Chorizo, chicken and sweet potato baked rice with paprika, mixed veggies and spinach leaves

During the week most of us need dinner suggestions that take little time and effort, but never do we want little flavour!

I think this dish meets the brief!

The recipe requires a little bit of sauteeing in the beginning, but the reward is delicious smokey, garlicy, caramelised flavours in the finished dish, and the oven really gives a lovely texture and flavour to the rice - not to mention it saving you any further effort for 50 minutes!

As with most of my recipes, take ownership and self belief, and make this dish your own.  If your family doesn't like the veggies I used, change them to suit your tastes.  Increase or decrease the garlic, use fresh tomatoes while they are cheap and in abundance in the summer months, add seafood if that's your thing (in the last 15 minutes of cooking), a drained tin of kidney beans instead of chicken, or even a garnish of freshly chopped coriander and a squeeze of lime before serving instead of the spinach leaves.  The important thing to maintain is the liquid to rice ratio and the rest you can play around with!

Chorizo, chicken and sweet potato baked rice with paprika, mixed veggies and spinach leaves.

 Ingredients

2 chorizo sausages, peeled (if required) and sliced in half lengthways, then chopped into half moons.
1/4 of 1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped roughly
a glug of olive oil
2 large garlic cloves, finely sliced
1 chicken breast, roughly cubed
1 tbs sweet paprika (more or less could be used depending on your tastes and hot paprika could also be used if you like it hot!)
1 400g tin chopped tomatoes
1-2 tbs vegetable stock concentrate stirred into 700ml hot water (made in the TMX.  A good quality chicken or veg stock would suffice)
Diced/chopped veggies - I used 2 carrots, approx 1/2 head broccoli and a zucchini.
2 c uncooked Basmati rice (brown or black rice could also be great but the cooking time may need to increase and increase stock/water by 100 ml)
A handful of washed baby spinach leaves

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius.
2. Place chorizo into a frypan with olive oil.  Bring up to medium heat until they start to sizzle.  Add sweet potato, garlic and chicken and saute until chorizo and chicken start to brown slightly.  Add paprika and stir through.
3. Pour chorizo mixture into an oven proof dish.  I used a pyrex large lasagna style dish.  Don't wash the frypan and lose all those yummy flavours!  Add the tomatoes, stock concentrate and water into the pan and bring to just below boil.
4. Meanwhile, scatter the veggies and rice over the chorizo mix.  Pour the stock mix evenly over the other ingredients and just mix through slightly, making sure the rice is submerged into the liquid.
5. Cover with foil tightly and place in the oven.  Cook for approximately 50 minutes to 1 hour, checking at 50 minutes to see if the rice is cooked.  When rice is soft the dish is ready.
6. Stir through spinach leaves and serve immediately.
7. This quantity would probably serve 6 adults, depending on how hungry they are!

Enjoy!