Every recipe is a journey, passed from hand to hand, sometimes around the globe.  Here’s the story of this recipe: a young woman leaves Australia at the beginning of World War II, on a shop bound for England.  She finds herself in Istanbul, out of money, and hears about a position at the British Embassy in Moscow.  She goes to Moscow and is interviewed by the man she later marries, and thus begins her life as the wife of a diplomat, enlivened by exotic postings around the world.  She learns to make a fool-proof chicken dish that can be frozen, reheated, expanded at the last minute to accommodate a few extra guests, adapted to be elegant or rustic, and uses the recipe throughout their diplomatic career, before retiring and giving the recipe to her American daughter-in law.

Cue my friend Lisa, who studied cooking in Paris and also traveled around the world with her journalist husband and three children before settling in Washington.  Lisa started her own catering business in Moscow after the Soviet Union fell, which gives you some idea of her buoyant entrepreneurial spirit.  When her husband was transferred back to the US, she turned her hand to running the kitchen at a charter elementary school in Washington.  She uses no processed food at the school, she daily replenishes a fresh and very popular salad bar, and her mother’s Diplomat Chicken recipe is in the regular menu rotation.   Now when she says “chicken”, the kids don’t automatically think “nuggets”; they want the “mother-in-law whatever that is.”

Lisa has developed a full complement of tasty, healthy recipes for her school, and is happy to share them.  Just email her at lisad@ewstokes.org.

Serves: 6

Prep time: