More Cooked Leftover Chicken Recipes

Ever since the grocer began selling those delicious rotisserie chickens, cooked leftover chicken recipes have become more important to the home cook. Who wants to eat the same exact dish two nights in a row? These birds are moist with infused broth and seasonings and require no additional effort. But what to do the next night with half of that bird remaining? Since it's already cooked, more "cooking" should be avoided.

Here's something extremely simple and yummy that won't make the leftovers dry - the hardest part is stocking the pantry in advance with "semi-homemade" possibilities.

Cooked Leftover Chicken Recipes

Exchequer of the countinghouse?
You're rushing like the dickens
Constraining costs to run your house?
Use leftovers from chickens

The recipe for leftover chicken or turkey:

Go the foreign foods section of the grocers and find the Indian products. Buy a handful of different flavor curry cooking sauces. Grab a jar of chutney while you're there (mango chutney is a good choice).

Slowly heat one of the prepared curry sauces, pull the leftover chicken off the bone and cut into 3/4 inch chunks and add to sauce, add a dollop of the chutney. If you have raisins and some type of nuts, throw in a little of each. Serve that over rice - plain will do nicely because the flavors are pretty strong.

When hot, it's done - the chicken is already cooked, remember? Chicken recycled this way does not look like nor taste like leftover chicken you had before. You score!

Chicken Stock

And when that chicken's truly gone
And all you have? The bones.
The carcass can become a stock
Like spinning gold from stones.

This is the ne plus ultra of thrift for the home cook. Yes, you CAN use already cooked chicken carcasses for making stock.

Some people think this is way too hard - it sounds like serious cooking. It isn't really. Throw the carcass in water- just to cover, add 2 bay leaves, a coarsely chopped onion, and a few cloves. Let it simmer on a back burner until reduced to about half volume. Freeze into ice cube trays if you like or use it right away (don't forget to strain out the solids) for soup or stew.

This makes a nice base for a vegetable puree if you now cook some leftover veggies to softness and then use your immersion blender to make a nice, thick, sauce. Vegetable purees are about the healthiest way to "sauce" something that there is.

Think of making stock from leftover carcasses as "free food." How thrifty can you get? Oh, very important, those shells from seafood? Throw them into a ziplock, freeze them, and when you have a goodly amount, make those into a wonderful stock as well.

If you enjoy recycling leftovers as much as I do, check back often and I will share as many ideas, like these cooked leftover chicken recipes - as I can find. It's like "found" money to use up what you have. If the family doesn't notice it - because you have taken some trouble to use a different sauce and presentation - more power to you!

Here are More Cooked Leftover Chicken Recipes