Comfort food Chicken Paprika

It was the second day of fall yesterday, a cool dull rainy day here in Vancouver, The Cottager and his wife were coming for dinner, comfort food was called for.  Nobody does comfort food quite like the middle Europeans, it must be something to do with their long cold winters. Anyway the only thing to cook was chicken paprika, you can only cook it at this time of year when the Hungarian peppers are plentiful.

To Cook this  for 6 you will need:-

10 Hungarian peppers
1 onion
3 tablespoons of Hungarian paprika
12 chicken thighs

Make sure you get sweet Hungarian peppers or the round "apple peppers" I used both

Hungarian and apple peppers

Chop the peppers in to fairly small cubes

Chopped peppers

 Place the chicken in a large frying pan skin side down on a high heat, the fat will release from the skin and so you do not need to add any oil.  Brown well on both sides. You may have to cook in two batches I did.

golden brown chicken

Remove the chicken from the pan and pour off most of the fat that was released.  Add the chopped onion and peppers.  Cook stirring often until the peppers are soft, about 10 minutes.

Peppers and onion cooking away

Then add the paprika make sure this is sweet Hungarian paprika not Spanish or hot paprika as the dish will turn out burning hot! (done that been there) Also paprika is one of those spices that does not keep well, I buy a new package every fall when I am making this dish even if there is some in the cupboard as it is such a dominant flavour it has to be fresh.  When the paprika and a little salt have been stirred in, add the chicken back, turn down the heat and cover with a lid.

Chicken back in frying pan making friends with the peppers

Cook on a slow heat for about 1/2 to 3/4 of an hour until the chicken is cooked through and the peppers have almost completely disintegrated.  The Cottager had to leave at this point to deliver an urchin to a party, so ours cooked a little longer frankly not a problem, as long as you stir once in a while to make sure it is not sticking to the bottom it is really hard to over cook.  In fact if you were entertaining formally and did not want to be in the kitchen all evening you can cook to this point and then just re heat at the last minute.

The finished product 

I served it with some egg noodles and some beautiful green beans, got to love this time of year for produce.

I got this recipe from an older Hungarian women I met at a party a few years ago. I was talking food (when am I not) and how I think it is important that people hand down their recipes to their children so that we do not lose some of these classic wonderful traditional dishes.  Any way she told me that her sons were not interested so she gave me this recipe in great detail and explained about the wonderful peppers she used to get in Hungary. This is well worth trying, it is easy, has few ingredients, fills your house with wonderful aromas and most importantly is delicious.

Just as we finished we were invaded by my second born his friend and my good friends from down the street who unbidden brought desert.  Now these are good friends!  So we finished dinner with a surprise fruit crumble, it was a surprise because we did not know it was coming and a surprise because it was a fridge crumble made from the fruit found in the fridge.

All in all a wonderful end to a rather stressful week at work.