This year I cooked an alternative Christmas dinner for a group of friends, a Persian feast (you can read all about my Friendsmas by clicking here, as well as seeing the full menu)! It was inspired by a Persian Street Food stall that I visited at a Food Festival earlier this year. I knew that I wanted to cook some kind of shredded chicken dish, with lots of rich flavours, but I couldn’t find a recipe anywhere that seemed to be the sort of thing that I was looking for, so I bit the bullet and made one up! I was pleased with how this came out (just as well as I hadn’t had time to test it out before the dinner party!). It had a depth of flavour, a good level of spice, and the chicken just fell apart after slow-cooking it. We served this with cranberry and saffron pilaf, crushed carrots, and a baby leaf salad with fresh figs and walnuts.

There are a couple of more unusual ingredients here- I have become really interested in Middle-Eastern flavours in cooking recently to these things have now become staples in my cupboards but for this dinner I found that I couldn’t get what I wanted in either Aldi or Morrisons. We got our pomegranate molasses in Waitrose this time, but I have also seen them in Sainsburys, Tescos and Holland and Barratt before, and I think most places would stock ras el hanout, but we again got ours in Waitrose, and have found it in Sainsburys before.

I was asked if I would like to host a dinner party by Sonos, we already had some of their amazing wireless speakers and they sent us a Play:3 (click here to see) so that we could listen to all of the songs chosen by our guests for our Playlist Potluck! It was so fun having the input of all of our guests into the music choices for the night!