How to Make a Great Pasta Recipe With Leftover Chicken

If you have leftover breast, thigh, or another part of the bird, you might be wondering what to do with it. After all, you cannot make leftover poultry into a chicken cordon bleu. The perfect solution is to combine your leftover poultry with pasta and a few other ingredients and make a delicious pasta dish. This certainly makes more sense than giving it to the dog!

Leftover cooked chicken only needs to heat through since it is already cooked and further cooking will only dry it out, so you will need to add it to your recipe at the end and just warm it through. You can use any kind of pasta you like for this recipe - macaroni, penne, and spaghetti are just a few options. Cook the pasta as directed on the package and make the sauce while it cooks.

How to Make the Pasta Sauce

Use a readymade sauce or make your own with tomato sauce, fresh herbs and perhaps some vegetables. The fastest way to cook the vegetables for a sauce is to finely dice them and saute them in oil or butter. Zucchini, carrot, onion, garlic, broccoli, bell pepper and mushrooms all work well. Season the vegetables with salt, pepper and perhaps some chili powder or Tabasco sauce if you fancy a spicy kick.

Combine the sauce and the cooked vegetables, and then add the chicken and perhaps some cream cheese or sour cream and stir the mixture well. Once every component in the sauce is warm, it is done. When the pasta is cooked, drain it well and toss it with the sauce. You can serve this delicious recipe to the family and rest assured that they will love it. Serve some grated cheese on the side so they can sprinkle it over the top.

Feel free to add other meat to this dish if you want because chicken is versatile enough to combine with various other ingredients such as chopped ham, cooked bacon, or even slices of sausage.

If you have some cooked beef to use up, you can add that to the recipe as well. You might not think that chicken would go with beef but think about pizzas where these meats are often used together. The great thing about pasta recipes is that you can often use up your leftover meat and vegetables and the tasty sauce makes everything taste fresh rather than leftover.

Other Uses for Leftover Chicken

You can use the leftover meat to make omelets or add it to a stir fry. You can even make a baked chicken rice recipe by cooking some rice and transferring it to a glass dish with some cooked chicken and a sauce. Bake it until the rice is crispy around the edges and everything is hot and cooked through. Twenty minutes at 400 degrees F is usually sufficient.

This is especially nice if you grate some cheese over the top before putting the dish in the oven. Melted cheese toppings work nicely with pasta and rice dishes and you can try mozzarella, cheddar, blue cheese or anything else you like.