Warming Winter Dinner

My brother in law and his girlfriend came to stay on Sunday night. It’s great to have a valid opportunity to make pudding! I hadn’t really thought about nibbles, so quickly made a dip using half a bottle of marinated artichoke hearts, cannellini beans, lemon juice, parmesan and basil leaves. We had that with some little crispbread crackers and wine while I got on with making dinner.

For the main I roasted a beautiful free range chicken. I stuffed it with a mixture of bulghur wheat, olives, walnuts and sage. We had it with a simple rice pilaf flavoured with white wine and bay, a spinach and red pepper salad and wee mini pumpkins which I cut in half and roasted with a mix of maple syrup, walnuts and pine nuts in the cavity (adapted from a recipe in the Autumn Donna Hay magazine). I love pumpkin and the maple syrup and nuts were the perfect accompaniment.

Pudding was these little apricot and ginger caramel puddings. The recipe is from Taste magazine and you can find it here. The puddings are almost like little steamed puddings – there is a fudgy caramel sauce with dried apricots and crystallised ginger in the bottom (or on top once turned out) and then a caramel flavoured sponge. I made 8 little puddings from the recipe and have frozen half of them. We had them whipped cream. It’s not often that I find something a bit sweet, but I did find the caramel in the bottom very sweet and a bit sugary. I don’t think that I stirred the caramel enough to help the sugar properly dissolve, so if you are going to make them, make sure the sugar is dissolved before spooning your caramel into your basins.

This was a great menu for a cold winter’s night.