White Chilli

I’m sure I’ve often written about my 2 week schedule for proteins at dinner.  (Beans, poultry, fish, beans, cheese, fish, meat, vegetarian, fish, eggs, beans, combination, fish, vegetarian)  Sounds rather insane, I know, but it for me it makes menu planning much simpler and helps ensure we eat reasonably healthily.  The woman who sits next to me at the sewing group insists that she can’t put anything from the freezer out to defrost for her dinner in the evening because she doesn’t know exactly what she will want and she can’t eat unless it is just what she wants at that moment.  You needn’t worry that she’ll starve; I’ve been watching her steadily expand over the past two years.  Anyhow, we eat what’s on the schedule.

I’ve been working on emptying the ‘protein’ drawer of the freezer which was stuff to the gills (so to speak) when I started.  We're now down to a couple of chicken breasts, the last bit of grated cheese, some turkey broth, ancient cabbage rolls, plain yoghurt, lamb's liver and something unidentified.  I used allrecipes for cheese and chicken and it came up with something called ‘white chilli’.  I liked the idea, but didn’t get around to printing the actual recipe, so that evening I ended up free-wheeling, which I always find rather fun.  This is how it ended up (plus what I would do differently).  Bill declared it his favourite new dish:

Saute a diced onion in 1-2 TBS oil, add a diced chicken breast and brown.  Open a tin of white beans, rinse off the sauce and add.  Put in 1 cup of uncooked rice and 2 cups of chicken broth.  Split open and de-seed 2-3 small chili peppers, mince and add (or omit if you don’t like spicy food).  Bring to the boil and simmer for 20-30 minutes.  When the rice is cooked, sprinkle grated cheese over the top and let it melt (even low-fat cheese tasted pretty good this way, though I normally don’t buy it).  Serve with steamed veg (eg broccoli and carrots) on the side; alternatively, add 2 cups of any veg to the chicken and rice (which makes this a variation of my usual rice dish).