enlightened chili’s cajun chicken pasta
This is one of those diary entry posts in which I reminisce into the abyss, so click here if you just want to make some filthy pasta inspired by good-bad times at a Chili’s.
It’s harder to do this with new episodes of Euphoria airing, but picture it anyway: it’s the summer of 2008, and you are eighteen. The boy you’ve carried your romantic teen torch for during all four years of high school is I guess in college now, home on break and cruising around in his dad’s Camry like he owns the suburbs. All day he sends you flirty flip-phone text messages that you try not to think about while you direct people to the latest George R. R. Martin installment on the Features table at the Barnes & Noble where you work at mostly because your dad believes it will build character.
You get off your shift and squirrel away to the bathrooms so you can change into your agreed-upon date outfit, selected for its irony: a plain white tank top and jean shorts, which he too has promised to wear. Your destination isn’t far—it’s the Chili’s at the other strip mall on the opposite side of the road—but he will pick you up and drive you there. Someone is having a Bookstore Blowout in the other bathroom stall while you try to fit your feet through your shorts holes without taking off your sandals. Once you’ve changed and stuffed your work clothes into your tote bag, you put on your sunglasses and wind through the labyrinth of bookshelves to the door, trying to avoid your boss—not because you’re worried he’ll think your outfit is unprofessional, but that he’ll be more interested in it than an adult male manager of a bookstore ought to be. You really don’t want to answer any questions.
Out in the parking lot you can smell dead grass, car exhaust, asphalt. It’s hotter than you thought it would be, but it’s August, so you really should’ve known.
When he pulls up, you’re dripping sweat, but you’ve been practicing how to Stay Cool. He has easy unbothered posture, the highest cheekbones you’ve ever seen on a human, and a firm grip on the steering wheel. You get in the car, prop a foot on the dash, and roll down the windows, even though the AC is on full blast. When he laughs—you’re only going across the street, he reminds you—you say there are windows-up people and windows-down people, and your worst nightmare is becoming a windows-up person one day. He actually agrees with you and rolls his down too while you turn up the music, hot air blasting through your hair as he guns it out of the parking lot. You hope it looks fun, not disheveled, but you don’t want to be someone who cares enough to check the mirror.
You get out of the car and see that it’s true: he did wear jorts, and both of you look fucking stupid. But there’s an intimacy in looking stupid together, a knowing smirk you share that ripples through a room and makes everyone else feel they missed out on something in which they were not cool enough to be included. The things people pity you for doing alone have an odd way of becoming magnetic and enviable when someone else is doing them with you. Plus, he looks at you in that outfit like you are important, and therefore so does everybody else.
You only ever order one thing at Chili’s, which is cajun chicken pasta with no tomatoes. You ask him if he wants to split it, because you’re not trying to be someone who eats an entire order of Chili’s cajun chicken pasta on a date and also because you’re too nervous to eat anything at all. He agrees, but he wants the tomatoes on his, so you get them on the side. Are you sure this is even a date? You suddenly feel very aware you are sitting across from an adult with a car and a job, and although you also have a car and a job, you are most definitely not an adult. You wish you had grabbed a packet of kid’s menu crayons so you would have something to do with your hands. Instead you pick at the threads on your jean-short hem.
Why did you wear jorts, anyway? I guess because you both thought it would be funny, but really because though it seems at first like you have more in common, it’s really just one thing and always has been: you’re both performers, and the only way either of you is comfortable is in costume. You think nobody else sees this about him, but you do. And so you’ve spent four years trying to be seen as an equal in that way, which is why you decide to put the tomatoes on your portion when they arrive, even though you won’t learn to like them for four or five more years. You talk shallow shit about the other couples, guess the length of their marriages, presume the kind of fights they have, count how many drinks a pair of moms orders and quietly throw shade at teens in capri pants. He asks you if you’re having a good time. You tell him that you think so, but even that answer is still just part of the act. Your jorts are riding up and you are fused to the booth now, but it’s fine, because if you unstick yourself then everything else will probably come unglued.
After dinner you walk in the parking lot and the sky is Midwest purple. He doesn’t take your hand, but his fingertips brush your leg enough times to know none of this is in your head. You finally ask if he knew he would end up here one day, knowing he knows what you mean, but he tells you he’s never had any idea where he would be before he got there. It sounds like the wisdom of his age gap in the moment, but what he’s really trying to tell you is this: even if I knew where I would end up, don’t count on meeting me there. The problem isn’t that he isn’t honest, but that you aren’t really listening.
You have leftovers under one arm as you walk, but once you see the car you throw them in the trash, worried that nobody who brings cajun chicken pasta in a folded cardboard carton into a car can ever be a sexy mature adult who will change a man’s mind about his commitment issues. You get in and he offers you a choice: do you want to go home, or do you want to go back to his house? It was framed as a question, but there was only ever one outcome on the table. He has one eyebrow raised. It’s taken you too long to get here to turn back now.
You think you’re old enough to Handle This, that you’ve seen enough of life and human nature to navigate what’s coming. It’s hard for other people, sure, but maybe that’s on them. At home in the kitchen, though, your mom (bless her) waits up, one light on over the stove. She doesn’t comment on your outfit or how late you are, and she is not going to tell your dad. You are an adult, she says, her work here is done, and all she can do is advise you. But she wants to know if you’ve really thought this through, that you can never undo what’s done once you let someone in the door. Something burns in the back of your throat, and it is not cajun spice. You say you know it probably won’t work out, but that you have to see it through anyway. You have to know. You promise you’ll be able to let it go if you need to, and she nods, because she has no choice but to trust you.
But you are wrong. You won’t be able to. And you will have to carry this for years.
Clearly this a Recipe With Baggage because it comes from where I come from: not Italy, not Italian America, but a small and unremarkable suburb filled with identical homes and babysitting jobs and chain restaurants and water parks and entirely-unspecial heartbreaks. I feel nostalgic warmth now when I go back there—driving past the one good Mexican place, hitting the left-turn arrow for the Barnes and Noble parking lot—but for years I couldn’t face these symbols without being reminded of my delusion, my foolishness. They were mocking holdovers from the last time in my life where I thought that no one would ever be smart enough to hurt me.
In the rearview mirror a jorts date to a Chili’s was a move on the chess board of a child, a way to seem cute and coy and smart after being seen as a kid for so long: a way that also exposed how little of the world I’d actually seen. But at 18, I hadn’t yet learned that you can play a perfect game and still not fucking win. Instead, I got a valuable lesson about romantic inequity, and how it usually starts by creating this game in one’s head in the first place. You can look into someone’s soul and see depth and a future, but someone looking back into yours might still just see a difficult teenager with whom they once took an art class.
The “enlightenment” in this recipe comes not from this revelation, but because it uses the same technique as my fettuccine Alfredo and spaghetti al limone recipes, eliminating flour and swapping a portion of the heavy cream for pasta water and emulsifying them together so that the sauce is thick and glossy but not pasty, greasy, or congealed. Bright pops of cherry tomato cut through cream sauce with an acid blade, and fresh herbs make the whole thing feel a lot less microwaved than the version I remember picking at in the booth while it slowly cooled into cement. Despite its source, this dish actually feels almost sophisticated if you squint. At the very least, it knows what it’s doing.
So no, it is maybe not that similar to the original, but will you really be able to tell? Being adults here, we fortunately have the right to practice revisionist history on our own memories, which is a good thing because the one of you standing in the parking lot of an Illinois strip mall trying to look skinny in your low-rise jorts and wincing as your sandals carve blisters in the space between your toes, not knowing your 18-year-old life as you knew it was about to burn to the ground, is more than enough baggage to carry without the extra burden of unnecessary heavy cream.
RECIPE
A lighter reinterpretation of the Chili’s cajun chicken pasta you might remember, minus most of the baggage you’d rather forget.
Effortful time: 20 minutes
Total time: 35 minutes
Serves 2
YOU nEED
8 oz. of boneless skinless chicken breast cutlets—you can make these by slicing one medium-sized chicken breast lengthwise, or have it done this way at your butcher counter
1 tbsp. + 1 tsp. cajun seasoning blend, divided
1 tbsp. + 1 tsp. extra virgin olive oil, divided
3 tbsp. butter
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup parmigiano reggiano
Salt and fresh pepper, to taste
~20 cherry tomatoes, quartered
6-8 oz penne pasta
2 cups reserved pasta water (you will not use all of it)
About 20 minced chives; reserve a few for topping!
MAKE IT
Get prepped. Boil a pot of salted water for pasta in a large saucepot; I used a 3-qt saucier. Mince 4 cloves of garlic, quarter about 20 cherry tomatoes, and chop maybe 20 chives to get about 2 tbsp. total. Set these aside for now—I like to use little cups to store my prepped ingredients so I can keep my board free. Lightly salt the tomatoes; this helps release some of their extra liquid.
Season the chicken. Coat the chicken in 1 tbsp. of extra-virgin olive oil, then season with a touch of salt, some fresh ground pepper, and the 1 tbsp. of cajun seasoning. The easiest way to do this is to combine all in a plastic bag and shake/massage it around for a few minutes.
Cook the chicken. In a skillet (preferably nonstick) over medium heat, add the additional 1 tsp. of olive oil and swirl around in the pan. Add the chicken and cook until each side is well-blackened, roughly 4-5 minutes per side depending on thickness, so that the chicken reaches an internal temp of 165°F. Remove to your prep board and cover with foil to keep warm.
Add the pasta to the boiling water as soon as you’ve flipped the chicken onto its second side. Cook to 2 minutes under whatever the package says; it will finish in the alfredo sauce. Using a slotted pasta scoop, transfer it all into a colander or bowl and reserve as much pasta water as you can just to give yourself plenty to work with—I like to do this by pouring the water into one of my trusty squeezable silicone measuring cups. Drain any unwanted water and lightly wipe out the pasta pot with a paper towel.
Build the sauce. Return that pot to medium-low heat, and melt 3 tbsp. of butter. Once melted, sauté the garlic, about 30-45 seconds until very fragrant but not toasted. Whisk in 1/2 cup of cream until fully combined. Bring to a simmer, stirring periodically, about 2-3 minutes or until the mixture is bubbly and thickened.
Thicken the sauce. To the cream mixture, add 1/2 cup of grated parm, about 3/4 of your minced chives, and the remaining 1 tsp. of cajun seasoning to the cream mixture. Whisk very well until velvety smooth and combined, a minute more.
Finish the pasta in the sauce. Return all the pasta to the pot and turn up the heat a bit to medium-low. Add some of your reserved pasta water and begin to toss the pasta with the sauce, adding more pasta water as needed to keep things loose n glossy, about 2 minutes or until the pasta is properly al dente. If it gets too thick or starts to look dry, add more pasta water. I usually find I need anywhere from 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of it depending on the day and the pasta shape.
Serve it up. Plate your pasta, then scatter the quartered cherry tomatoes on top. Slice your chicken breasts into thin strips, and plate these on top of the pasta. Sprinkle on your remaining chives. Welcome to Chili’s!