Melissa Shaheen makes homemade noodles and boiled chicken for her Hungarian chicken paprikash.SEEKING RAVE RECIPESDo you have a dish that you’re known for? Do your friends ask for that one recipe? Is there something your family asks you to make over and over? The Times Free Press would like you to share that dish with our readers and to show you preparing it. If you would like to participate or have someone you’d like to suggest (with their permission), contact Clint Cooper at 423-757-6497 or ccooper@timesfreepress.com.
Melissa Shaheen’s specialty is her great-grandmother’s Hungarian chicken paprikash recipe.It wasn’t quite by osmosis, but Melissa Shaheen could hardly have escaped learning to cook.
“I grew up in a family where all we did was bake and cook,” says the recently transplanted Chattanooga wife and mother. “I took over my Grandma’s recipes. But a lot of the stuff she did, there’s no [exact] recipe for.”
That’s the case for Grandma Marge Carlson’s chicken paprikash, “a comfort food dish” that Shaheen says “was a real staple” in her great grandmother’s native Hungary.
“It’s really good on a cold night,” she says. “It’s also pretty cheap to make.”