What to do with leftover roasted chicken breasts?

I roasted a couple of chickens the other night and will write about roasting chickens another time.  I thought as long as I was roasting one whole chicken; I might as well roast two and use the meat from the second chicken for something else. And as long as I was going to roast chicken, I might as well roast a bunch of vegetables too.

We ate part of the first chicken one night with the vegetables and wanted to use the leftovers for another meal so I looked to see what I had in my refrigerator and pantry and decided to make a Penne with Chicken & Peas in a Cream Sauce. I basically had everything I needed in stock thus avoiding another trip to the supermarket.  Not that I don’t enjoy hanging out in the supermarket but two or three times a week is enough.

I put together a recipe and it was good but thought it needed a little more flavor help so I wrote to my friend Chef Ricco, who happens to be working in India right now starting a restaurant, and asked what I could have done to make this recipe better. The recipe below is a combination of what I came up with and Chef Ricco’s suggestions.

Roast Chicken Alternatives

If you don’t feel like roasting whole chickens, you can either buy already roasted chickens at the supermarket or use uncooked chicken breasts that you cook in the pan yourself. The advantage of cooking raw chicken is extra flavor you’ll get from sautéing the chicken (see fond on my Pan Sauces page).

I hope you enjoy it and please write and make your own suggestions or comments.

Penne with Chicken & Peas in a Cream Sauce
Serves 2

Ingredients:

• 1/2 lb. penne pasta, cooked to al dente
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoons butter
• 2 thin slices from a large red onion, diced
• 1/2 red bell pepper, finely diced (Ricco suggested using roasted red peppers for more flavor and adding them toward the end of the recipe)
• ¼ cup white wine or brandy
• 1 chicken breast, cut up into pieces (cooked or uncooked)
• 1 cup half and half
• 1 pinch nutmeg
• 1 tablespoons fresh chopped parsley
• 1 cup frozen peas
• Grated cheese like Parmigiano or Romano or you could even try some crumbled Roquefort cheese.
• Freshly ground pepper, to taste
• Salt, to taste

How to Prepare at Home

Heat a large saucepan over medium heat until hot. Add the oil and butter. When hot but not smoking, add the onion and diced pepper. Sauté until the onion is translucent.

Deglaze the pan with the white wine or brandy and continue cooking until most of the wine has cooked off. This will add another layer of flavor.

Season the already cut up cooked chicken with some freshly ground pepper and add it to the pan to reheat for about one minute.

Add the half and half, nutmeg, parsley and peas being sure to mix together with a wooden spoon. Raise the heat to medium-high but as soon as the half and half comes to a boil, lower the heat to medium or medium-low and reduce the sauce to desired consistency (thickness).

When the sauce is just the way you like it, add some freshly grated cheese or try the crumbled up Roquefort. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper.

Drain the pasta but reserve a few tablespoons of the pasta water to add to the sauce if the sauce appears to be too thick. This thins out the sauce while giving it a little flavor from the cooked pasta.

Add the pasta to the saucepan; toss well and serve.

Uncooked Chicken Method

If you are using uncooked chicken, you’ll start by sautéing the chicken first, before the onions and peppers. So cut up the chicken into bite sized pieces and sauté them in butter and olive oil.  Cook until almost done but not all the way. You can finish cooking the chicken when you return it to the pan otherwise you risk overcooking it.

Remove the chicken from the pan, add the onion and pepper and follow the rest of the recipe above.

An alternative would be to sauté the chicken breast whole, let it rest while you are making the sauce and cut it up just before adding it back to the pan. I don’t think it makes much difference but if you try it both ways, please let us know which you like better.

There’s nothing like braised anything when the weather gets cooler and you’re not out firing up the grill. Not that braised meals aren’t perfect any time of the year. They are, but the fall and winter is when I am looking for something more hearty. Nothing satisfies that hunger more than a seasonal braise.

Braising is a simple technique where you brown a food, add a cooking liquid and let the food simmer in the oven covered until it breaks down and becomes tender. No magic. Just sear and simmer.

It works especially well on tough cuts of meat. We’ve all heard of pot roast and braised veal shanks or leg of lamb. One of my favorite dishes is braised chicken with whatever herbs and spices I might have lying around. I’m especially fond of braising chicken with leeks or fennel. Check out chicken thighs with sausage and braised fennel.

Please visit my web site for a more detailed explanation on braising, what cuts are best and the science that makes it work.

I adapted this recipe from December issue of Fine Cooking, one of my favorite culinary magazines. I made a few changes but the process is pretty much the same whenever you braise chicken.  The difference comes from the ingredients used. At the end of the recipe I have some suggestions for leftovers.

Braised Chicken with Apple Cider, Apples, Pears & Mustard

The recipe calls for using hard cider, which is alcoholic, but I used fresh sweet apple cider because that’s what I had and to be honest, I misread the recipe. I’m not sure why they say don’t use fresh apple cider, the recipe turned out great.

Ingredients:

• 6 chicken drumsticks
• 6 bone-in, skin on chicken thighs
• Salt & Pepper for seasoning
• 2 plus tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 3 apples (I used Rome)
• 2 hard Bartlet pears (if too ripe, they will fall apart when cooking)
• 2 cups fresh apple cider
• ¼ cup Dijon mustard
• 3 sprigs of fresh marjoram
• ¼ cup half and half
• some chopped fresh marjoram for garnishing

Prep

Rinse the chicken under cold water and pat dry.  Season with salt & pepper.
Peel & core the apples and pears. Slice them into sixths or eights.
Chop some fresh marjoram for garnish.

How to Prepare in Your Kitchen

Preheat your oven to 350° F.

In a large sauté pan, heat the olive oil and butter. When hot but not smoking, brown the chicken pieces a few at a time being sure not to crowd the pan with too many pieces or they will steam. Depending on the size of the pan, you may have to do this in batches.

When all sides are browned, remove the chicken from the pan and transfer it to a plate to reserve. Pour out most of the butter/oil fat from the pan, but leave about 1 tablespoon for browning the apples and pears.

Over medium high heat, cook the pears and apples for about 4 minutes. Transfer the pears and apples to another plate to reserve.

Add the cider to the pan to deglaze. Bring to a boil. Using a wooden spoon, scrape any bits of browned chicken from the pan. This stuff is called fond.

Now add the mustard and using a spoon or whisk, stir the mustard into the cider. Return the chicken pieces along with any juices that may have leaked out back to the pan. Add the marjoram sprigs, cover and place the pan into the oven on the middle rack.

I didn’t have a sauté pan big enough for all the chicken pieces so for this step, I transferred everything to my Le Creuset Dutch Oven, one of my favorite pieces of cookware.

After 10 minutes in the oven, I added the apple and pear slices to the pot and continued braising for another 30 to 40 minutes. The meat was so tender it was about to fall off the bone.

I carefully removed the chicken and fruit to a plate with a slotted spoon, removed and threw out the marjoram sprigs and started the hardest part to this recipe – defatting. There’s just no easy way to get rid of the fat that comes off the chicken. I’ve tried those defatting gadgets, paper towels but nothing really works so well that it removes the fat and isn’t messy expect for…

If you have the time and don’t have to serve this up as soon as it’s finished, I highly recommend you transfer the liquid to a small bowl or plastic container let it cool and then place in the refrigerator over night.

The next day you’ll have a layer of fat on top that you can easily remove and be left with nothing but incredibly flavored braising liquid. When I made this, I didn’t have the luxury of time so I defatted by hand and made the best of it.

I transferred the liquid to a saucepan, brought it to a boil and then reduced the heat to medium, added the half and half and continued reducing until the sauce was my desired consistency.

I could have made a roux (fat and flour) to thicken the sauce, but I think you get much better flavor by reduction.

To serve, plate the chicken, top with a little sauce and sprinkle a little of the chopped marjoram on top. This is one delicious meal and even better if you let it sit for a day before serving.

Leftovers

The next night I served the leftover chicken over pasta with the sauce and it was incredible. Once the chicken was gone, I still had a small container of the sauce. I made use of it tonight but that will be another story another time.

We had a roasted chicken on Monday night and I thought there was a lot leftover but it turned out there was only one breast and one leg. So my idea of making a curry sauce to serve over the chicken that would be served over couscous needed to be changed rather quickly since I needed to make dinner in the next 20 minutes.

So I decided to clean out the refrigerator a little and throw together a quick stir-fry with some spices and various vegetables that were on their last legs along with the leftover chicken. It was quick and easy and delicious too. Simple but tasty.

It’s pear season and I purchased a flat of them at Costco so for a salad my wife sliced up some Bartlett Pears, placed the slices on some Romaine lettuce, crumbled some blue cheese on top and served it with a commercial brand poppy seed dressing. Again quick, easy and delicious.

Leftover Chicken Stir-Fry

Ingredients – I used whatever vegetables were lying around my vegetable drawer in the fridge but you can substitute your favorite stir-fry veggies.

• 4 – 5 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 thumbnail size piece of ginger
• ½ onion – Found it in a zip lock bag at the bottom of the vegetable drawer
• 1 yellow bell pepper
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 handful of green beans
• 1 small bunch of broccoli heads
• Leftover chicken
• 1-teaspoon Asian fish sauce
• 1-tablespoon rice wine vinegar
• Salt and pepper to taste

Prep the Ingredients – As with all stir-fry, the most work and time is spent getting the ingredients ready. See my web page on stir-fry. It is important to try and chop all like ingredients to the same size so they cook evenly.

I peeled the garlic but left it whole. All I wanted to do was flavor the oil with garlic and ginger. By leaving it whole, it’s easy to work with and does the job nicely. If you like the taste of garlic, by all means chop it up or slice it. The ginger I did slice, but if I wanted to add more flavor from the ginger, I would have grated it.

I sliced the onion and cut the slices in half. For the peppers, I cut the top and stem off, removed the seeds and membrane and cut them into ¼ inch slices. The green beans were washed, trimmed of ends and cut into quarters or thirds. The broccoli stems were cleaned and separated.

The chicken was already cooked so I just removed the meat from the bone and sliced it into strips. It was more like shredding than slicing because the meat was so tender. Now I was ready to start cooking.

How to Make at Home

With any stir-fry, you want the pan and oil hot, but not smoking, so I heated up the oil in my large sauté pan over medium-high heat. I added the whole garlic and sliced ginger and cooked until the garlic was brown and I could smell it release its flavor. I removed the garlic and ginger with a slotted spoon and discarded it.

I immediately threw in the onion, peppers, green beans and broccoli stems. If I had more time I may have cooked some of the ingredients separately, adding more as I went along, but I didn’t so everything went in at one time. And you know what, it turned out fine.

Once the ingredients are in, you want to keep your eye on them so they don’t burn. I gave the pan a shake and then stirred them with my slotted spoon every once in a while. After about 5 to 6 minutes, I added the fish sauce, vinegar, salt & pepper and continued cooking for another 3 to 4 minutes.

Lastly, I added the chicken and continued cooking for a couple of minutes just so the already cooked chicken heated up and picked up some of the flavoring from the other ingredients.

I tasted for seasonings and everything seem fined so we served it up with our romaine lettuce, pear and blue cheese salad.

It actually took less time to make dinner tonight than to write & post this recipe. Isn’t that a funny thought?