Boring as chicken

(alt. title: "in which the author solves two culinary problems with one recipe")

I never understood people complaining about blog sites losing their posts. It never made sense to me that software specifically made to post to blogs would make your posts vanish. It's like a bank not being able to handle money. Anyway, I had a post up about roast pork, but it got lost when I was mucking about with the template. I'll try to repost it some day.

If you've ever tried to change your eating habits to consume less fat, or to exclude red meat, or if the first thing you learned to cook on a stove was chicken, you're probably really bored by now. Even though slapping a piece of boneless, skinless chicken breast onto a pan is a shortcut to a healthier dinner, it also ends up being very boring quite soon. This is sad, because chicken is good.

Another culinary phenomenon I would call sad is the use to soy sauce by soy sauce neophites. I can't remember how many times I've had "chicken with soy sauce" that was just chicken with soy sauce. Adding soy sauce to a dish is not a stand-alone method to create flavor. Soy sauce needs help from other flavorful ingredients most of the time.

In light of these two problems, after careful and lengthy consideration, I came up with the following recipe, which as yet, is nameless.

(Nameless chicken with soy sauce recipe)
for one person
-1 boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into approx. 1.5cm cubes
-1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced vertically
-1/2 cup chopped/diced tomatoes
-3 tablespoons soy sauce
-small amount of hot sauce (optional, adjust to taste and spice tolerance)

Pour 1 tablespoon olive oil into a pan and put it over high heat. After 1 minute add the tomatoes to the pan. Let them cook while stirring occasionally. Put the cubed chicken in a small bowl, add the soy sauce (and optional hot sauce) and stir. When the tomatoes have lost their shape and most of their juice is released, add the mushrooms. Cook until mushrooms are almost done. Clear a space in the middle of the pan and dump the chicken (with the sauce) in there. The chicken, being in small pieces, should cook quickly. Turn all the pieces over once to cook the other side. When the chicken is cooked, stir everything together and cook for another 30 seconds, and you're done!