When my boyfriend and I first got together, I tried to impress him with my culinary skills and offered to cook him my signature chicken and leek pie. Being the ultimate gent, he offered to pay for the ingredients, which he maintains to this day cost him £60. They obviously didn’t, but there’s no changing the mind of this handsome man.

We’re both feeling a bit under the weather at the moment, so I thought I’d cheer us both up with a cheeky reference to our early days. So whilst my boyfriend was out at hockey training, I busted out the perfect blend of idiot and housewife, and made him a £60 pie.

Sainsburys didn’t have any leeks because they’re out of season, so I changed my usual (erratic) recipe and used what I had to hand:

400g chicken breast steaks
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
100g diced chorizo
65g kale
1 chicken stock cube
1/2 pint almond milk
white sauce mix
Pre-rolled puff pastry
1 egg white

Chop up the chicken into bitesized pieces and fry in a little bit of oil until it’s just cooked. Add in finely chopped onion, garlic and the chorizo and turn the heat right down and sort of just leave it to do it’s thing while you faff about with cleaning chopping boards and spilling ribena on yourself.

In a saucepan big enough to eventually hold everything, heat up some chicken stock and then add your milk and white sauce mix. YES OKAY I CHEATED, but it was wednesday night and I had laundry, washing up and cleaning to also do, so a roux was the last thing on my mind. Make your sauce, and then add your lukewarm chicken and the kale into it, stir it all up and bung it in a (ideally orange, Le Creuset) pie dish.

Roll out your puff pastry (take it out of the fridge when you start cooking your chicken, to allow it to come up to room temperature) and lay it out on top of your pie, crimping the edges with a fork. In a perfect world I would have used a pie bird (is that what they’re actually called?) but the one I have is too tall for my dish, and looked mental. I cut out the letters with little cutters from the catering supply shop in Clapham, glued them onto the pastry with some egg white left over from a cookie recipe and then brushed the whole lot with almond milk before cooking for 35 minutes at 170c (ish).