mushroom chicken

I pondered calling this dish "The Really Incredible Shrinking Meal" but I thought it was too long, so Mushroom Chicken it is. There are few ways you can make a crappy tasting meal if you use tasty ingredients. A roomie of mine once told me that if you add mushrooms to something then you're cheating because you can make any meal taste good with mushrooms. I understood, but I didn't care. I think the point of making food is to eat it - not to challenge the food and make it submit to your spice war. :)

That being said, this recipe is so full of mushrooms that it can't help but taste good.

Ingredients:

4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts

3 portobello mushrooms

2 fistfuls of chopped regular mushrooms

1 small bag of dried porcini mushrooms

1 bag of prewashed spinach

3 cloves of garlic

1 tsp. of butter

1 tsp. of virgin olive oil

2 tsps. of pepper

If you really want to cheat, douse everything in cheese after you're done because that generally helps a failed meal. Drew advises ketchup on anything.

Soak the dried porcini mushrooms in water to rehydrate them. Sauté the onion and minced garlic cloves with the butter and olive oil. Add the portobello mushrooms (cut in various sizes) because they take the longest to shrink. Cook until reasonably shrunk and then add the regular mushrooms and the porcini rehydrated pieces. Stir and watch all the shrinking.

Cut up the chicken into bits and put them into the frying pan/wok with the mushrooms, cover and let hang out for 10 minutes or so.

Now you want to carefully fold in the spinach. It too will shrink beyond belief, but getting it in there might seem a little difficult and messy if you do it too fast.

Add all the spices, and taste the broth. If it tastes strange to you, add different and/or more spices. Like any food this is a matter of taste. I always taste things part way through unless they contain things that will give me food poisoning like chicken... at which point I wait until the chicken is cooked.

Things should be reasonably shrunken, and the chicken should be cooked all the way through. Like I mentioned before, this is bound to taste good unless you dropped it all on the floor or sneezed in it repeatedly and even then, it may still survive.