The Rotisserie Chicken

Yum, yummy, yum! If you've never eaten a rotisserie chicken or used one in a recipe, get going! It makes meals so quick and easy and it's great for 1-3 or 4 people, depending on what you're doing with it. Rachael Ray, Pioneer Woman and lots of others call for rotisserie chicken in their recipes. This month's Real Simple has 10 meals using RC and they look really good.

I have lots and lots of meals that call for 'shredded or chopped cooked chicken.'  It's not a hard thing to make and it's a bit cheaper than the rotisserie chicken, but it adds a significant amount of time to your prep work for dinner and makes for more dishes. So...enter rotisserie chicken, stage left. I generally divest the chicken of its skin and pull off/chop all the meat. That leaves you with 3-4 cups of chicken, depending on its size. This is great on salad, in pasta, inside puff pastry/crescent roll with cream cheese, onions and mushrooms, you name it.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day and we decided to stay outside and take a long, long walk so I didn't want to spend a ton of time cooking. I ended up making a simplified version of Pioneer Woman's Asian Noodle Salad. It was sooo good, see below.

Asian Noodle Salad with Chicken
1 package of whole grain thin spaghetti (cook al dente and drain)
1/2 bag of good quality chopped cabbage (cole slaw mix)
3-4 handfuls of baby spinach
1/2 c. chopped fresh cilantro
1 red bell pepper, chopped
4 green onions, chopped
meat of 1 rotisserie chicken, chopped
(you could add lots of things to this, any veggie that seems Asian...)

Dressing:
3 T. canola oil
2 T. tahini (or you can use some sesame oil)
2 T. peanut butter
4 T. soy sauce
1/4-1/2 c. seasoned rice vinegar
a little white sugar (tsp.)
several dashes of cayenne (I had sriracha so I used some of that too)
* Season to taste at the end, usually I add a few more dashes of soy sauce, vinegar or a bit of oil if it seems too dry.

Whisk together dressing ingredients (be sure pasty ingredients are dissolved), pour over noodles, chicken and veggies, toss together. It's really good hot or cold!

Especially great if you want to do this...instead of stand around in the kitchen...