One Pot Chicken and Rice with Dill
in January it's so nice to eat chicken {soup} with rice
Apologies for my tardiness this week! I hope everyone had a restful end of year. I’ll be back on Friday with another (baked good!) recipe for you.
Whenever I cook any sort of chicken and rice (and there are so many ways!) I can’t help but think of the Maurice Sendak book and the classic Carole King musical rendition, Chicken Soup with Rice. Be careful though, once you listen to the song you’ll be humming it to yourself all day. This isn’t a soup recipe, but it is a cozy one pot dinner and the leftovers can easily be made into soup.
This is a one pot version of a meal we ate all of the time growing up. I’ve heard the story more than once of how when my parents met, my mom didn’t really know how to cook. And I just learned that she had never had lemons, onions, or garlic before she met my dad too. Wild! My dad famously taught her how to make a simple meal that they ate all of the time in their tiny apartment on Capitol Hill in Seattle. My mom famously went into labor with me when moving from that apartment to a bigger one in Greenwood. She’s also a great cook now btw.
They would roast a whole chicken coated in tons of lemon pepper and serve it with an improvised Baghali Polo - an Iranian rice dish that is usually made with lots of dill and fava beans. Fava beans were impossible to find, so a bag of frozen lima beans stood in for them, and I’m pretty sure they used dried dill too. I didn’t even know that it was “supposed” to be made with favas until I was paging through an Iranian cookbook years later.
I never have lemon pepper on hand so I sub in some lemon zest and juice and dill is easy enough to find fresh year round so I use it instead of dried, but we’re keeping the limas. Feel free to sub favas if you can find them I can usually buy them in the freezer section of my local grocery store, but I imagine they aren’t readily available anywhere.
Note: this isn’t a crispy chicken skin situation, but rather more of a soft, rendered skin situation so just know that going in. If you do use favas, make sure to remove the individual beans from their shells before adding them to the rice. Frozen favas sometimes come already peeled.
Pull any leftover chicken off of the bone and add it along with some rice and beans to broth and make it once, make it twice, make it chicken soup with rice.