welcome friends today we are making a chicken and lentil dish that has a
vaguely North African or Moroccan flavour profile
we're using our homemade Ras el hanout spice mix which is fantastic by the
way and chicken and some dates and lentils
and chicken stock and so I just want a lightly seasoned the chicken thighs
they're bone-in skin-on chicken thighs and then we're gonna brown these off in
the pan and you don't need to over season them there's enough
going on here it's going to be braised in the oven the chicken is going to
taste amazing anyway
looks good so we'll flip it over to the other side and get both sides nice and
golden-brown okay so take the chicken out and this is a point where you know
take a look in your pan if there's too much oil or grease or fat pour some out
if there's not enough put some in next thing that goes in is chopped onion and
we just want to you don't wanna get any color on that you just want to soften it
down once the onion is nicely softened and mostly cooked through I'm gonna add
some garlic and I just use a garlic press and crush it right into the pot
and just stir that around and cook the garlic out a little bit the onions look
good and now the ras el hanout spice mix goes in and you
just want to sort of almost kind of toast it a little bit you don't want to
overcook it you don't want to burn it you just kind of want to bring it up to
temperature and release some of the oils and this only takes you know a few
seconds now cherry tomatoes we just stir those around then a splash of vinegar
just give a little bit of an acid component gotta tell you it just
absolutely smells heavenly in here now lentils into the lentils and some
chopped dates stir that around to coat them now in this pot I've got some
chicken stock on the go until we want to pour in about 2 cups worth of chicken
stock oh it's hot it's hot
and when I say about I mean that because we're gonna put this in the oven and you
need to watch it fairly closely if it starts to get too dry before it's cooked
add a little bit more stock and if you don't have any more stock add a little
bit of water so that's all stirred together chicken pieces go back in and
then we stick this in the oven
that smells wonderful there's it's like a fills the room doesn't it yeah it's
got a bunch of different smells there that I can't quite put my finger on what
what it comes to looks really good to UM talk I just I see that it just came out
it just came out of the oven it's hot and it might be a little bit spicy I
might have gone a little bit overboard on the spicing yeah yeah okay so I'm
just gonna try the lentils first to see lentils I said what is that oh is that
like a date mm-hmm well so that'll be an in trying to get that date there is an
absolute explosion of flavour in there
mm-hmm yeah now it's really good I mean there's clearly the dates give it a
lovely taste bring a lovely sweetness to little bit of sweetness yep
so what inspired this good smaller piece chicken thigh tastes like a chicken
thigh with some really great flavours going on with them well I want to do
more lentil and pulse recipes a lot more pulses lentils and greens you know I
mean I love lentils meat so I'm all into it
we just don't cook with them that often and there's a couple of soups that we
make like there's that the lentil squash that we do every other week
yeah that I absolutely love and so since I love that soup so much and take a look
for I'll put the link somewhere so you just want to practice making lots of
stuff with lentils so these type of lentil so you think of lentils more
often yeah that makes sense I never think of them I never think of them as
something to cook with at the same time is the chicken mandatory in this recipe
like could you have made it without the chicken and it could be a lovely I think
you call his dish I think you could have made it without the chicken I think he
could have just used a vegetable broth mm-hmm I mean the Ras el hanout brings
enough flavour enough complexity to the whole thing that you can then you could
have thrown in and then the dates kind of thicken it up and so yeah you really
couldn't get thrown in some raisins I mean you could still throw raisins in
with this one all of those things so this isn't this doesn't follow any
tradition like there's no I'm saying Moroccan just to sort of put it in a
ballpark for a lot of people that's because of the spice because of the
spices that's the spice flavor the flavor profile is in there but I mean
I've never been to Morocco I'm obviously not Moroccan I looked at a
dozen different lentil and chicken dishes that claim to be Moroccan and I
picked and chose the parts that I thought I'd like but are you like which
is fair enough and so now you've made a dish that you like mm-hmm
and I I hope you're gonna like it too and it's super simple to put together I
mean it really I can imagine nice fresh salad with this nicely or yeah yeah I
mean there's a whole bunch of different things that you could have with this so
give it a try thank you stopping by
so you can soon
you