Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 8, 2019

This is the perfect dinner to make when you want to cook, but don’t actually feel like cooking.

It fills your house with hearty, delicious aromas but doesn’t require much in the way of stirring, sautéing or much any “ing”ing, really. It’s more of a cut, slop and smoosh kind of dish. And you don’t even cut that much, come to think of it.

It’s a rip off of a tray bake, but when I first made it I felt like some kind of freeballing cook, boldly chucking things together led only by my chef instincts. It almost certainly already exists, but I felt like I was breaking real ground at the time. I was in a flurry of inspiration, thanks to my gourmet muses: tinned tomatoes and microwavable rice.

I feel this dish would pair well with a cheap red wine and Ratatouille (the Disney movie about the French rat who loves to cook).

Step one: Rip off a piece of baking paper, violently scrunching it in your hand to squeeze out your rage. Not only does this make you less likely to write angry, rambling Facebook statuses taking aim at people you’ve never met, it will also help the paper to better sit in the baking dish when you unfurl it. Shove this paper into the corners of a square baking dish and exhale, letting go of your hate.

Step 2: Preheat an oven to 210 degrees. I mean, you should have done this first, but you were busy cleansing your soul. If your oven has a grill function, engage that bad boy. We want crispness here, people.

Step 3: Slice a chicken breast in half lengthways, so it’s about two or three centimetres thick. Think schnitty.

Step 4: Season this raw slab of flesh with a few good pinches of salt, rubbing the grains into both sides.

Step 5: Remember that thing you read about salting raw meat ahead of time, and regret spending your morning buying out-of-print DVDs and pony ceramics from an op shop instead of caressing raw chicken. Set chookie aside.

Step 6: Open a packet of microwavable rice – I get something with the words “wild” and “medley” in the name, because it makes me feel fancy – and tip into the paper-lined tin.

Step 7: Roughly chunk a medium-sized onion. I used “chunk” as a verb here, because it’s sounds slightly better than “slice and dice it, but fatly”. Just cut it into medium, irregular pieces for a rustic vibe.

Step 8: Crush about three or four cloves of garlic, smooshing with the flat side of a knife under most of your weight (plus the added weight of your existential dread, that can only help at this point). This makes it easier to pick the skin off and saves you from having to chop it like a chum.

Step 9: Place the garlic and onion atop the rice.

Step 10: Tear up two large handfuls of fresh spinach with your hands and scatter on top of the rice.

Step 11: Open up a can of crushed tomatoes, dumping it into the baking tin and marvelling at how it mirrors the a rapid evacuation of one’s stomach. Slop the chunky liquid so it covers the entire surface of the rice.

Step 12: Glide out to your slowly-dying-but-not-dead-yet collection of pot plants, serenely plucking a dozen or so basil leaves from your garden. Ignore the silent cries of the plants you’ve failed, telling yourself that you’re an earthen goddess. You could also buy fresh basil from the shop or ask a neighbour skilled in the art of not killing stuff if you can pillage in exchange for whatever you can scrounge around that might be worthy of a basil trade – perhaps they’ll take pity on you and insist you take the leaves for free.

Step 13: Rinse and tear the basil, scattering it over the tomato and squelching it into the mix.

Step 14: Delicately lay the chicken atop layers of goodness, because slapping them in there would give you serious splashback which would be annoying to wipe up.

Step 15: Crumble over a few cubes of goats cheese, preferably the super wanky kind that comes drowned in olive oil with thyme and pepper. I wouldn’t judge you for using the whole jar, but do keep the oil for drizzling on assorted hot breakfast items to keep that luxe feeling going.

Step 16: Drizzle with oil of some kind – either the goat’s cheese oil or that garlic olive oil you bought on a whim when it was on special and only used once like three months ago.

Step 17: Chuck into the oven for about half an hour, until the chicken has browned to the point that you’re certain it won’t give you violent diarrhoea.

Step 18: Using a spatula, dig under one of the chicken pieces and dump the claggy mix on your plate.

Step 19: Keep returning to dish to pick at the rice until you’re so full you can only communicate via groans.