Easy Costco Dinner Idea: Chicken, Pesto, Mozzarella Panini
When it comes to feeding my family we have three types of meals:
1.) Home cooked meals – take more effort and usually the most affordable.
2) Restaurant meals (take out/dining out) – convenient, but are more expensive than home cooked.
3.) Meals somewhere in the middle – these are the meals that are easy to pull together using convenience foods, costing a little bit more than 100& home cooked meals, but not as expensive as eating at a restaurant.
The meals in the middle are a good mix of convenience foods/ingredients. They may cost a little bit more, but are easy to whip up on a busy school night. The idea is you spend a little bit more for convenience – but it prevents you from spending the big bucks at a restaurant or in a drive thru.
One of our FAVORITE easy meals are these Chicken, Pesto, Tomato, Mozzarella Paninis. WE LOVE THESE. They are easy to make and you can get ALL the ingredients at Costco.
Rotisserie Chicken – $4.99
Spring Mix – $4.99
Artisan Rolls, 12 ct – $5.99
Vine Tomato, 16 in box – $6.99
Mozzarella – $7.99
Basil Pesto – $9.99
These six items will cost you $40.94 . . . but you will have lots of leftover ingredients. If you grab two bags of the artisan rolls (another $5.99), your total will be $46.93 and you’ll easily have enough for 24 sandwiches!
We make these often when we have company in town. For example, if my parents are visiting from Alaska and we don’t really want to spend hours in the kitchen – this is an easy, inexpensive meal for six of us – we can each get two sandwiches, plus have leftover ingredients, for $40.94
I figure it comes out to about $2.43 PER SANDWICH
Artisan ciabatta roll – $0.50 cents each
2 slices of tomato – about $0.14 cents
($0.43/tomato, get about 6 slices per tomato, 7 cents a slice)
Spoonful of Pesto – $0.50
2 slices of mozzarella – $0.44 cents
(18 slices in each log, $4/log, $0.22/cents slice)
Handful of greens – $0.35
Rotisserie chicken – $0.50
Other things you could add to it – cooked onion, cooked mushrooms, cooked peppers and/or sun-dried tomatoes . . .do you have ideas of things you’d add?
The beauty of this meal is everyone can doctor up their sandwich however they like. I am not eating meat right now so I add extra onions and greens on mine. My kids love to add rotisserie chicken to theirs. They even taste good without being pressed in the panini.
We found this Cuisinart panini press at a thrift shop ages ago for $12! I see them at Goodwill regularly because I think unless you are making paninis often, it’s a bit of a novelty item. If you don’t have a panini press – here is how you can make a perfect panini without a panini press.
Extra ingredients? If you have extra pesto you can use a spoonful in a frying pan when you cook up eggs for breakfast – my kids love pesto fried eggs with goat cheese (also from Costco)! Pesto also goes great on pasta. Extra greens and tomatoes can be the start of a salad – add chicken! You can put the chicken carcass into a crockpot and make up broth for a future soup!
We hope you love these sandwiches as much as we do. My son came home from cross country tonight and said “I was dreaming of these paninis on my run!” They are one of our favorite easy meals to whip up with ingredients from Costco.
Do you have favorite meals you can whip together with ingredients from Costco?
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