Chicken in Mushroom and Cream Sauce

The kitchen smells of butter and mushrooms and thyme, which is to say it smells like an evening when you have nowhere else to be. This is an autumn supper, the kind you make when the clocks have gone back and the dark comes in early and you want something warm and quiet on the table.

There is nothing clever here. Chicken thighs, browned in butter until the skin goes golden and crisp. Mushrooms, sliced thickly and cooked in the same pan until they give up their moisture and start to colour. A splash of white wine that sizzles and reduces to almost nothing. Then the cream goes in, and the whole thing comes together into something that smells like the sort of evening you'd write down. I did, once: "Chicken. Mushrooms. Cream. Tuesday. Rain on the window." That was enough.

A recipe is a conversation, not a contract. If you've got tarragon instead of thyme, use it. If the mushrooms at the market are field mushrooms rather than chestnut, even better. The method stays the same: brown the chicken, build the sauce in the same pan, let everything simmer together until the sauce is silky and the kitchen smells like somewhere you want to be.

Serve it from the pan with mashed potatoes or rice or just a torn piece of bread. Something that will catch the sauce, because the sauce is the thing. There are few better feelings than putting a warm plate of this in front of someone on a cold evening and watching their shoulders drop half an inch.