I’ve posted several recipes or dish ideas about how we use leftovers and I’m going to try a new one this week. Hubby prefers bone-in chicken for grilling which also means the pieces are large. We usually have leftovers and usually make chicken Alfredo for our traditional Thursday pasta meal. Last night as we were clearing away from dinner, he made a comment about enough to do so. I agreed, then he said something about, “or doing deconstructed chicken parmigiana. Hmmm….., an interesting idea. The trick of course is the chicken is already cooked and not breaded. So, working out how to manage that is one thing. We do have a Le Crueset au gratin dish that would allow the mixture to be spread out.

When we make ragu, we use jarred marinara sauce (although rarely the Ragu brand) and often add extra onions, or garlic, and other spices depending. If I take that sauce and add to it to simmer away for a bit, I can then put some of that in the baking dish, add the chicken, another thin layer of sauce, the cheeses and bread crumbs to bake for whatever amount of time I work out. That allows the rest of the sauce to continue to simmer as the pasta cooks. Serve the chicken on a plate with the pasta marinara as the side rather than putting it together in a pasta bowl. The trick will be to get enough sauce on the chicken for it to not dry out as it bakes as well as to get that golden brown color. I’ve had difficulty with that in doing other dishes. One reason comes from my reluctance to use the broiler although I don’t really know why. Alton Brown, one of Hubby’s favorite celebrity chefs, talks about that in several of his episodes – using the broiler I mean, not making deconstructed chicken parm. We’ll see how this goes.