The alliteration wunderkind strikes again!
So, I have this recipe file that dates back to, oh, 1989. When I was 10. Yes, I’ve always been food crazed. Most of them are things I’ve never cooked: some family recipes, some things pulled from magazines and newspapers, or sent to me by friends. I thought it would be fun to go through and selectively try some of these out, and on this freaking cold ass day, chili sounded perfect.
I apparently culled this one from Health magazine’s March 2004 issue: Chicken Chili with White Beans and Chipotles (I just had to change the title for alliteration’s sake). I changed it up a little bit, so the following isn’t exactly what they printed, but it was pretty darned tasty. Someday, I promise, there will be pictures of these things…
White Bean Chili with Chicken and Chipotle
- 2 T olive oil
- 2 chicken breasts
- 1 tsp. ground cumin
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced
- 3 15-ounce cans of Great Northern beans
- 1 chipotle pepper and about a tsp. of the adobo sauce
- 1 4-ounce can of diced green chilis
- 2 c. chicken stock
The original recipe called for using already cooked, diced chicken, but I didn’t have already cooked chicken. So the recipe had to be changed a bit to incorporate the chicken cookin’ step. Here is what you should do to make this tasty chili:
Cut the chicken breasts into pieces, as small as you can make them. Heat the olive oil (another kind of oil would probably work, too) in a large stock pot, and toss in the chicken and the garlic. Stir it around a bit over medium-high heat until the chicken starts to turn all white and cooked looking. You don’t want to brown it, or cook it all the way, because it will probably just get tough. After about 5 minutes, throw in the cumin, and stir some more. Then add all three cans of white beans. I rinsed and drained two cans, and then used the bean juices from the third can in the chili. Add the chipotle and the can of green chilis, and stir it around a bit more. Then just add the chicken stock, lower the heat, and let it simmer for at least 20 minutes. Taste a little ways into the cooking to determine how much salt and/or black pepper you want to add. Mine cooked for closer to 50, because I was waiting for The Crystal to get home, and it was super awesomely good. Just enough bite to warm us up in our freezing cold house, but not enough to burn our faces off.