Budget Meals Using a Rotisserie Chicken
Rotisserie chickens are my budget meal secret weapon. These super cheap cooked chickens make the last minute dinner rush easy! While they’re delicious on their own with a simple side, we usually upgrade them into a family favorite.
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These are a staple in our house for when I’ve completely failed at dinner. It’s cheaper and healthier than takeout, and my family usually has no idea that I screwed up the menu plan. They think this was all just part of my plan. I actually keep a list of easy meals using a rotisserie chicken on the first page of my menu planning binder.
We’re huge fans of 15-minute meals here because honestly… I hate cooking. And I hate the stress of trying to cook dinner with my toddlers underfoot and my husbands unpredictable evening schedule.
We started making 15 minute meals for every single dinner when we reduced our spending by over $23,000 a year and then paid off all our debt so I can stay home with the kids. We went through the 90 Day Budget Bootcamp and it was absolutely life changing. It stepped out the only meal plan I’ve ever been able to stick to consistently. You can get instant access to the program for free here.
Rotisserie Chickens are one of the best buys in a grocery store. Usually, you can find them in your area for $4.99 (Costco, Walmart and Wegmans all have them for $4.99 in my area). At Walmart, you can even try this trick to snag them for half price!
Thinking of roasting your own chicken? Think again. The rotisserie chickens are actually significantly cheaper than raw chickens that you have to cook yourself. The reason has to do with grocery store economics, but I prefer to just roll with it and not look a gift horse in the mouth (what does that even mean?)
In fact, we once roasted our own chicken for one of our cooking date nights and while it was delicious, it wasn’t spectacular enough to offset the amount of work that went into it. My philosophy is that we should do what we do best. That means I’ll leave rotisserie chickens to the grocery store and I’ll expend my energy on lasagna.
Easy Meals Using a Rotisserie Chicken
Quesadillas
Chop up the chicken, add cheese and extras (black beans, green pepper, onion, and salsa to taste). Place a flour tortilla in a buttered hot skillet on medium high, add filling, layer with another tortilla, turn when cheese is melting and cook the other side to a crisp.
Strawberry Avocado Salad with Honey Balsamic Dressing
Chop the chicken. Slice the strawberries and avocado. Layer chicken, strawberries, and avocado on salad greens, then add blue cheese and chopped walnuts. Combine equal parts honey, balsamic vinegar ,and oil. Add a splash of lemon juice (and poppy seeds if you have them). Mix and dress the salad.
This is also our favorite salad dressing. It’s a million times better than any store bought and we make it frequently.
Chicken Salad Sandwiches
Chop the chicken, add mayonnaise and mustard to taste, along with salt and pepper. Stir until chicken is coated. Add extras if you have them like celery, onion, apples and grapes. I’m not really one for in-depth recipes on stuff like this, but if you need it, This Simple Chicken Salad is my husband’s favorite.
Buffalo Chicken Pizza or BBQ Chicken Pizza
Buffalo Version:Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Coat chopped chicken in hot sauce (we add some melted butter to ours) layer a Boboli pizza crust with room temperature cream cheese, then sprinkle with ranch seasoning (the dry dip kind), then a little mozzarella cheese, and finally the dressed chopped chicken, sprinkle more mozzarella and bake for 10 minutes.
BBQ Version: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spread a thin layer of BBQ sauce over a Boboli pizza crust (leaving the crusts without sauce). Sprinkle Monterey jack cheese over crust, add finely chopped chicken and red onion then more cheese. You can add extras as you have available (crumbled bacon is our favorite!) then bake for 8-10 minutes.
BBQ chicken sandwiches
Chop hot chicken, mix with BBQ sauce, spoon onto hard rolls. You can also top with cheddar cheese and broil for 2 minutes to melt and toast.
Chicken and Veggie Wraps
Chop up chicken and lay down the middle of a flour wrap. Stuff with your favorite veggies, cheeses, dressings. Roll up to serve. You can also slice into pinwheels, securing with cream cheese or toothpicks.
Our favorite variation is a Ranch chicken wrap with chicken, corn, green pepper, red pepper, onion, lettuce, shredded cheddar, a cream cheese base and topped with ranch dressing.
Choose Simple Sides
I usually pair these meals with a super simple side like fresh fruit or a bagged salad to make the meal as effortless as possible. We keep a list of easy to prep sides in our house for situations like this.
- Cut apples or pears.
- Fruit salad.
- Apple sauce.
- Bagged salad.
- Coleslaw (ready made).
- Baked Beans.
- Chips and Guacamole (we have a super simple guac recipe that involves mashing avocado with a whisk, adding lime juice, cilantro and onion. That’s it!)
- Canned or frozen corn.
- Canned or frozen green beans.
- Baby carrots and celery with ranch dressing.
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Need more easy dinners?
If you struggle with getting super easy and cheap dinners on the table, I can tell you what’s worked for us.
You can see our favorite 15-minute meals here and then we found out about this freezer cooking service that cut our grocery budget in half.
Neither require much cooking skill and you can save a fortune on your grocery budget!
And lets not forget the $70/week menu plan for our family of four with 20-minute meals.
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What are your favorite easy meals using a rotisserie chicken?
You can find more easy dinner recipes here (cooking skills never required!)
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Great list! I love the buffalo chicken pizza recipe! We do a similar version with BBQ chicken pizza- BBQ sauce and cheddar cheese and sometimes we go crazy and add some bacon on top… I know totally nuts! Great ideas for quick meals!!
The BBQ and cheese sounds amazing!
I always cook the carcas and hard-to-get-off bits for as long as I please to make chicken broth and freeze it. It really comes in handy if you cook every day or use homemade freezer meals.
Great tip! Thanks
Great list! Just a comment. The phrase to look a gift horse in the mouth is about looking at the value of a gift. You judge a horse’s value (partially) on the condition of their teeth so if someone gave you a gift of a horse it would be bad manners to look in it’s mouth to judge its value.
Thanks for this great list! I’m always looking for new recipes like these.
By the way,”looking a gift horse in the mouth” refers to the Trojan horse. If they’d looked closer, they would have seen the army hiding inside.
2 of my favorite uses for rotisserie chicken is to shred it up, add taco seasoning to it, and then make chicken enchiladas or taquitos. Super fast and tastes great!
I just read the linked article comparing the cost of rotisserie chicken to fresh whole chickens. I will buy rotisserie if $4 or less. Otherwise I wait for whole chickens to go on sale for .99/lb. they take a few hours to cook; you can put it in the oven and forget about it. I cook one after work for the sole purpose of carving off the meat, dividing & packaging it, then freezing it. Ready to use for casseroles, salads, or whatever else I’m in the mood for. And I use the remains to make stock, which I freeze too.
Hey, whatever works! 🙂 I do love the idea of making homemade stock from the remains – nothing else really compares, does it? 🙂
These are great ideas for dinners. I’m all about cheap, fast and easy dinners because we are super busy and are gone 4 nights out of the week so i need meals I can fix when we get home. I am learning so much from your blog and hope when instant mine it will be as helpful to others. Thank you so much for making my life easier.
I’m so glad it helped you, Beverly! 🙂
I always cook the carcas and hard-to-get-off bits for as long as I please to make chicken broth and freeze it..This is post are very nice thanks for sharing this post..
Love this idea! I do something similar where on Sunday I throw a whole pack of chicken breasts in a slow cooker with some broth, set to low, and cook for a few hours. when it’s done, I put it all in a bowl, take five minutes to shred with a fork, slap a lid on it, and throw it in the fridge. Then, for the rest of the week I have pre-shredded pulled chicken that I can use for so many recipes – BBQ chicken sandwiches, pulled chicken tacos, chicken salad (both the leafy kind and the mayo/celery/on a bun kind)… so convenient and affordable!
It’s so cheap and easy!
Thank you for posting 🙂 As it so happens, we had rotisserie chicken for dinner, yesterday, and with leftover (dryer) parts of the chicken (breasts) I warmed them up with spices and added sour cream. I mixed this together with salad greens, fresh onion and ginger for a super yummy Indian style dinner. How amazing that you decided to post this today. I will try the salad for sure, and probably many more. It had just been on my mind that these rotisserie chickens are practically worth their weight in gold!
We swear by rotisserie chicken! Some of our favorite dishes we use it in are chicken ‘n dumplings, chicken pot pie, chicken broccoli ‘n rice, cheesy chicken ‘n spaghetti and the list goes on!
I love to cook, but sometimes there just isn’t time! I buy chicken tenders, no breading! After a quick visit to the microwave, I cook them on the stove top and add a sauce. Depending on what I have on hand, I may add tomato sauce or white sauce. I serve with quick brown rice or pasta. With a little experimentation, you can add pasta or quick rice directly to your dish for a one-pot meal.Throw in a can of green beans or frozen broccoli for your veggies. It takes longer than 15 minutes to add pasta, but no more than 30 minutes. I hate washing a lot of pans, so one pot works for me! One other thing I do is cook double meals – one for dinner and one for the freezer. I only do that for tried and true recipes. I experimented with a new recipe once and ended up finishing the dish with the dog!
My friend showed me how to make lazy guacamole … mash the avocados and add a little salsa. It already has onions and tomatoes … you can add cilantro if desired but it is delicious as is. You can make it hot by using the hot salsa or mild using the mild. It’s changed my life 🙂
The Costco chickens are so bad for you!!! There is almost as much sugar in a Costco chicken than in a can of soda; that’s why they taste so good. You can roast a chicken at home in the oven. You stick in a covered roasting pan in the oven at 225 degrees and let it go for 4 hours up to 6 hours. It doesn’t take any longer than standing in line at Costco. You can get a chicken for $4 that is almost twice the size of a Costco chicken. A store bought chicken is about $1.00 a lb. sometimes you can find it for as little as $0.78 a lb. A Costco chicken is about $2 a pound. Be kind to your budget and your body.
I make chicken and dumplings, New Mexico Hatch chili stew, chicken enchiladas, chicken meat balls with spaghetti squash, I feel a bit like Bubba Gump!!!
Good eats and congrats on paying off the debts. Dave Ramsey is my hero. He helped me become debt free, pay cash for a car and take a once in a lifetime trip to Europe. I have no student loans to pay back, I have no mortgage, no credit cards and I have enough money in savings to cover life’s AHH $#@$#@ moments (like a new roof plywood and all after a sever weather event).