Someone surprised me with a rotisserie chicken for dinner. Sounded great but it was tough and chewy. Turns out they used a stewing chicken that I was planning to use for soup.
An emergency frozen pizza was cooked for dinner and the rubber chicken was stashed in the fridge. Can I make anything decent out of this, or should I just boil it for stock? I’d hate to try and make something like coq au vin or something similar where the chicken is stewed or simmered for a few hours only to have inedible hunks of jerky in a sauce, or for it to disintegrate into an oddly flavored soup.
It’s already cooked, right? Make pashtet. Pull it off the bones and run it through the food processor with some sauteed onions and shredded carrot, black pepper, and salt. Adjust the consistency by adding a tablespoon or two of butter.
You’re not going to be able to tenderize it or anything so your best bet is to grind or finely chop it and mix with something else.
My sister and a few relatives make a dip with some type of chicken paste or very finely shredded chicken, hot sauce, sour cream, and cheese. It’s great with tortilla chips. I’d put the chicken in a blender and try something like that.
Or you could make chicken salad and make sandwiches.
We would use it to make cannapki which are little open faced sandwiches sometimes served as an appetizer and sometimes just as something to nosh on during drinking binges. There’s no set recipe for cannapki, so just spread some on a slice of bread or toast, cut it into quarters, and put a little slice of tomato or cucumber or hard boiled egg or pickle on each quarter. Pashtet can be made from any kind of meat. Liver is favored, but any kind of cooked meat will do.
You can still turn it into a soup or stew. Just take the meat off the bone and give it a good chop. Use your bones for stock, and the meat any way you want. It will need to simmer for a little while, maybe an hour, to soften up. After that it will start to shred and fall apart.
Right now I’m craving chicken pot pie. The process of making the filling them baking the dish will make the meat nice and soft.
You could also chop it into small pieces and make chicken salad sandwiches.
If you’re okay with it shredding simmer it with some store bought salsa then use it in tacos.
Pashtet? Cannapki? Are these anglicizations of Polish words? I know both of those as pasztet and kanapki, and that’s how we use them. (“Pasztet” being the Polish word for what we call pâté and “kanapki” being canapés.) I just find this interesting, as I’ve never seen “pashtet” and “cannapki” in print before and assumed it was just Polish.
Another vote for chopping it in the food processor. I’d turn it into chicken enchiladas. In fact, when I want chicken enchiladas, I usually start with a grocery store rotisserie chicken.
No surprise, Slavic languages being as closely related as they are.