27 Healthy Dinners You Can Make on 1 Sheet Pan
Cooking is fun; cleaning is not. And while all cooking will inevitably require a little bit of cleaning up, there are certainly ways to keep the post-dinner dishwashing requirement to a minimum. My favorite way? Cooking a whole dinner on a single sheet pan.
In addition to the low cleanup commitment, sheet pan dinners basically cook themselves. The method lets you cook your protein, your veggie, and your starch all in the same place and at the same temperature. The key? Choosing ingredients that cook at approximately the same time and temperature, and cutting them to the right size. If you're cooking with delicate veggies like tomatoes or zucchini, you'll want to pair them with either a quick-cooking protein like fish, or with meat cut into small pieces (which cook faster than big ones). On the other hand, if you're roasting something sturdy like potatoes or winter squash—both of which may need a bit more time in the oven—leaving your chicken means it'll cook slower, which means neither your veggies nor your bird end up overdone.
If you prefer to follow a recipe and would rather not wing it, these 27 ideas will help get you started. In addition to being insanely easy, they're also pretty high in protein and lend themselves easily to meal prep, so you can eat half of it for dinner and save the other half for tomorrow's lunch.