Pesto-Like Rotisserie Chicken and other ideas

Pretty, isn't it?

My local grocery store has been running specials on 5-lb. bags of chicken leg quarters all summer, so I stock up every few weeks. The last ones were $.49 per pound and they limit three bags at a time, so I bought 15 pounds of chicken the other day for a little over seven dollars! Needless to say, we've eaten a LOT of chicken leg quarters this summer. Pretty much all of our chicken was cooked on the barbecue grill outside since the high temperature has been up around 315 degrees (OR SO) every day for months here, and even if my oven were working (which it's not), there's no way I'd cook anything in it.

To prepare our chicken, we mostly just rinsed it and sprinkled the outside with salt, then SuperDad grilled it until it was done all the way through. (You can always add some other seasonings under the skin, like I do below, or baste with a sauce, too.) After we take off the skin, we remove the meat from the bones and freeze in labeled and dated Ziploc bags for other recipes, and we have quite a few meals ready to be thrown together. Save the skin and bones, and you can make your own chicken broth for soups and stews!

Here are some of the things we've done so far with our cooked chicken leg quarters (and one whole turkey, too, that was super cheap):

• Dice for chicken tortilla soup, chicken and dumplings, chicken and rice soup
• Add to ramen noodle soup with some frozen mixed veggies and maybe a can of cream-of-something soup
• Add one jar of Woody's barbecue sauce/marinade and a little water to roughly four leg quarters' worth of meat for barbecue chicken sandwiches
• Mix diced chicken with some sour cream, dill, salt, and pepper for chicken salad sandwiches
• Use diced meat in a stir-fry (add thawed, cooked meat at the end and heat through)
• Of course, you can just serve them whole (as seen at Medieval Times - well, sort of "seen," since you eat in the dark)

I also have a rotisserie oven that my grandmother gave me about five years ago. I haven't used it much this summer because it heats up the kitchen - not as much as the oven, but the rotisserie oven does put off a good bit of heat. But today has been rainy and cool, so I decided to give it a go. I made some rotisserie chicken with pesto-like seasoning this morning and soon, I plan on using a soy sauce/ginger/white pepper marinade to make some for stir-fry.

Here's how to make the Pesto-Like Rotisserie Chicken:

I can fit three leg quarters in the basket in my rotisserie oven, but it's the compact version, so if you have a bigger one, you can fit more.

Prepare the chicken... Don't remove the skin! Thaw your chicken, if frozen. Otherwise, rinse extremely well and pat dry. Set aside.

Prepare the seasoning... With a mortar and pestle, crush together some fresh ground black pepper, Kosher salt, dried rosemary, dried oregano, and dried thyme. Crush until it's a pretty fine powder. Pour into small bowl (I used a coffee mug). Mince several cloves of garlic, finely chiffonade some fresh basil and add to the bowl. Add a splash of lime juice and a little olive oil to make a paste (the consistency of store-bought pesto). Stuff the seasoning in between the skin and the meat, giving it a good thick coating. I held the skin together with a toothpick so the seasoning wouldn't fall out while it was cooking.

I cooked mine in the rotisserie oven for 45 minutes, and then I let it go for another ten minutes on "No-heat rotation," mostly to allow it to cool before I took it out. If you're using it for something (mine will be chicken salad sandwiches), let it cool, remove the skin and bones, and dice the meat. You can either use it right away, refrigerate overnight, or freeze in a Ziploc bag for later.