The Immigrant Cookbook is a fabulous collection of recipes put together and edited by Leyla Moushabeck.

Featuring recipes and stories from chefs across America who came to the States for various reasons, through this book they share their cultural heritage and also some really amazing food.

I have loved reading through the book and also attempting to cook some of the recipes.

This particular one by Mourad Lahlou is for Chicken with Charmoula. I am not sure that I have done it justice having never tried this dish before, but I do know that it was really delicious and quite easy to follow from the recipe. I can only imagine how good it would be cooked properly by the chef!

In essence this is a grilled chicken dish, but the flavours from the marinade used made it really tasty. I cooked it on a grill pan, but really it should have been cooked on skewers over a charcoal grill and that is going to be what I am doing now that we are at the start of BBQ season.

Anyways this is what went into the preparation to produce that really fantastic grilled chicken.

THE SPICE AND HERB MIX

To get the marinade started you add all the dry ingredients for the marinade into a bowl. A mix of Sweet paprika, ground cumin, ground ginger, salt and pepper and finely chopped garlic cloves

Then I was quite surprised at just how much fresh herb gets added; 2 tbsp coarsely chopped thyme, a tbsp of coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley, and 2 tsp of coarsely chopped coriander

ADD OLIVE OIL AND MIX

Then you add in a cup of extra virgin olive oil and stir to mix it all together

MARINADE THE CHICKEN

Add in boneless and skinless chicken breast to the marinade and leave to rest overnight in the fridge

Pretty simple stuff really, the hardest part was finding the clingfilm to cover the bowl and moving stuff around the fridge so that it fitted in 🙂

COOKING ON THE GRILL PAN

As I mentioned up top I ended up cooking the chicken on a grill pan. It worked out ok but I think it will be much better done on a BBQ grill over the coals

COOKED AT THE END

Most of the effort was in the preparation of the marinade, then a patient wait before you start cooking. I think it was worth it though as it is a very tasty dish and the combination of all the different herbs had my tastebuds dancing around as I ate it.

The Immigrant Cookbook by Leyla Moushabeck really is a fantastic collection of recipes and a lovely book to flick through.

The food described looks amazing and the stories that run alongside from the different chefs bring the recipes alive on the page and really inspired me to cook many of them.