Preparing dinner every night can be time-consuming and sometimes even tedious, but choosing to eat out instead adds up quickly, especially compared to cooking at home. If you're looking for a middle ground to help you with your weekly dinners, meal kits can become your best friend.
While testing at CNET, I became a fan of services like Blue apron, Marley Spoon And Hello Fresh. And lately, as I've been preparing for the holidays and upcoming move, most of my free time (and maybe even mental capacity) has been occupied, so I've found myself leaning toward a certain type of food lately. No, I'm not talking about protein preference; I'm talking about dishes prepared on a baking sheet. That's why I love them.
Tray plates make cooking easier
Lately, as I've been browsing meal kit websites, I've noticed more and more sheet pan recipes popping up. These are dishes that are prepared immediately in the oven on one or two baking sheets and require minimal preparation.
This sheet pan dish—roasted salmon and vegetables—is from Blue Apron and only took 30 minutes to prepare.
In my experience, these types of dishes reduce overall cooking time. While all the food (including side dishes) is baking, I have time to clean up the mess I made during meal prep and even get some rest. By baking on a sheet pan, I can still enjoy a home-cooked meal in a fraction of the time it would normally take to prepare dinner. In my opinion, this is a win-win situation.
Some dishes prepared on a baking sheet require only five minutes of active work.
While some dishes do require some prep work, such as chopping or dicing vegetables, others, like the one above, require virtually no prep at all. For my salmon dish, all I had to do was season the salmon with salt and pepper, rinse the ingredients, and break off the ends of the green beans. The whole process took me no more than five minutes. Some recipes even include pre-chopped vegetables to save more time.
Sheet pan dishes are often cooked in the oven, but I've recently been experimenting with cooking a couple of dishes in the oven. Miracle Oven Proand they turned out just as good. If you have a toaster oven large enough for food, you can use it in place of a traditional wall oven if you prefer.
I made Honey Mustard Chicken from Blue Apron in the Wonder Oven Pro. While it was cooking, I prepared the salad.
One-pot or one-pan cooking is just as easy.
You may also see some dishes labeled as one-pan rather than sheet pan, but there is only a slight difference between the two. Sheet pan dishes are often cooked in the oven, while one-pan (or one-pot) dishes are cooked on the stovetop. However, both types offer essentially the same thing: a complete meal prepared in one bowl rather than several. You can think of these types of meals as a way to create less mess, less stress when cooking, and still have a home-cooked dinner.
Do all food delivery services have sheet pan meals?
It's hard to say for sure what every One service suggests meals on baking sheets because there are so many of them, but most of the services we tested do that.
Some recent recipes we've seen include pan with pork and persimmons in hoisin glaze from Blue apron, Cantina shrimp in one panfajitas from Hello Fresh And low carb cabbage on a baking sheet from Marley Spoon.
Home Chef also offers sheet pan meals. Many recipes also recommend using foil to make cleanup easier.
Besides making weeknight dinners easier, what I love most about these recipes is that they are usually very easy to recreate, with or without a meal kit. For example, the salmon dish above has become part of my weekly dinner routine, even when the meal kit doesn't help keep me full.
Another new trend worth mentioning…
You may already know how useful the presence of an air fryer may beand it looks like meal kit companies are catching on, too.
For numerous recipes, Blue Apron now offers alternative instructions for specific air fryer steps. So instead of turning on the oven to cook potatoes or vegetables, the service details how you can cook them in the air fryer.
To prepare the broccoli for this dish, I used the air fryer instructions.
While there are currently no recipes that cook entirely in the air fryer in the same way as sheet pan meals, there are many recipes that can help reduce cooking time. We suspect other meal kit companies will soon follow this trend as well.
