June 2 Is National Rotisserie Chicken Day And Here Are Some Of My Favorite Posts

Rotisserie Chicken is one of the best food inventions ever and it is fitting that there is a day to celebrate this glorious food!  I thought this was a good time to go over some of our best posts about the fine birds we get at Costco.

One of our favorite things to do with Rotisserie Chicken is to remove the the meat and put it in recipe sized containers and make stock from the carcasses.

Two Birds in the Hand is Worth Five Packages of Chicken and Four Quarts of Stock in the Freezer.

Using the chicken and stock we have in the freezer I made some wonderful Chicken Soup with a couple of twists to it.

Chicken Quinoa Soup with Vegetables.


It is getting warmer and summer salads make a great meal.  They can also be lighting fast.  Here is one that came together at warp speed.

Caprese Con Pollo Salad.

Here is another salad idea but this one has beans in it for a totally different but tasty character.

Chicken Salad With Cannellini Beans, Sun Dried Tomatoes, Green Pepper and Sweet Onion.

Sometimes I like to take a recipe from someone else, make a a bunch changes and then have some with similar flavors but essentially a brand new dish.

Chicken with Artichoke Hearts in a Piccata Style Sauce Over Rice.

I can say with complete confidence I will have more posts using this versatile, flavorful and affordable food.

Be well and good eating to you all.

A Chicken Soup With Quinoa: Grandma's Home Cooking Meets A Bolivian Staple

My wife had a couple of long nights in a row with concert rehearsals and she told me in advance for her night off she wanted comfort food.

Few foods are as comforting as chicken soup so I quickly settled on that for dinner. Since she gave me warning, I pulled some of our frozen chicken from Costco out of the freezer the night before and put it in the fridge to thaw.

When I got home from work, I pulled out our big soup pot and drizzled in some EVOO. I then added a generous helping of Christopher Ranch Chopped Garlic we get from Costco and a small palmful of rosemary I crumbled in my hand.  Meanwhile, my wonderful wife chopped:

• 1 small yellow onion
• 2 stalks of celery
• 1 cup of baby carrots

These were added to the pot and I sauteed them until the onions were tender. While this was going on my wife thawed out a couple of quarts of homemade chicken stock and added that to the pot while I tossed in the somewhat thawed chicken.

She then rinsed a half cup Nature's Earthly Choice Quinoa  and threw that in the pot with about a cup of boiling water.  We brought everything to a boil then turned it to a simmer for about 15 minutes to cook the quinoa.

This dish was absolutely a home run!  It was a delicious, healthy, hearty chicken soup with lots of comfort but it also had a distinct character.

Rosemary and chicken are a natural combination and while parsley is a great seasoning for chicken soup, the rosemary gave it a bit of panache.  Also, the garlic helped give it a more varied and hearty flavor profile.

And finally, the use of quinoa instead of noodles gave it a twist without making it so out of the ordinary it was no longer comfort food.

And by using all the foods we had in a cupboard, fridge and freezer, this went together in very little time with minimal effort.

In every way this dish was a success:

• Taste
• Ease
• Cost
• Comfort

I am positive we will do something like this again and it only reaffirms our strategy for rotisserie chickens.

Two Birds In The Hand From Costco Is Worth Five Packages of Chicken And Four Quarts of Stock In The Freezer

Buying things in bulk and having them ready to use can be a big time and money saver.  For example, we love cooking up the big family size packages of ground beef we get at Costco and freezing them in a number of small packages that are the right size for a single recipe.

Recently, we expanded upon this idea with the rotisserie chickens we buy at Costco. I bought two of them and while I was putting away and organizing the other items from the shopping trip, my lovely wife cut up the birds and diced the chicken into bite-sized pieces.  She then took and put all the chicken in a number of containers that we then froze.

After all the chicken was put in the freezer, she then threw the carcasses in a pot with some onions, carrots and celery and let it all simmer together.  Then she strained it and put it into some containers (which I think were from soup we bought at Costco) and froze them.

As I said, this gave us five packages of high quality ready to use chicken and a couple of containers of delicious home made stock.  Doing all this at once right when the chickens were bought was extremely time efficient.

The number of different meals we will get out of these two chickens is really pretty impressive from both a time and money aspect.  Plus, rotisserie chickens are tasty and chicken can definitely be one of the healthier meats to eat.

And I have to say, homemade stock is wonderful stuff. In addition to having lots of real chicken flavor, it    is much lower in sodium than what you typically buy at the store.

My wife and I are absolutely thrilled with this idea and I can guarantee you we will be doing it again.  There are so many plusses to it that I simply can not recommend this enough.

Don't cry over spilled milk

or in this case, a lost dinner.

Chicken 'Pot Pie' with Garam Marsala

The dinner wasn’t a disaster, but storage ended up causing it to be wasted. I made a variation on chicken pot pie seasoned with garam masala inspired by Jeffery Saad. Start with a stock pot that has two small onions chopped, one carrot chopped, one stalk celery chopped and four cloves of garlic grated into it and softened in EVOO over medium heat. Add about six cups chicken stock and about half a rotisserie chicken chopped into bite size pieces. The whole pot is seasoned with salt, pepper and about a teaspoon and a half of garam masala. This all cooked together and about two cups of quinoa is added and left to simmer until cooked. The quinoa took the place that potatoes would be in a regular chicken pot pie.

The dish tasted fantastic, but was too hot to put in the refrigerator right away, so I set it outside to cool down. Unfortunately, the dish fell off the ledge later in the evening and crashed on the cement and we lost the rest of the beautiful dinner and a fine Corning Ware dish as well.

This is a dish we will be making again and hopefully I can take a picture of it and it will be around for Mike to eat as well. I will be more careful about using the 'Minnesota refrigerator' in the future.