Foiled Chicken and Potatoes

“Make sure you cut the potatoes thin. They’ll need to cook quickly.” Mom is directing us from out the back door as we cut the potatoes into slivers. Foil glints across the table and the other ingredients are laid out with it. 

There’s a warmth that edges in as she gives us directions every few minutes, the outside coming into our air conditioned world. My brother Brandon is on the bench, Zack is on one of the chairs on the opposite side of the table. Our table has become a paper mache of old Sunday comics and the Region sections of several newspapers. We each have a white handled paring knife in hand and it is a race to see who can cut their potatoes the fastest.

Randy, my stepdad, is downstairs in the garage and Hank Williams floats up with the sound of tools tinkering on old tractor parts. Summer time was in full sprawl and we had spent the morning weed eating and making the yard look nice. My little brothers operated the mowers while I got on hands and knees to weed my roses. Seldom did all of the members of the family come together to do anything in peace, but the times when we’d be cajoled into yard work were always good times.

After we finished trimming the yard and picking up the driveway, Mom and I would hang out the laundry. It has taken me up until adulthood to realize that my mother was born in the wrong era. She should have been born when she could hang billowy white clothes from a line in the south and a soldier in a neatly pressed uniform could have called on her. She should have been born in the roar of the twenties when she could have bobbed her hair and lived her life to the sound of jazz in a speakeasy.

We work together to clip the clothes up on the plastic green lines and I imagine that we’re wearing sundress and floppy straw hats instead of dirty tennis shoes and tank tops. It’s an automatic work that we can both do. We devise a strategy to hang out underwear behind the larger towels, because who really drives past here anyway and there’s nothing like sun warmed clothes.

The steaks would be defrosted by the time we had finished with the yard and after hanging the clothes our arms would have stopped shaking from the hour of weed whacking. Time to head in and make dinner.

There’s nothing like eating a meal that you’ve prepared. Not just throwing Hamburger Helper on the stove or making a box dinner. I mean taking the raw ingredients and shaping them into something delicious. I mean taking a bag of potatoes (the boil ‘em up, mash ‘em up, stick them in a stew kind) and frozen steaks and creating a meal that would give us a closure to a busy day.

“I think you guys have cut enough, Jesus, we’ll be eating potatoes for a week.” Mom flicks the ash of the end of her cigarette and drifts back into the kitchen with us. Outside the back door, where she operates the grill, our dog Blackie awaits scraps and another bowl of water—he’s thrown the original off of the porch in excitement.

Randy comes up the stairs and gets a cup of soda out of the fridge.

“The yard looks good, guys. Those roses look much nicer since you tidied them up, little one.” The compliment is natural and I smile as Mom gets the potatoes wrapped up in the foil. She chunks butter and onions along with salt and pepper into a foil wrap and takes them out on the porch with the steaks.

“Help your Momma get the table set.”

This part come naturally to us. Zack gets the plates, Brandon the silverware, and I survey the living room for cups that already have owners and seek out new cups for those without. Within the next twenty minutes dinner is on the table and we’re all enjoying the fruits of a day’s labor. Part of me is just glad to see that we could do things together like this. Most days are spent separate, Mom on the couch, Randy in the garage, and it felt like a rare treat for everyone to be together for something good.

The steaks are well done (I’ll find out a year later that I actually like my steak still bleeding) and the potatoes are crispy on the edges while soft toward the center of the circular slivers. They rest in a sauté of butter and spices, no onions for me, the picky eater. The foil is hot for a while, so I work on cutting my steak up while the heat and smell rises up from the potatoes.

Zack grabs the ketchup and Brandon gets more soda. My parents joke. No one is arguing over my eating habits or Brandon’s less than spectacular grades; no one is nagging on Zack for being unmotivated or slamming either parents with angry words. We’re just eating a meal. The sun is getting lower in the sky and we make plans to roast marshmallows after dinner—there’s just enough newspaper and dry wood to get a fire going in the burn barrel.

This is family. This is heaven.

***

“I’ve never made this like this before. I’m completely making this up as I go.” A couple months of living on our own has made me brave in the kitchen. I’ve improvised enough recipes that it comes naturally to me to meld together my mother’s potato recipe and one of the chicken recipes from work.

There’s not much natural light coming in to the kitchen and there’s no clothesline to hang our clothes out on, but there are several book cases and my writing desk in the living room. This is our home now. Our first home.

“Okay, baby. Is there anything I can do to help?” I shake my head no and put all of the weight of my body on the knife that I’m cutting potatoes with. It’s not a paring knife, but it will do. I offer the knife to Mike and he works at slivering the potatoes. I pull the foil out and preheat the oven. Our chicken is defrosting in the microwave.

Maroon 5 plays in the background and I sing to Mike as we put together our dinner. I throw the chopped potatoes on the foil with hunks of “tastes like butter” and season them. I add garlic in to flavor the chicken and cheese because I’m sure we could use more dairy than the dash we put in our coffee in the morning. One the chicken is diced, I mix it in with everything else in the foils and wrap them up around themselves. 

Fifty minutes in the oven and we have a hot dinner.

I don’t think about my mom in a hospital in Pittsburgh. I don’t think about her struggling to breathe as I rewrite her recipe for potatoes into a whole dinner wrapped up in silver foil.

We eat our dinner and laugh and it is just the two of us. We’re our new family.

***

Foiled Chicken and Potatoes

Servings: 2

Ingredients

4 thawed, boneless, skinless chicken breasts

2 potatoes

8 table spoons of butter (4 table spoons per foil)

1 cup cheddar cheese

Salt

Pepper

Garlic Powder

Two sheets of foil roughly 14” long

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Cut potatoes into ¼ inch slivers.

Dish out potatoes into roughly equal servings on the foil (don’t get too worried about the portioning. Eye balling it should be fine.).

Add four table spoons of butter (or butter substitute, it doesn’t matter) to the foils.

Add ½ cup of cheddar cheese to each foil.

Season potatoes with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

Dice chicken into cubes and divide evenly between foils.

Season foils again, lightly this time, with salt, pepper and garlic powder. (Aim mainly for the chicken.)

Pull the ends of the foils together and twist together until the contents are covered. Don’t worry if there are small parts where the foil doesn’t cover completely.

Place foils into a glass 13X9 pan.

Bake for 50 minutes.

Enjoy! Also, please check the chicken before consuming, I don’t want anyone to get sick!