The year before our first kid was born, my wife and I went on vacation in Budapest. It was a beautiful city, and the food was wonderful – I particularly loved the chicken paprikash that they seemed to server everywhere. When I got home, I started looking for recipes to reproduce it. This is the closest I’ve been able to come.

The most important thing for this recipe is the paprika. Get good hungarian paprika. American paprika is pretty much just powdered red food coloring. Hungarian paprika is a richly flavorful spice which is the heart of this dish.

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Since the friday pathological programming died out, I’ve been looking for something else to
do for special friday posts. A while back, I posted a bunch of recipes for a mutant meme, and
it seemed a lot of people really liked it. So I’ve decided to do an off-topic friday thing: friday random recipes.

For today, a special chinese dish: braised salmon in meat sauce. This dish would traditionally
be done using pork for the meat in the sauce, but since I don’t eat pork, I use ground chicken thighs. Whatever meet you use, you need to make sure it’s not too lean – the sauce does need a bit of fat in it; not a huge amount, but in needs some. Ground chicken breasts are too dry. I like to do this with wild alaskan salmon. If you don’t like or can’t get salmon, it would work with other strong-flavored firm fish – this would probably be very good using swordfish, or mahi-mahi.

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