Baird - 101 Things to Do With Rotisserie Chicken

1. The purpose of this book is to help you get more meals out of your chicken and to show a variety of ways to extend your grocery dollar. The underlying principle of these recipes is that poultry used in small, healthy portions can provide delicious, satisfying flavor in a wide array of easy dishes. By refrigerating or freezing all the salvageable meat from a bird, you can stretch a single chicken into at least two meals, and possibly three or four.

2. Whether you use fresh or canned produce, these recipes can be -easily adapted to the ingredients you have available. There are some flavor differences between fresh and preserved, so your dish might not taste just like the test dish made in my kitchen, but its sure to be delicious either way, as long as you taste it and adjust seasonings before finishing the dish.

3. Whenever you purchase a rotisserie chicken, if your budget can handle it, buy two, not just one. As long as youll be in the counter top mess of skinning, carving, and picking the meat from a chicken carcass, you might as well do two chickens at the same time and freeze the extrasliced or cut upfor later use. And some supermarkets offer a second chicken at a reduced price.

4. The best time to remove the meat from the chicken is right when you get it home, while its still warm but not too hot to handle. The skin and meat come off the bones of a warm chicken much easier than a refrigerated one. If youre not going to deal with it or eat it right away, the bird needs to be refrigerated.

5. When storing the portion of the bird that youre not going to consume the first day, remember that its safe to keep cooked chicken in the refrigerator for only three to four days.

6. To freeze chicken, divide into portions of 1 to 2 cupsamounts that are convenient for use in subsequent recipes. Use frozen chicken within four months.

7. Chicken toughens and dries out if it is overcooked, so when adding to casseroles, soups, and skillets, the chicken goes in near the end of the cooking time.

8. Chicken broth is the most called-for ingredient for making hot dishes with pre-cooked chicken. Keep a variety of low-fat options on hand:

The key is to read ingredient labels and choose varieties whose flavors you like.

9. Be cautious about adding salt to recipes if you have used bouillon to make the broth in your dish, because chicken bouillon broths, powders, and cubes already contain salt.

10. Fruits are superb complements to chicken, in both sweet and savory blends. A number of recipes here call for fruit: strawberries, apricots, plums, peaches, pears, and more. These pleasantly surprising flavor combinations shift the emphasis from eating leftover chicken to sampling a cornucopia of fresh flavors.

11. Amounts of salad dressings in these recipes might be less than you are accustomed to using. The reason is that these homemade dressings often have strong flavors and a little goes a long way. Think of salad dressings as ways to enhance the flavors of the fresh ingredients rather than smother them.

12. Be adventurous in trying different kinds of grains, pastas, and rice as base ingredients for your dishes. Various recipes here call for brown rice, couscous, whole wheat pasta, quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wah), and gritsall of them normal foodstuffs somewhere, but maybe not currently in your kitchen.

13. These chicken recipes support the trend toward low-fat cooking. A small amount of extra virgin olive oil in a nonstick skillet is sufficient to saute or fry any vegetables.

14. Chicken pre-cooked in any manner can be substituted for rotisserie chicken in these recipes. So, feel free to grill some extra breasts at your next barbecue, boil some chicken with a small onion and a carrot, roast a whole bird in your own oven, or bring home the leftover chicken from a restaurant meal.