Simple comforts and everyday cooking: Chicken with Black Beans and Rice

Chicken thighs, black beans, rice, tomatoes with green chilies, and cilantro make a hearty, slightly spicy dish that’s even better the second day. Recipe below.

WE’RE ALL LOOKING FOR EXTRA LITTLE BITS OF COMFORT these days and taking them wherever we find them. Not big or extravagant things—more often than not, just things that feel comfortably normal. This week, we talk about a few comforts we’re finding, including in the kitchen.

We are museum goers. We plan vacations around museums and exhibits. In fact, our last weekend trip before everything shut down last year was to St. Louis, to see two shows at the St. Louis Art Museum. Finally, several weeks ago, we returned to the Art Institute here in Chicago. Fully vaccinated and double masked, Marion, our friend Kevin and I showed up when they opened on a Sunday morning. It was glorious. Revisiting old favorites and discovering exciting new-to-us works, wandering through gallery after gallery. Being reminded by all that was around us that, as I said Kevin, Chicago is a big effing deal (or words to that effect).

Libraries are back on our to-do list too, specifically the Harold Washington Library downtown. We’ve even discovered a secret, cheap parking space that’s often open—again, taking little comforts where you find them. When everything was on lockdown, we made do with downloadable books. Now we are browsing shelves, reserving books on the library site and picking them up. You know, normal (or new normal, giving others a wide berth, masked or not, spraying disinfectant on our hands, being careful).

A recent library find Marion made is A Month in Siena, by Hisham Matar. He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Return, his memoir about returning to Libya, where he grew up, to try to learn what had happened to his father. Matar’s father had been living in exile in Cairo and was kidnapped and taken back to Libya and “made to vanish.”

Writing The Return took Matar three years. A Month in Siena describes what he did as a way to recover, to emerge “blinking into the light.” Sienese painting, specifically that produced in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has long fascinated him. So he devoted a month to living in Siena and visiting works of art, spending hours and even days just looking at a particular piece. It is not an art history book, although he imparts a good deal of information about the work. Rather, it is thoughtful contemplation about what he sees, with his wife or alone, and what he feels. Reading it is wonderfully comforting. And although it’s a library find, we’ve ordered it at our local bookstore; we know we will both want to read it again.

So, about the kitchen? For most of us, cooking has been something we’re doing more of over the past year and change. Some of it, of course, has been a necessary chore, getting something on the table to feed ourselves and others. Some has been taking on an elaborate project to fill the time—I’m looking at you, sourdough starter. Some has been simpler adventures, exploring a new cuisine or technique—we’ve done our share of this and enjoyed it.

But at its core, whatever kind of cooking we’re doing, there is comfort there. Feeding people, caring for ourselves and others. This week’s dish, Chicken with Black Beans and Rice, is everyday cooking. Taking something we cook a lot, chicken thighs, and looking for a new way to cook them, without getting all cheffy. Looking at a couple of recipes and thinking, yeah, but what if I…

It’s one-pan simple and weeknight quick. And one of the things that makes it a one-pan dish also plays a nice flavor trick. Usually, we cook rice separately and serve whatever dish we make over it. Here, the rice is sautéed along with the onion and garlic, and it cooks in the pan in broth and spicy tomato juices, absorbing flavors and helping thicken the sauce with its starch.

The first night, it was dinner. A healthy, hearty meal on the table—you know, comforting. The leftovers a couple of nights later were even better; the flavors had melded more and perked up. I’m thinking next time, we may treat this as a make ahead dish, planning it to have on a too-busy night when we’re going to need some delicious comfort.

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Chicken with Black Beans and Rice

This hearty, slightly spicy one-pan dish is even better the second day.

Course Main Course, Poultry

Servings 4

Ingredients

• 4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, about 1/2-pound each
• salt and freshly ground pepper
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 cup uncooked white rice
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 cups chicken broth, homemade (or reduced-sodium, if store-bought)
• 1 10- ounce can diced tomatoes with green chilies (we like Ro-Tel Original)
• 1 15- ounce can black beans, drained and rinsed
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro (optional—see Kitchen Notes)
• 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Instructions

• Trim excess fat from chicken thighs and season them generously with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a large, lidded skillet over medium-high flame. Add chicken skin side down and sauté until golden brown, about 5 minutes. Turn chicken, reduce heat to medium and cook for about 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate (they won’t be cooked through—that’s okay, they’re going back in the pan later).
• Add onion to pan and cook, stirring frequently, until it just starts to soften, about 3 minutes. Don’t let it brown—reduce heat if needed. Add rice to pan and cook, stirring frequently, for another 3 minutes. Clear a space in the middle of the pan and add garlic. Cook, stirring constantly, for about 45 seconds.
• Add broth and tomatoes to pan and stir to combine. Nestle chicken thighs into the rice. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook, covered, for about 20 minutes.
• Remove chicken to a plate and add beans, cilantro and lime juice to pan, stirring to combine. If the rice has absorbed too much liquid, stir in a little water. Taste and adjust seasonings with salt and pepper.
• Return chicken to pan and cover. Cook until everything is warmed through, about 5 minutes.
• To serve, spoon rice and beans mixture onto plates and top with a chicken thigh.

Kitchen Notes

Cilantro, love it or hate it. Apparently, dislike of cilantro is a genetic thing. If you don’t like it, leave it out. If you do like it, it does add a nice, subtle note to the dish.

Liz's Crockery Corner. This plate is slightly a mystery because it's unmarked, but we're comfortable in saying that it was made in America, and probably in New York State, in the first half of the 20th century. The original inspiration for this pattern, white with heavier green bands, came from plates made by the Buffalo Pottery company, founded in 1901 in Buffalo, New York, by J.D. Larkin, a soap manufacturer who was one of the pioneers of mail-order sales and marketing gimmicks—gifts with purchase. Each Larkin product—from Boraxine soap powder to Jet harness soap—came with a certificate redeemable for one piece of premium china. In the 1920s, the company began shifting its production to commercial-grade ware. Plates like this one were used on trains and in coffee shops, hotels and diners all over the country for decades. A lot of this classic stuff is still out there, still in use, because it was made to last—it's sturdy and it's heavy. Variations on this pattern—white with dark green bands—were made by several American potteries in the 20th century—Buffalo, Homer Laughlin and Syracuse are the ones you will often find, in a dazzling array of shapes and sizes—bowls, coffee cups, platters, mugs, soup plates—we even have a little baked potato dish we are especially fond of. BTW, Buffalo Pottery still exists, as a subsidiary of Oneida, and it still manufactures commercial-grade china.