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This is one of my original dishes -- Chicken with tomato and mushroom tapenade. Easy to make, healthy, and very tasty. Serves 2.
I don't know if it's an Italian thing or a me thing, but I dislike being given exact measurements by recipes unless it's completely necessary, i.e., something won't rise when it should, or will explode when it shouldn't. As when doing a cover of someone else's song, the rule is "MIYO" -- make it your own! Food is meant to be prepared according to taste. With this recipe, I recommend using 1 1/2 to 2 times more mushroom than tomato. Otherwise, please feel free to use my measurements as guidelines and adjust as you like.
Heat a frying pan with canola oil, or your oil of choice. Just realize that olive oil is meant to be cooked with medium heat at the hottest -- else, a lot of its nutritional benefits get burned off. Cut the chicken breasts into cubes, about a half-inch to an inch thick. Cut tomato and mushrooms into smaller pieces, so they'll blend easier in a food processor. crush or chop the garlic cloves. Add tomato, mushroom, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, pepper, and salt into the food processor, and blend until you have an even brown paste, without any significant chunks. The garlic and pepper are what give a it a little bite, so scale back on these (or scale forward) as you like. Scrape the mixture out into a bowl, add the red wine, and stir with a spoon.
Cook the chicken cubes in the pan on medium-high heat, stirring/flipping them frequenty so that no side is raw. It's very easy to overcook the chicken so that it's too dry, so after six or seven minutes, take a out a cube and cut it in half. If there's any pink in the center, cook for another minute and then check another cube. When it's white all the way through, turn off the heat and let the chicken sit in the pan a minute longer. Then move it to the plate(s), and fold the brown tapenade on top. This goes well with 1/2 cup of wild rice for each serving and a side salad.
Fun fact:
Calling the sauce in this recipe a "tapenade" is a misnomer -- "tapenade" is actually defined as a puréed mixture of black olives, anchovies, olive oil, and capers. I just called it tapenade because it sounds cooler than "sauce". But now my shameless lie is exposed, and you can easily add black olives and/or anchovies and/or capers in the mix if you like. Don't add the pinch of salt if you do, unless you want it to taste really salty!
Fun Fact++:
Extra virgin olive oil is made by simply crushing olives and extracting the juice. It is the only cooking oil that is made without the use of chemicals and industrial refining. For olive oil to be considered extra virgin, it must have no taste defects. It needs to have a nice flavor of fresh olives, and achieve higher scores in lab tests for its chemical composition than other grades. Since olives are considered a fruit, extra virgin olive oil is essentially fruit juice without any additives.