Sometimes nothing beats a slow cooker dinner. Having your dinner bubbling away in the slow cooker while you get on with something else, smelling the delicious aromas as the hours and minutes tick by, and then feasting on melt in the mouth slow cooked meat takes some beating on a cold winter night.

This week I made slow cooked chicken, chorizo, and rice in a dish I found online that drew from the flavours of Spain but took a mere 20 minutes to prepare. Here’s how to create this comfort food dish from scratch…

The first thing to do is prepare some stock. I used a chicken stock cube dissolved in two pints of boiling water. Into the stock, put one teaspoon of turmeric. Stir well and allow to infuse on the side for at least 10 minutes.

Whilst the stock is infusing, heat some vegetable oil over a medium heat. Then, add four skinless, boneless chicken thigh fillets and brown for around 10 minutes. The recipe asked for the fillets to be diced but I like keeping thighs intact, so I didn’t chop them up.

Once the chicken has been browned, pop the thighs in the slow cooker but keep it turned off at this stage. Then, add a chopped onion, a sliced red pepper, 50g of chopped chorizo, and two chopped cloves of garlic to the oily pan. Fry until the onions are soft and the chorizo nice and crispy on the outside.

At this stage, add around 300g of long grain or basmati rice. Stir it around the pan so it doesn’t stick, add a handful of frozen peas, and then pour the stock in. I made an awful mess doing this and would in hindsight recommend the use of a ladle!

Stir everything together and season well with salt and pepper. I didn’t add too much salt because the chicken stock cube contains plenty!

Pour everything into the slow cooker, where the chicken has been waiting patiently! Turn the slow cooker on to low for two to three hours. One thing I did before leaving everything to simmer away was crumble another chicken stock cube over everything as I thought there was slightly too much fluid for just the one stock cube.

After two to three hours, all the fluid should have been absorbed and you’ll be left with a gorgeous rice dish that just needs some parsley added on top before serving.

Next time, I might add more chorizo and perhaps some prawns to add another dimension of flavour to this easy but lovely meal.