I love food with a little bit of kick to it. I’m not one to cringe at the thought of spicy foods. Buffalo chicken wraps.. buffalo wings.. I love them all. A couple weeks ago I saw some different variations of people stuffing the jumbo pasta shells online. This week I had a BBQ chicken breast left over and figured I would see what I could come up with.
The first step in making the buffalo chicken shells is to cook and cut your chicken up into little chunks, or step it up and use rotisserie chicken. While you’re doing this, start to boil the water to cook your jumbo pasta shells in and preheat the oven. I set the oven to 425 degrees.
You don’t have to cook the pasta shells entirely, in fact its better to have them done “al dente,” mostly cooked, but not enough for the shells to be super soft that they will rip open on you. Next I added shredded marble cheese, diced red onion and BBQ ranch dressing in with the pieces of chicken that I had cut up. Then comes the good stuff! I usually use Frank’s Red Hot Sauce but when I ran out, I replaced it with PC’s Hot Sauce! Drench the mix with that!
I’m sure red peppers would be great too, but I didn’t have any in the fridge. You can also use regular ranch dressing, but I’m currently lovin’ the BBQ ranch dressing from Kraft.
You should leave enough cheese aside so you can top the shells off once you’ve stuffed them. Stuffing them was easy, I left the pasta shells cool down a bit so I could use my hands and that was much easier than when I was trying to stuff them and not touch them using a spoon. Once they were stuffed, I loaded them with some more shredded cheese and topped them off with real, little bacon bits!
PS. I was stuck for a side and wanted something quick. I didn’t have enough lettuce to make a caesar salad so I microwaved a regular potato and then cut it up into chunks. I then tossed these chunks in a little bit of olive oil and a generous amount of cajun seasoning. I never said this was a healthy recipe.. right? But this meal was pure comfort food and lacked veggies.
After about 15 minutes in the oven, dinner was ready!
