6 Simple Recipes Using Rotisserie Chicken
Shortcut ingredients are a life saver for busy weeks and days you need a lazy dinner. I’m sharing recipes with rotisserie chicken to inspire your easy weeknight meals.
Leftover rotisserie chicken recipes don’t have to taste like leftovers. Baked shredded chicken is a blank canvas and can fit almost any cuisine. It also saves so much time, and is a great short cut ingredient option. This is good news if you’re someone who dislikes leftovers, because you can get the convenience of pre-made chicken, with the flavor of freshly made meals.
Things to make with rotisserie chicken include rice bowls, noodle bowls, tacos, sandwiches and soups. In this post, I’m sharing tips to make meals with rotisserie chicken more flavorful, and six completely different recipes to inspire your next dinner or meal plan.
Tips for Meals with Leftover Rotisserie Chicken
The flavor of reheated rotisserie chicken tends to come though stronger than freshly made. This might not always be the case, or it might not bother you, but I wanted to share tips that can help make it taste less like leftovers.
Flavor
Recipes to make with rotisserie chicken are best when there’s really flavorful ingredients, like sauces and spices. Shredded chicken is a blank canvas, so it’s fun to add flavor that fits the meal you’re adding it to. I’m sharing a variety of recipes made with rotisserie chicken below that have a lot of flavor, so you’ll have different meal options from this one simple ingredient.
Reheating Method
For meals made with rotisserie chicken, I like to reheat it in a way that adds more flavor. After mixing the shredded chicken with seasoning and/or a sauce, I’ll heat it up in a skillet or bake/broil it. This way, the chicken gets a bit browned and the flavor can infuse into it.
Recipes To Make With Rotisserie Chicken
Sesame Peanut Scallion Noodles with Shredded Chicken
This is one of those simple and nourishing shredded rotisserie chicken recipes using ingredients you probably have on hand. These can be made without peanut butter, using all tahini if you need to. For the noodles, I’d recommend soba noodles, which are made from buckwheat. The sauce is thick and flavorful which might be enough for the chicken, but if you’d like more flavor you can reheat in a pan on the stove top with a drizzle of water, tamari/soy sauce and garlic powder (or chopped garlic if you’d rather), until the liquid has reduced and the chicken gets a little browned. You can add more vegetables too like peppers, broccoli, mushrooms, kale and spinach.
BUFFALO CHICKEN PITAS
This recipe includes cooking chicken thighs, but you can skip this step completely when you use rotisserie chicken. Shred the chicken, coat with buffalo sauce of choice (does not have to be Frank’s) and reheat, then build your pita. You can top it with either crumbled blue cheese or blue cheese dressing/sauce. And if you want a pita alternative, you can use a wrap or lavash too!
Rotisserie Chicken Tacos
This recipe provides a spice blend to cook chicken in and then shred. This spice blend makes it easy to add flavor to already cooked and shredded chicken. Just mix some of the spice blend (amount varies by how much chicken you’re using, go by taste) with liquid to coat the chicken while it reheats. You can serve this chicken a variety of ways, including tacos, but you can also make taco rice bowls, or sheet pan quesadillas by folding flour or corn tortillas over a mixture of chicken and a little cheese and baking.
Lemony Chicken Soup With Farro, White Beans, and Kale
This hearty soup is loaded with nourishing and high fiber ingredients and would be great to batch cook and keep some portions in the freezer for future lazy dinners. For the liquid, the recipes calls for stock but I’d use half bone broth and half chicken stock (I like Pacific brand bone broth and Imagine chicken stock). Dill goes into this recipe, but I think any herb would be great like basil, parsley, thyme and rosemary. To serve, you can drizzle it with extra virgin olive oil for an anti inflammatory boost.
Greek Chicken Bowls
This recipe includes cooking chicken in a simple spice mixture, but you can easily use this spice mixture on leftover rotisserie chicken and either bake or cook in a skillet to reheat. To do this, toss with a little water to help the seasoning coat the shredded chicken, and prevent it drying out too much when reheating and cook until the liquid has evaporated.
BBQ Chicken Sandwiches
Recipe by All The Healthy Things
This is another recipe where you can save time by using shredded rotisserie chicken. Toss the chicken with spices and BBQ sauce and reheat in the oven or on the stove top. For the slaw, you can use Greek yogurt (with some fat) as an alternative to mayo. The recipe calls for slaw mix, which makes vegetable prep extra easy.
Let me know in the comments if you’ve tried one of these recipes with chicken rotisserie, or if you have a favorite rotisserie chicken recipe to share!