Sheet Pan Suppers

Introduction

I love a good one-pot meal. Really, who doesn’t? Maximum ease, minimal cleanup, and boom: dinner. But beyond soup, chili, and stew, the one-pot meal quickly loses its legs. It’s pretty much all soupy stuff, all the time. And do you really want to eat Dad’s “famous” beef chili again? (Sorry, Dad.)
    I want the simplicity and ease of a one-pot meal, but I want more. I want the flexibility to get creative. I want an elegant, satisfying, complete meal. And most of all, I want amazing, intense flavor.
    Enter the sheet pan. Also known as a “half sheet” or “rimmed baking sheet,” the sheet pan is one seriously underrated kitchen tool. Sheet pans combine pure ease (easy prep, easy process, easy cleanup) and interesting, sophisticated flavor. Beef stew? Try rack of lamb with herby breadcrumbs and buttered carrots. All on one pan, in the oven. No mess, no fuss. Boom! Dinner.     “Sheet pan cooking” means roasting, baking, and broiling, three methods that concentrate and intensify flavor. That’s just science talking, not me. If you too tune out when science starts to talk, take courage—it’s actually pretty simple: The shallow sides of a sheet pan allow your oven’s dry, even heat to fully surround that chicken breast (or stuffed eggplant or shrimp or cherry tomato) and draw out its natural sugars, producing a crisp brown exterior and an amazingly tender and juicy interior. So you get succulent chicken, syrupy fruit, crisp potatoes, and tomatoes that taste like dinnertime candy, all by tossing a few fresh things on a pan and then simply shutting your oven door. Constant stirring? Nope. Chance of hot oil jumping up and viciously splattering your wall/stovetop/new silk shirt? No, thanks. Browning meat “in batches”? Who’s got time for that when there are guests to entertain, kids to play with, episodes of the latest cable drama to binge-watch?
    This book is a roadmap for getting impressively flavorful food on the table simply and enjoyably. Does it use a few shortcuts, like frozen rice and packaged polenta? You bet it does. Do I care about taking time in the kitchen to cook entirely, 100 percent from scratch? Of course I do . . . sometimes. Other times it’s seven o’clock and I’ve just come home from work and care about nothing but getting a passable meal near my face quickly, instead of throwing my hands up and eating cheese and crackers for dinner.
    The truth is, we don’t always have time to stand over a pot of polenta for an hour to get it perfectly, authentically smooth. That’s okay. I’ve developed these recipes for real people, taking care to focus on fresh and simple ingredients and the occasional shortcut (see: packaged polenta in a tube), in the hopes of making it easy to pull mouthwatering, sophisticated full meals from your oven.
    Sound like a plan? Great. Let’s get cooking.