Chicken and Chorizo Casserole

Chicken and Chorizo Casserole is a spicy, warming chicken supper dish based on the Basic Chicken Casserole recipe.

Chicken and Chorizo Casserole

Investment Cooking

Have you heard about Investment Cooking? It's when you invest a bit of time, maybe at the weekend, making a large batch of a basic dish that can be jazzed up on subsequent days when you have less time. Basic recipes, such as Basic Chicken Casserole, are simple dishes, cooked in bulk. The basic recipe is the basis and different additional ingredients give a variety of different meals.

Why bother with Investment Cooking?

We all come home from work tired and needing to eat. If you want to feed your family home-cooked food, so that you know what's in it and you can give everyone a good, balanced diet, you have to cook dinner yourself.

One solution is to use recipes that don't take long to prepare and cook, and a lot of the recipes that I use fall into this category. But there is only so much that you can do in an hour after work, so another solution is Investment Cooking. You will find the recipe for Basic Chicken Casserole here.

How do you turn a Basic Chicken Casserole into Chicken and Chorizo Casserole?

It takes about 15 minutes to prepare and add the extras, then you leave the casserole to cook for half an hour.

• Chorizo - You need cooking chorizo, i.e. the sort that needs cooking before eating. A pack of small tapas chorizo sausages is ideal (like these from Waitrose) and they only need snipping apart before cooking. Otherwise buy a piece and cut it up.
• A tin of tomatoes - Chopped tomatoes are easiest, but do buy a decent brand or you get left with a lot of watery liquid. My current favourites are Tarantella Chopped Tomatoes, which I buy in bulk from Amazon.
• Herbs - Mixed herbs (I mix my own) and some paprika. Not too much paprika because the chorizo has some in. I like to use smoked sweet paprika (La Chinata is my favourite), but if you prefer more heat, they do a hot version
• Red pepper - Actually, the colour doesn't matter, except that everything else in the casserole is red, so I think it looks better. Along with the tomatoes (and onions from the basic casserole), it means that there is a bit of veg in here.

What else can you make with Basic Chicken Casserole?

So put aside a weekend afternoon, buy chicken, onions and stock (or make your own) and make a batch of Basic Chicken Casserole. Then you have all these other supper dishes to choose from when you want to eat.

Helpful Tools

• Splash screen – for a frying pan. I’ve managed to cook for decades without one, but it was a revelation. This really does reduce the amount of oil splatter and the screen goes in the dishwasher.

Recipe