This Sheet Pan Chicken Rolls Over into a Fast, Flavorful Noodle Bowl

Welcome to Rollover Dinners, a series to help you make smart use of leftovers. In this post, we’re using leftovers from this sheet pan dinner to these super fast and fresh noodle bowls. Read the intro post here.

A good sheet pan chicken is one of the most exciting ways to satisfy everyone at your table — and you can even roll over the leftovers into a super delicious (and totally different) dinner the next night. In fact, sheet pan chicken might be the ultimate “cook once, eat twice” dinner, because you can cook lots of chicken and lots of vegetables on a single sheet pan, making enough of each for dinner and leftovers.

This set of Rollover Dinners has a couple of smart secrets: a strategy for cooking both breasts and thighs on one sheet pan (so everyone gets what they want) and a sauce that doubles as a topping for dinner number one and flavors the broth of dinner number two. Here, we’ll walk through both recipes and how to get double dinners with minimal hands-on effort.

Rollover Recipe Number 1: Saucy Sheet Pan Chicken with Sweet Potatoes and Peppers

As much as I personally love a chicken thigh, certain members of my family prefer breast meat, so this recipe includes both. The trick to keeping the breasts juicy is to protect them by putting them in the center of the baking sheet. The thighs will cook quickly without drying out on the edge of the pan, and everything goes directly on top of a bed of sweet potatoes, peppers, and onion.

While cooking and prepping, set aside 1/4 cup of the sauce from this first recipe for the second recipe. After cooking (or maybe during dinner cleanup), set aside 1 to 2 pieces of chicken and 2 cups of the sweet potatoes, peppers, and onions. 

Rollover Recipe Number 2: 20-Minute Chicken and Sweet Potato Noodle Bowls

With your leftover sauce and chicken, this recipe has you pull together a super quick and flavorful broth that becomes the base for a noodle bowl. You’ll reheat those leftover veggies from last night’s dinner in the broth along with crisp bok choy and ramen noodles for a family-friendly dinner that comes together in less than 30 minutes.

Rollover Dinners will win over your whole family with their flavor and ease, and you’ll avoid wasting food and cooking fatigue. Look out for more of these smart, delicious recipes each month here on Kitchn.