I cooked a (belated) birthday meal for my mum this weekend. She requested something simple with chicken that wouldn’t leave me in the kitchen all day, and left pudding up to me.

For the chicken I decided to do with a Spanish chicken with chorizo, potatoes & chickpeas from BBC Good Food Magazine (October 2014 p84). As I was cooking for more than four I went with multiple chicken thighs rather than try and use  larger whole chicken, and bulked up the rest of the recipe in various ways, including adding some bell peppers to the mix.

I served it with the recipe’s recommended sides: Greek yogurt dip, and bread for mopping up, specifically the pumpkin sourdough loaf I made the night before.

This was delicious. So good that Soph is considering streamlining it and making it a weeknight staple meal – result!

For pudding I went with a seasonal pumpkin pie from Cook’s Illustrated. Mum made and blind baked the crust in advance, so I just made the filling, and a rather boozy whipped cream thanks to a confusion of the exact volume of ‘a glug’…

Despite the dark colour (I assume from the dark brown sugar I used) it turned out great. It was properly set and tasted lovely and smooth and sweet (well… when you didn’t have any of the cream… then you just tasted booze :).