White Chicken Chili

This is one of those go-to dinners that you can pretty much always throw together: frozen chicken breasts, canned beans, broth, jar of salsa--although fresh is better than jarred. Fresh from the store, I mean, like from the produce section. If you’re making homemade salsa, that’s fantastic, but you’re in a different gear, certainly, than white chicken chili gear. By all means, make homemade salsa. But then definitely don’t dump it in the chili. It would be both show-offy and sort of useless, like putting on makeup before bed.

This is what you make on cold, weary nights, nights when you are so worn through and chilled to the bone that the only thing that will cure you is something thick, spicy, and eaten with a spoon.

A couple great things about this soup: first, it’s gluten-free and dairy-free, things that are very important in our house. This is a good one to bring to friends who just had a baby—warm, easy, comforting. Bring a big container of the chili, and then in another bag, the chips, salsa, cheese, avocado, etc.

And this is a perfect Sunday afternoon football meal—great with beer, big piles of chips. For crowds, I like serving traditional beef chili and this one, too—two big bubbling pots on the stove, counter full of bowls of toppings for both.

This is an endlessly versatile recipe, like all my favorite recipes are. You can add a can of corn or even corn with peppers. You can use tomatillo salsa, if you’d like, and a can of diced green chilis, and then it’s Chicken Chili Verde, which is lovely for a change. You could add a can of black beans, if you’d like, for a little color, and for their mineral-y, almost chocolate-y flavor. To make it even one step easier, you can use a rotisserie chicken, skin removed and meat shredded.

I wouldn’t add kidney beans, because that would make it too much like a plain old chili, and because, to be honest with you, I don’t like kidney beans. There really aren’t too many things I just don’t like, but kidney beans are one. For the record: I also don’t love ham, cinnamon or white chocolate.  But I digress...back to the chili at hand.

White Chicken Chili for 6

1-1.5 pounds chicken: breasts, tenders, or boneless skinless thighs, cut into bite-sized pieces. Cook in a large stock pot or Dutch oven over medium heat.

Add one container of salsa, preferably fresh. Or green salsa, as we discussed above.

Cook until chicken is almost cooked through, about five minutes.

Drain all 4 cans of beans. Add 2 cans as they are, and mash 2 cans with a fork or the back of a wooden spoon, then add them.

Add four cups of broth.

Bring to a rolling boil, then reduce heat to a simmer, stirring occasionally.

Simmer for at least 30 minutes, but, really, the longer the better.

Serve with cilantro, wedges of lime, sliced avocado, shredded cheese, chips, sour cream, and salsa.  I will warn you, however, that sometimes what began as a thoroughly virtuous soup becomes a very large meal consisting mainly of cheese & chips with a very occasional bite of soup. Or at least that's what I've heard.

Custom Canvas Giveaway Winners!

Thanks for sharing so many great quotes...a few of my favorites:

From Gillian:

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all. Shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things will fill from behind, from beneath, like water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”  --Annie Dillard

From Julia:

“You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
-G.K. Chesterton

And from kottley:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, 

"what's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.”

― A.A. Milne

Great, great words. I might be calling my friend Holly for three more canvases. :)

And now, to the business at hand: with a little help from http://www.random.org/, we have 4 winners!

First, the Custom Canvas Winner:  Lindsey

Lindsay’s comment:

"For now we live between already and not yet, memory and hope; we live between the times. Until the promised future arrives, we will always be in transition...faith is faith precisely when it points away from itself toward its object- toward the God who is love, and therefore toward the promised future. Faith lives by the promises of God , and we are saved in no other way than by hope" Karl Barth

January 24, 2012 | Lindsey

Lindsey, please send me a message, so that I can connect you with Holly, and she can get to work on your custom canvas!

And the three Valentine’s Day canvas winners are Anna, Jessica, and another Anna, with these comments:

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case you fail by default. J.K. Rowling

January 24, 2012 | Anna

***

"Living Water, swallow me

Deepest River, wash me clean
Jesus Savior, more of Thee
Jesus, more of Thee

Come and ruin me with Your love
So no other is enough
Come and leave Your mark on me
Jesus, more of Thee

Deep is the stain inside of me
But deeper the River that washes me clean
I've been the one who cries in the night
But You've been the Friend of my life." - Watermark

January 26, 2012 | jessica brazeal

***

It is never wrong to do the right thing.

January 26, 2012 | Anna

***

For you three lucky girls, send me a message with your full name & mailing address, & Holly will send out your canvas in time for Valentine's Day. :)

Lots of good things coming up here: this spring we’ll do two book giveaways from friends I can't wait to introduce you to, if you don't know them already—Untitled from Blaine Hogan & 7 from Jen Hatmaker. I’m reading both right now & can’t wait to share them with you.

Later this week, I’ll post the white chicken chili recipe I made with my sisters-in-law last night, and next week, a few of my favorite baby things.

Until then: love, grace, good books, hard laughter, and lots of time around the table. XO

15 Pounds of Awesome

Mac is four months old today, and he is just nothing but fifteen pounds of love and awesomeness. He’s all smiles—that’s like his thing, smiling with a side of laughing. When that baby smiles, everything stops for me. I am totally, completely, one-thousand-percent in love with him.

He’s a laid-back, happy baby, and he basically gets passed from grandma to grandma to aunt to papa to dad to mom, with the occasional sort-of strangle/sort-of hug from his big brother. And he rolls with it all. He’s been to Dallas, Atlanta, Palm Beach, South Haven, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, and Appleton, Wisconsin. Not bad for four months.

Everyone says that when your baby is born, your other children suddenly become giants, and that’s absolutely true. Henry became practically an adult the day we came home from the hospital, and he’s proven to be a fantastic big brother. He loves to dress just like his little brother, so every day he comes into the nursery when I’m changing Mac to see what he’s wearing, and then finds something similar. Darling.

Even after four months, I confess that I’m still having trouble finding the right words for how I feel about this baby, about this gift, about the depth of gratitude I feel for his healthy birth and for each passing day of growth and thriving life.

Five years ago, Henry's birth was the beginning of our parenting journey, and he has brought us joy and laughter and love every day. Right alongside our joy and gratitude for Henry, though, there were years of longing, praying, losing, hoping, trying not to hope. Mac is the answer to every one of those prayers and every one of those tears.

Every parent believes their baby is a miracle. And they’re right. And so do we.

Every parent believes their baby is absolute magic. And they’re right. And so do we.

Here’s to four months of our magic, our miracle, our baby Mac.

Giveaway: Custom Canvas from Livingston & Porter

It’s a new year, and it’s time for a giveaway!

I love this one: my sweet friend Holly from Livingston and Porter will paint one of her amazing custom canvases for the winner.

You know, of course, that I’m a words person by profession. And that carries through all of my life—I love to be surrounded by words: quotes, fragments of poetry, lines from songs, passages from scripture. Naturally, then, Holly’s canvases are totally my jam.

(Yeah, I absolutely just used the phrase "totally my jam." What?)

I have Holly’s work all over my house, literally, and last Christmas, she painted custom canvases for my husband, my mom, my dad, my brother, and my best friend. Seriously, I’m a fan.

I love giving these canvases as gifts—I chose my dad’s life verse (1 Corintians 15:58), a quote about peacemaking for my mom, and a much-loved Nietzsche quote for Aaron: “One must still have enough chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” 

For a friend with a darling new baby girl, Holly did a canvas in the softest, sweetest pink, and in white it said, “The day you were born, the world had to make room for a little more fancy.” Come on.

For the winner, Holly will do any color, any shape, and any quote for you—so cool, right?  You can peek at her Etsy site for examples, or totally dream up your own. Also on her site are all sorts of treasures—vintage books, things she finds at estate sales. The girl’s got style.

All you have to do is leave a comment with your name and your favorite quote—and it doesn’t have to be the one you’ll choose for the canvas if you win. Just share with us some words that move you.

One entry per person, and the winner will be chosen at random at noon CST on Monday, January 30^th.  Simple enough, yes?

My favorite quote, of course, is in the photo, and that canvas is hanging right in my kitchen, where I see it every day. Splendid torch, indeed.

XO

***Late breaking news: Holly is the best, and not only is she giving away a custom canvas, but because there are so many comments, she's also giving away three Valentine's Day canvases!  That means that on Monday, we'll annouce FOUR winners!  XO***

On Writing & Creativity

I am, as you know, working on Bread & Wine, my third book, a collection of essays about faith, family, food, friendship & life around the table. It’s due this summer, and I’m taking a little bit of a different tack than I have before.

I began again in earnest on January 3^rd, and I write between two and three days a week, depending on the week. I write sometimes at a coffee shop—there are four coffee shops in my rotation, and the one I choose for a particular day has everything to do with who’s watching my sweet baby that day. If I leave him with my mom, I go to the place nearest her house, and so on. That's all just about the same as last time.

I realized, though, that somewhere along the way I developed a bad habit, or at least what I think is an unhelpful habit for my current purpose. I slipped into writing a first draft, cleaning it up, reading through again, crafting first paragraph and last, and then pronouncing it nearly done, all in a day. That’s good, I think. It’s productive, and it lets me cross one essay off the list—one down!

But what it doesn’t do is force me to play in the messy, unfolding, rich, mulch-y creative wreckage. It’s tidy, it’s straightforward, it’s perfect for a blog post—and the bonus there is immediate feedback. But have I become so accustomed to immediate feedback and the tidiness of finishing a quick essay that I’m missing some of the deep, gutsy, creative work that’s yielded only when you let it sit and settle and marinate for a while? That's the question I'm asking these days.

Five years ago this month I was working on Cold Tangerines. I didn’t have a blog. No Facebook or Twitter. I wrote and wrote, and for ages, no one saw it. Occasionally my editor. Very rarely, a friend. It was a wide, sloppy, creative, beautiful mess. Bits and pieces, knit together and unraveled, over and over till they settled together like old friends. There were a few of those essays that I wrote straight through, in a flame of creativity and pure happiness, but I think that happened because I gave myself the protected time and space to write both good stuff and terrible stuff.

So I’m going back to that place. We’re going away with friends mid-February, and between now and then, my only goal is volume—words and words and words. Every story and idea and rabbit trail. Every question, dream, memory. Quantity, freedom, playing around with words.

It’s harder than I thought, mostly because I miss feeling like I’m producing—look at this finished thing I made today! But I can tell, at the same time, that it is yielding as sense of freedom and gutsiness, a depth that I hadn’t been hitting when I wanted a quick, clean 1500 words and a check off my list.

So here's to the mess, the sprawling, ugly-beautiful, chicken-scratched, rabbit-trailed, creative wandering. To the discipline it takes to stay there. And to the goodness we find when we linger there.

As always, for me, writing is more about learning than teaching, more about discovering than reporting, more about showing up than showing off.

Here's to showing up.