27 Ways to Save Weeknight Dinners with Rotisserie Chicken
Rotisserie chicken is so much more than a shortcut in these satisfying soups, salads, and weeknight meals.
Rotisserie chicken is a simple, satisfying main ingredient that also makes for great leftovers. These rotisserie chicken recipes are great when you're in a time crunch. Whether you need to pack a quick lunch or whip up an easy, stress-free dinner, you've come to the right place. This collection of recipes with rotisserie chicken is full of fan favorites including bright salads, cheesy calzones, and hearty soup.
French Onion Chicken Pot Pie
Antonis Achilleos / Food Styling by Ali Ramee / Prop Styling by Christine Keely
This is about to be your new favorite comfort dish, and using store-bought rotisserie chicken instead of chicken thighs makes it even easier.
Avgolemono Chicken Soup with Rice
Diana Chistruga
Shred a rotisserie chicken to turn this Avgolemono — a classic sauce of chicken broth, egg yolks, and lemon juice — into a satisfying soup with depth and contrast from cooked rice.
Chile Crisp Sesame Noodles
Jennifer Causey / Food Styling by Ali Ramee / Prop Styling by Christina Daley
Customize these 25-minute lo mein noodles with shredded rotisserie chicken and your favorite vegetables for an easy weeknight dinner or meal prep.
Sugar Snap Pea Salad
Sweet sugar snap peas give this light summer salad from Ivan Conill's Branch Line in Boston a satisfying crunch, while whole-milk ricotta adds heft with its creamy richness.
Peppery Greens Salad with Avocado, Chicken, and Tortilla Croutons
Shred rotisserie chicken and use store-bought tortillas to simplify this fresh salad and shave off some time.
Arroz de Galinha
Shredded rotisserie chicken, olives, sautéed onions and bell pepper, and crispy rendered soppressata are topped with cooked saffron rice and baked until the rice gets crispy on top in this cozy chicken and rice recipe from 2011 F&W Best New Chef George Mendes.
Gnocchi with Roast Chicken, Bacon, and Kale
Store-bought gnocchi and rotisserie chicken do much of the heavy lifting here, making this cozy dinner easy to pull off on a weeknight.
Chicken Tortellini Soup with Kale
Use rotisserie chicken to skip cooking chicken thighs for this comforting, 30-minute dinner.
Thanksgiving Leftovers Nachos
Use this cheesy, low-lift snack recipe all year round by swapping rotisserie chicken for the leftover turkey. It's ready in a half hour.
Lemon-Ricotta Pasta
Jordan Provost / Food Styling by Thu Buser
A no-cook sauce and just five ingredients makes this lemon-ricotta pasta especially easy as a weeknight dinner that comes together in 15 minutes. Stir in some shredded rotisserie chicken to make it heartier.
Silky Tortilla Soup
Chef Rene Ortiz serves modernist Mexican dishes at La Condesa in Austin. His smoky, tomatoey tortilla soup is a bit simpler and more classic than many of his recipes, but it still has an innovative touch: It's enriched with butter, not tortillas.
Chicken Salad with Cucumber, Red Pepper, and Honey-Mustard Dressing
A store-bought rotisserie chicken keeps the preparation time short. If you want just chicken salad with no greens, skip the lettuce; double the chicken, cucumber, bell pepper, onion, and tarragon; and toss them with the dressing.
Chicken-and-Okra Gumbo
Chef Rembs Layman prepares rich gumbo with house-made stock and a jerk seasoning blend from Christina's Spice & Specialty Foods. To make this dish at home, use store-bought rotisserie chicken, canned chicken broth and supermarket jerk or Cajun seasoning.
Skillet Chicken-and-Mushroom Potpie
Grace Parisi proves that making potpie doesn't have to take a long time with this one-skillet version, prepared with store-bought rotisserie chicken and — her stroke of brilliance — buttered white bread in place of the usual labor-intensive puff pastry crust.
Buffalo Chicken Calzones
To make the most of rotisserie chicken, Food & Wine's Justin Chapple tosses it with a buttery Buffalo sauce, then bakes it into a calzone with Monterey Jack cheese. In keeping with traditional Buffalo wings, he serves the calzone with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing.
Leftover Blue Cheese Chicken Salad Sandwich
Jonathan Waxman's tasty chicken salad is dressed with a mix of tart yogurt and funky Gorgonzola cheese.
Chicken and Cabbage Tacos with Cilantro Cream
This easy taco recipe tosses red cabbage, scallions, and jalapeños together with shredded rotisserie chicken.
Potato Flatbreads with Chicken and Cilantro-Yogurt Sauce
Inspired by the crispy, light, naturally fermented Indian dosas, these lacy flatbreads are made with a combination of mashed potatoes and white rice flour, and are leavened with club soda instead. Wrapped around shredded rotisserie chicken that's been tossed with yogurt, cilantro, and red onion, they make a delicious (and portable) gluten-free lunch.
Chicken Flautas
For these flautas, tortillas are rolled around a savory filling and pan-fried until crisp.
Creamy Piquillo Pepper and Chickpea Soup with Chicken
The secret to this speedy soup is buying ingredients with lots of built-in flavor, like hummus and jarred piquillo peppers.
Pulled Chicken Barbecue Sandwiches
Toss pulled rotisserie chicken instead of the usual pork with this classic eastern North Carolina barbecue sauce, then pile onto soft buns and smother under cold, creamy coleslaw.
Green Goddess Chicken Salad
© Petrina Tinslay
Green Goddess dressing — a mix of mayonnaise, sour cream, herbs, anchovies and lemon — was created at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the 1920s, as a tribute to an actor starring in a play called The Green Goddess. The creamy dressing is typically tossed with a green salad, but it's also delicious in Melissa Rubel Jacobson's chicken salad, made with a rotisserie bird.
Chicken-and-Garlic Chowder
The beauty of this recipe is that it takes advantage of an array of terrific prefab ingredients, from prepeeled garlic and precut butternut squash to rotisserie chicken and frozen sofrito (the Spanish green-pepper-and-onion seasoning paste). Poaching the prepeeled garlic cloves in milk helps bring out an extraordinary depth of flavor.
Chicken Salad with Blue Cheese and Grapes
Grace Parisi considered many classic salads, like Waldorf and Cobb, before deciding on her version of chicken salad, which mixes store-bought roasted chicken with blue cheese, grapes, celery and sunflower seeds. She likes eating it wrapped in Bibb lettuce leaves.
Fast Rotisserie Chicken Lasagna
© Kristen Stevens
Use leftover rotisserie chicken and you can have this lasagna prepped and in the oven in only 15 minutes.
Chicken Tetrazzini
Use 3 to 4 cups of meat from a rotisserie chicken to skip poaching chicken breasts for this classic casserole.
Quick Chicken-and-Cheese Tamales
Melissa Rubel Jacobson uses a store-bought rotisserie bird in her reinvented chicken salad. She spikes the mayonnaise with chile sauce and toasted sesame oil and adds water chestnuts for crunch.
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