The Grandma Files: Cheesy Green Chile Chicken Pasta

Oh, boy! This recipe pull is way less a fleshed out recipe than it is cook's notes for a dish my Grandma wrote. This will be a great opportunity to use our brains to decipher what recipe my Grandma has for us!

I like to start with reading the entire 'recipe' before anything else, so I can have some idea of what the dish is supposed to be. By the looks of it, (if my title didn't give it away) this is a pasta dish. Creamy, cheesy, chicken and green chile pasta, to be exact.

Let's break my Grandma's recipe down into easy parts. First up the ingredient list.

Very little is given to us in how to prepare the ingredients, so let's put on our thinking caps and ask ourselves a few questions.

Now, let's answer our questions using what we already know about cooking and eating. Both will inform our answers. Even if you don't know a lot about cooking, you do know how to eat and how you like things.

The onion and celery:

The cook's answer: Chopping the onion and celery into medium sized pieces should work. They will blend into the sauce and be easy to eat. A yellow or while onion is the best choice for a nice onion flavor without being too pungent or sweet.

The eater's answer: I really like onions when they're in little strips instead of dice. I also love red onions when they're cooked. I don't like celery a lot, but don't mind it cooked with other flavors.

I think you get where I'm coming from using this example. Cooking is understanding how to cook, but it's also about making things that you and your family will enjoy. So when you're given an open ended recipe like this one, think about how you enjoy other similar dishes, and let that inform your choices.

The chicken:

We aren't given a cut of chicken, only that we need a pound of it. The two cuts of chicken that come to my mind are thigh and breast. Since we are cooking the chicken in liquid, I would choose breast meat, boneless and skinless for ease of cooking. We aren't told if we need to cut the chicken up before we cook it, so you'll have to decide what you want to do here. If you like little chunks of chicken, dice up the breast before you cook it. If you like shredded chicken, leave the breasts whole and break them up with a fork or spoon after they cook. My cook's instinct is to shred it.

The reason I am choosing breast over thigh? Fat content. Chicken thigh is delicious, hello crispy skin! But for this recipe, we are poaching/boiling the meat. The fatty bits will not fully render out, and that texture can be off-putting. If it is something that doesn't bother you and your family, by all means use the thigh, boneless and skinless. I think you'll get a richer chicken flavor.

The green chile:

This one is easy. Buy roasted and chopped green chile, frozen or canned. You can of course get fresh green chilies and roast them yourself, it really isn't all that difficult. But for the sake of ease, canned or frozen is perfectly acceptable.

This is the most confusing part of the recipe. What the heck is a 1/2 pan of water?

Let's stop for a minute and put on our thinking caps. (I LOVE yours, by the way!) We are not only cooking our chicken with the onions and celery in water, we are going to add the pasta in as well. So this means we need a pan or pot large enough to accommodate a pound of spaghetti. But we aren't going to add the amount of water we would normally use to cook a pound of spaghetti. The intent here is that the pasta will soak up the water that's in the pan. In my mind, I am picturing a large deep sided pan (12 inch base with at least 4 inches of depth), or maybe a large dutch oven (8 to 12 quart). Something that can hold a decent amount of liquid. THINK: those one pan pasta meals.

So fill the pan half-way with water and boil your chicken, onions, and celery. Once the 10 minutes is up, top off the water to bring it back up to 1/2 full. This is also the perfect time to break up or shred those chicken breasts if you didn't cut them beforehand. Allow it to come back to a boil and add your pasta. You may want to baby-sit it and add a little water if it's running out before the pasta is cooked.

I think we are given the 15 minutes of cook time so that the pasta will soak up the water without needing to be drained. But if you find you have a lot of water after your pasta is done, you'll need to drain it and then put everything back in the same pan. If there's just a little water left, I would leave it in the pan and proceed with the next steps.

Before we add anything else, turn the heat down to low once the pasta is cooked. Otherwise we will end up with a burnt mess.

Add one can cream of mushroom soup. Easy enough! No water or milk, just the soup. This stuff is going to be thick!

Add cubed velveeta and stir until melted. Again, easy enough.

Turn off heat and serve.

We've become so used to a 'standardized' recipe format, giving us every single step in detail, that seeing a 'short-hand' version like this can feel intimidating. Don't let it! You have a beautiful brain and an adorable thinking cap! Take what you know about cooking and what you know about eating, and break things down into steps. You've probably done everything required before, or at least something very similar. You can (and should!) think for yourself and problem solve. And if you make a mistake? Good! Try again, get better, fail differently. That is how things work.

I'm already very proud of you! Thanks for being here!