Healthier Paprika Chicken

For the past few weeks, I have had Eastern European food on the brain. We stopped into a Slavic café in Galway (which was not serving food at the time), and I have been dreaming of visiting Café Polonia again. This week I decided to make paprika chicken, and while I wanted the creamy comfort of the traditional recipe, my marathon training made me lean towards lightening up and adding nutrition.

To get started, I consulted about a dozen recipes online before deciding on how to make my chicken. While doing so, I also started making slow-cooker sweet and sour purple cabbage as a side. My Lithuanian nana would have been proud! I can share that tangy vegan recipe in another post. Sooo good!

I started off by cooking four chicken breasts in a bit of olive oil until brown on both sides, dusting them with paprika as I went along.

Once the chicken was browning, I chopped up some carrots, about three cups’ worth, and one large yellow onion and tossed them on top of the chicken. In went two cups of organic chicken stock, and then I left this on the lowest flame possible while I went back to work.

Every time I went to check on the chicken, I added a few more teaspoons of paprika, ensuring that my chicken was flavorful and colorful.

When it was time to serve, I cooked  up a bag of egg noodles (some for dinner and some for leftover lunches), topped the noodles with heaping portions of chicken and the resulting sauce, then stirred in something different than the typical sour cream required for this dish. . . Fage Greek yogurt.

To each dish, I added about two tablespoons of yogurt and stirred thoroughly, finishing the dish off with a dash of smoky paprika.

This dinner was every bit the comfort food I was craving after a long workout and day of work. As an added bonus, it warmed me up in our freezing house! I don’t think the yogurt made much a difference from paprika chicken made with sour cream, and I was excited to have an extra bit of protein and calcium in my dinner. Leftovers were plentiful  and will serve us both for lunch for a few days.

Have you healthifed any traditionally heavy recipes lately?