By Marci Lutsky
I am always searching for ways to make my weeknight dinner recipes quicker and tastier. If you think I’m going to preach yet again about the Instant Pot, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to let you in on one of my other favorite techniques for getting healthy food on the table quickly. Welcome to the world of sheet pan dinners.
What is a sheet pan dinner? It basically means roasting everything for your meal on a pan in the oven. Here are five tips for perfecting your sheet pan dinner game. First, you want to make sure the ingredients are uniform in size as much as possible. Second, you want to add food in stages depending on how long it needs to cook. Meats and hearty vegetables like potatoes will need to cook longer than delicate vegetables like green beans, so they will all need to be added at different times. Third, don’t overcrowd ingredients or you will end up with steamed, mushy food. Fourth, make sure the pan is lined with parchment paper to ensure that you don’t find yourself scraping food off of the bottom of the pan. Last, make sure your ingredients are coated in olive oil or a marinade so they don’t burn.
If you search online for sheet pan dinners, you will undoubtedly pull up endless chicken recipes. Is it possible to make good vegetarian or seafood sheet pan dinners? Yes! One of my favorite recipes includes roasting gnocchi, Brussels sprouts, shallots and tomatoes that have been tossed with olive oil and lemon juice then topped with goat cheese and pine nuts. It doesn’t really get any easier (or tastier) than that. If you are a tofu fan, how about making a stir-fry without the stir fry pan? Roast tofu and broccoli in the oven and then pour a peanut sauce or marinade on top when it gets out of the oven.
While we don’t eat meat in my house, we do love seafood and eat salmon weekly. My favorite method for preparing salmon is in a miso marinade. I typically roast salmon for 13 minutes so I will add potatoes to the pan for about 10 minutes before adding the salmon and asparagus. Everything gets seasoned differently but cooked on the same pan. Not only are sheet pan dinners so quick, but clean up is an absolute breeze with only having used one pan.
Sheet pan dinners along with one-pot meals (see Tater Tot Veggie Casserole on my blog) and Instant Pot recipes have become major life savers. Our weeknight schedules are so hectic and will only get busier once lacrosse season starts this spring. I’m unwilling to sacrifice feeding my family healthy meals so I look for help anywhere I can find it. I would love to hear from you about your favorite sheet pan dinners and easy meals!
Marci Lutsky is a food blogger at Vegging at the Shore, www.veggingattheshore.com and can be reached at veggingattheshore@gmail.com.
