Chicken a la King
You will need a ceramic baking dish and a frying pan. If you don’t have a ceramic baking dish, you can get away with using a small roasting pan. If you don’t have a certain ingredient - pan sauce, or veggies - just substitute with chicken broth and frozen vegetables.
Ingredients
Leftover chicken (I had 4 chicken thighs)
Leftover pan sauce/juice/soup/water from cooking the chicken
Leftover veggies served with last night’s chicken
1 can of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup
2 cups of sliced white mushrooms
1/2 of a red onion, chopped
2 cups of fragrant rice. You can use any rice you want.
splash of EVO
salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
Preheat oven to 400. Put all the leftover stuff in the baking dish, and throw it in the oven. Let it heat while you prep the other ingredients. Saute onions and mushrooms with some EVO on medium heat - use a bit of butter if you want to spoil yourself silly. Set aside. Boil some water in a kettle. Heat the cream of chicken soup on low heat in the pan.
Take the chicken out of the oven, and if not stripped, strip the chicken. Discard bones. Roughly chop chicken. Pour two cups of rice into the baking dish, cover with pan sauce, veggies, and chicken soup. Now add hot* water until you have enough to cover the rice with 1/3 inch of liquid on top. Put a lid on that and bake for 25-30 minutes.
When that’s done, it should be very moist. Mix in the chicken, mushrooms and onions, adding salt and pepper to taste. Pack tightly, and put back in oven for another 10 minutes to dry the top out to create a crust. Leftovers never tasted so good!
This is an ideal recipe for using up leftover turkey and gravy. You can substitue cream of mushroom/celery/broccoli/etc for different flavours; you can also use a different mushroom. There are a few things you have to watch out for. First, make sure you don’t put the chicken in with the rice to cook - the water will dry it right out. Second, the water must be hot when it pour it down the cream, otherwise it’d simply separate into chunks of soup. Third, don’t burn the soup while it’s in the pan. Since we’re not adding any water, burning it would be extremely easy to do.
Tomorrow’s forecast: I’m making shepherd’s pie tonight with leftover mashed potatoes. Mmmm.
