Chicken paprika (revisit)

I did a post on this earlier , but I thought I'd revisit it from a diet perspective. As it turns out, it's not nearly as unhealthy as it looks!

This is (as far as I can remember) basically a recipe from the old Joy of Cooking. I started making this in college, probably about 24 years ago, and it's so simple and tasty I keep making it, despite misplacing that ancient copy of Joy of Cooking.

One of the changes from my original recipe is that I reduced the size of the chicken portion. As it turns out, one breast of chicken is actually a lot of chicken. A "proper" serving is 3.0 oz. but in the interest of not starving, I bumped it to 5.0 oz.. Here are my portioned chicken breasts out of a 1.43 lb. package of Misty Knoll local, antibiotic-free chicken.

Season chicken breast with salt, pepper and garlic powder.

Dice an onion and finely chop garlic to taste. For one serving, I used half a medium onion and two small garlic cloves.

The completed mise en place for the meal:

Add a little oil to a sauté pan and cook the onions for a minute. Push the onions to one side of the pan and add the chicken to the other. When browned, flip the chicken over. Add the garlic to the onions.

Add chicken broth. I used 1 cup for my serving for one. Actually, I used 0.4 oz. (by weight) of More than Gourmet chicken stock gold with 8 oz. of boiling water. The More than Gourmet stock concentrate is great because it lasts for at least a year in the refrigerator, and you just cut off bits of the gelled concentrate and add it to water. It's also low in sodium and has no fillers. And it tastes much richer than the stuff in a can. You'll notice that the stock is not the pale yellow color of chicken broth.

Add 1 tbsp. paprika or more. Ideally, add a mixture of hot and sweet Hungarian paprika to taste. Cover, and cook for several minutes until the internal temperature of the chicken reaches 160°F. It took 12 minutes to cook my chicken.

Remove the chicken to a warmed platter.

Reduce the broth. Add 1/4 cup sour cream to make a sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste.

I served it with 1 cup of white sushi rice and 1/2 cup of broccoli, with everything covered in the sour cream sauce.

I had some sour cream sauce left over, so the actual calories were a little lower than this (from caloriecount.about.com). This is the entire plate, including rice and broccoli.

642 calories is a little high, but not unreasonable. Fat is a little high but not unreasonable for dinner. All in all, I found it quite surprising that it was not worse nutritionally with all that sour cream sauce. Not something to eat every day, but once in a while it's not that bad. Just watch out on the size of the chicken serving!

Also, that's using real full fat sour cream because I don't really believe in using the reduced fat or reduced calorie products. I just use less of the "real" product.

Update 5/22/2012: Minor edits to the cooking steps.