Arroz Verde con Pollo

The week before the anniversary and the week the country is exhaling slightly—vaccines becoming available, the news less relentless in its badness, the quality of the air changing from emergency to something more like the difficult-but-manageable. I got my first vaccine dose on Tuesday at a site in Birmingham. I sat in the chair and held out my arm and the nurse said, "There you go," and I said, "Thank you," and I drove home and I cooked, because cooking is how I mark things, and I made a big pot of something warm and good—a chicken stew with biscuit dumplings—and I sat at the table and ate it and thought: we made it this far. The pandemic and the grief and the year and the two losses and the outside table and the bag meals and the counseling and the Tuesday dinners and all of it. We made it this far. March third is coming and I am making it to March third. That is not nothing.

Shanice has been coming to the Saturday cooking class. She and CJ come down on Saturday mornings about twice a month now, she stays for class and he sits at the kitchen table with Calvin and they watch football or talk theology—two men with nothing in common except Loretta Simms and the Simms family and somehow those two things are sufficient for an entire Saturday morning of comfortable companionship. Shanice is a good student. She is precise in the way schoolteachers are precise—she wants to understand the why before she does the what—and I accommodate this because the why is important and because Shanice is going to be cooking for this family for the next fifty years and she deserves to understand what she's doing and why. She made smothered chicken last Saturday with only minor guidance. The gravy was correct. I said so. She wrote it in her phone. Good. Write it down, baby. Then put it in your hands.

The chicken stew I made that Tuesday was my own version of something I’ve been making for thirty years, built on the same instinct I come back to whenever I need to mark a moment with something real: a whole pot, warm from the inside out, smelling like the kitchen is doing its job. This Arroz Verde con Pollo is the recipe that sits closest to that spirit — one pot, one bird, rice that drinks up every bit of the broth, herbs that make the whole kitchen green and alive. It’s the kind of dish I’d make for Shanice on a Saturday and explain every step of, because a recipe like this deserves to be understood before it goes into your hands.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 50 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

2 1/2 lbs bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs and drumsticks
1 1/2 cups long-grain white rice
2 1/2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems, packed
1/2 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
1 poblano pepper, stemmed, seeded, and roughly chopped
1 jalapeño, stemmed, seeded, and roughly chopped
1/2 medium white onion, roughly chopped
4 garlic cloves, smashed
1 cup frozen peas, thawed
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
Juice of 1 lime
Lime wedges, for serving

Instructions

Make the green sauce. Combine the cilantro, parsley, poblano, jalapeño, onion, garlic, and 1/2 cup of the chicken broth in a blender. Blend on high until completely smooth, about 1 minute. Set aside.
Season and sear the chicken. Pat the chicken pieces dry with paper towels and season all over with salt, pepper, and cumin. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the chicken skin-side down and sear without moving for 5–6 minutes until the skin is deep golden brown. Flip and sear the other side for 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate.
Toast the rice. Pour off all but about 1 tablespoon of fat from the pot. Add the dry rice and stir over medium heat for 2 minutes, until the grains turn slightly opaque and smell nutty. This step matters — it keeps the rice from going mushy later.
Build the pot. Pour the green herb sauce into the rice and stir to coat. Add the remaining 2 cups of chicken broth and the lime juice. Stir once to combine and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
Nestle and simmer. Return the seared chicken pieces to the pot, skin-side up, pressing them gently into the rice mixture. Reduce heat to low, cover tightly, and cook for 25 minutes without lifting the lid.
Check and finish. After 25 minutes, check that the rice is tender and the chicken is cooked through (internal temperature of 165°F). Scatter the thawed peas over the top, replace the lid, and let sit off the heat for 5 minutes to warm the peas through.
Serve. Bring the pot to the table as-is. Serve with lime wedges on the side and extra cilantro if you like.

Nutrition (per serving)

Arroz Verde con Pollo — The Pot I Made the Day the World Exhaled