Meat Stuffed Pancakes (Hungarian Style)

For me, home cooking is partly about creative ways of using leftovers. This is a classic recipe for using leftover chicken stew, but it's definitely not a second-line solution. It's so delicious that every time I make chicken stew I make double the quantity to have a good excuse to come up with meat stuffed pancakes the next day. Nobody ever complained about it ....

So, for those of you who had a glance at the chicken stew recipe, the first part will be familiar.

For the stew

1 chicken cut to pieces
(breasts, legs cut into two, breast, and wings Ask your butcher to do it, it will save you time and energy, and he is a pro, after all) 1 pepper 1 tomato 40g duck grease 30g salt 30g paprika

1 pepper
1 tomato

40g duck grease

30g salt

30g paprika

200 g sour cream

For the pancakes

225 g flour

2 eggs

1 tablespoon salt

200 g milk

250 g soda (or sparkling mineral water)

Chop the veggies.

Put approximately 2/3 of the grease into a saucepan and start melting it on medium heat. Add the onions and saute on low/medium heat until it get soft (for about 15 minutes). Take care not to burn it (adding the salt at this stage will help you avoid burning) Add the pepper and keep cooking for another 10 minutes.

Tip: Chose a saucepan with a large base, the stew cooks more evenly if the meat is placed in one layer.

Put the rest of the grease in a frying pan and fry the chicken pieces on high heat. You should work with only a few pieces at the same time, as if you try to squeeze too many in the pan, they'll get cooked rather than fried. Fry them until the skinny part is golden brown.

Once they are ready, transfer them into the saucepan on top of the onion. Add water so that the level of the water would be slightly under the top of the meat (pictures 1-3). Bring it to boil, then cover with a lid and cook it for 45 minutes.

Afterwards, add the paprika and the tomato (pictures 4-5) season with freshly ground pepper and cook it for another 20 minutes.

Separate the chicken pieces and the sauce, remove the meat from the bones, get rid of the skin and cut the meat into small pieces or pull it apart. Using a hand blender, blend the sauce then bring it back to boil and keep boiling until it gets nice and thick (like a cream soup).

Add the sour cream into the sauce, blend. Combine the meat with one or two ladles of sauce to make it succulent.

Mix all the ingredients, grease the frying pan with some oil. Pour the dough into the frying pan in a thin layer then fry it on one side then on the other. Don't make it too crispy. From this quantity I ended up with twelve pancakes using a 24 cm diameter frying pan.

When the pancakes are ready, fill one after the other with the meat. Put the meat into the middle of the pancake fold from right and left then top and bottom, like an envelope.

Organize the pancakes neatly in a rectangular baking pan. Add half of the sauce remaining and a couple spoonfuls of sour cream.. Bake in the preheated oven (190 C) for 40 minutes.

Serve it warm. Take a pancake, add sauce (reheat if necessary), pour over some sour cream, decorate with chopped parsley.