, so even the most basic foods in her hands — sautéed broccoli, steamed rice — are sublime. Why? She knows how to cook, and she has a secret ingredient. Where I might use water, she’s using chicken broth.
Not homemade broth. Please. She’s dribbling a few tablespoons from a carton of Swanson’s into her skillet of broccoli, and pouring bigger glugs into her rice cooker. It won’t make the end results chickeny — just more wholesome, more yummy.
Today’s chicken and rice is homey because it’s chicken and rice, because the rice is slicked with the rendered fat of seared chicken and plumped with chicken broth, and because of all the garlic and cumin (two of my mom’s other trademarks).
But it’s also buoyant and bright with heaps of greenery stirred in at the end (I had arroz verde and Chipotle’s cilantro rice on my mind). It’s velvet and verdant, cozy and zippy, but above all, it’s family food.
