Evening Edge

Which came first? Well, for the purposes of today's recipe, neither. The chicken and the egg arrive at the party together and work in unison to create some serious deliciousness.

Before I tell you about this dish, let me explain how it came to be. I was driving home one evening after working too late and trying to picture what I had in the kitchen that could be slammed into dinner.

John Kessler writes food features and a column about food and more for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution E-mail John Kessler Recent Kessler columns Try cobia fillet for affordable grilled fish dinner  Making frozen yogurt at home pays off in tasty benefits  Small peppers sometimes pack a wallop         More John Kessler Related: AJC Food & Drink Evening Edge Atlanta Restaurant reviews and search Recipes from Atlanta restaurants Search AJC recipes

Unlike normal people who, say, visualize shrink-wrapped boneless pork chops in their tidy refrigerators and jars of applesauce in their pantries, I let my mind wander over a messy landscape of semi-edible items on the countertop. There were some white onions I had bought for a recipe I never made. There was a bag of rice I had never put away. I could make ... ricey onions! The kids would love it. Or not.

Open the fridge, my mind commanded. There were eggs. I saw a carrot or three. I think a spring onion or something green lurked in a low drawer.

I saw a tub of scarily old spaghetti sauce. Then I spied some leftover poached chicken. It was only three days old and, most likely, fine. Or at least disguisable.

Chicken and eggs. Seems like they should go together.

And then I remembered one of the great comfort foods of all time. This Japanese dish is called Oyako Donburi, and the name literally means "parent and child in a lidded bowl."

Our home is a little like a lidded bowl, and the kids were bouncing around noisily inside of it, evidently hungry and eager to see what I planned to make. I put on a pot of rice and got busy assembling the topping. I pulled out the poached chicken, and it tasted fine.

Nothing is easier than Oyako Donburi. You pour some chicken broth in a large skillet and season it with soy sauce and mirin (sweet cooking sake) if you have it, brown sugar if you don't. You add sliced onions and green onions and cover the pot to let them simmer until they wilt.

Next you add some cooked or sliced raw chicken and cover the skillet again until the chicken evinces yumminess.

Now here comes the brilliant part. You pour beaten eggs over the whole thing, cover the pot again, and let the eggs just set. By this point, your rice is cooked. You mound it into bowls and divide the kind-of-set/kind-of-saucy topping over the top. If you need a little kick, the traditional seasoning to sprinkle on Oyako Donburi is called shichimi togarashi — a "seven flavors" chili powder with orange peel and sesame seed in it. (Tabasco works, too.)

Since we didn't have the lidded earthenware bowls traditionally used for this dish, we made do with cereal bowls.

No matter, for all the parents and children present it was a felicitous marriage of ingredients

The recipe: Oyako Donburi

What's your favorite improvised dinner dish? What do you make from ingredients on hand?