Nothing spells festivity like adding dried fruits or nuts to your food. Want to make leftover rice look fancy? Garnish the rice with fried raisins and cashews and turn it into a pulao. Birthday in the house? Jazz up that Ravo with fried charoli, almonds and cashews. Or, my all time favourite is to fancy up the super easy to make Sali Chicken with some dried jardaloo (apricots) to add a fancy touch of sweetness to the dish.

While researching chicken recipes a while ago, I came across a recipe that cooks the chicken in apple and orange juice. By doing so, it makes the chicken incredibly moist while also making it deliciously sticky. This felt like a great idea that I couldn’t wait to try out – all I needed was the perfect occasion.

That occasion came about in December when I wanted to make Bawa Groom something special for Christmas.

Having a business means his weekends are always booked and festivals and birthdays are inevitably celebrated on the Monday following the special day. This year I didn’t want to wait until a Monday to celebrate and decided that a late night Christmas treat was in order.

Ofcourse, since it was a special occasion simply cooking the chicken in juice wouldn’t suffice and so I decided to add in some dried fruits to jazz it up. Just my luck of course that the pantry had nothing left (I used up all my fruits and nuts for the Christmas pud) except for a handful of leftover apricots and some cherries from a cherry cake experiment gone wrong. Magic happened when I threw these into the pan with my chicken and the result was this delicious Apricot & Cherry Chicken.

Trust me, once you make it you won’t want to wait for a special occasion to make it again!