Okay so you've got the average or more than the average amount of stress and limitations to your time and/or ability, but you like to eat good food. And you know you need to both eat healthier and more cheaply (i.e. home cooked food.) What do you do?
Well in the past few months I've kinda perfected a system for low effort cooking of very healthy meals that last for many days of leftovers. None of this is revolutionary or anything or original but IDK it's working really well for me so I'm sharing.
(Also this is for omnivores. Sorry non meat eaters.)
Basically the idea is sheet pan meals. Like I said, not revolutionary. But I've found a system to make it as easy and low-effort as possible.
Step One: Choose your meat and recipe.
So mostly I use chicken for this, because it's cheapest. But if your store is having a great sale on pork or beef, by all means. This last week I did pork tenderloin cause they were super cheap I just searched for a recipe for sheet pan pork tenderloin and adapted it.
But we're gonna assume you're going chicken. So I really only like chicken breasts, but if you like thighs you can use those because it's cheaper. I typically use about 1.75-2lbs of chicken at at time for these recipes.
So what I do is buy the thin sliced chicken breasts from the store. The benefit here is they are already pre-trimmed of all the nasty parts so you're not paying for bits of chicken you don't want and also you don't have to handle and cut the chicken yourself. All I do is open the package and I cut each piece of sliced chicken in half in the middle, horizontally. You don't have to do that, but it makes all the pieces about the same size and it fits better on the tray and then people can take exactly as much meat as they want more easily. (I'm only feeding two adults but it would work well for kids that way.)
So that's your meat, then you need veggies. I use frozen veggies because they are 1)cheaper and 2)pre-cut. You can pretty much use whatever veggies you like with whatever recipe, but I try to keep it in theme. Like with a Mediterranean dish I did onions and bell peppers and cauliflower. Recently I got a bag of "roasting vegetable blend" that was excellent with brussel sprouts, butternut squash, and onions. Get the higher quality veg like broccoli "florets" cause it's worth a few cents more. You will need/want more veggies than you think, like 20 oz total, you can mix a couple small bags of different ones per tray. And they will shrink a good deal in cooking.
Step Three: Sauce/seasoning.
And then we have seasoning/sauce. This is where I turn to internet recipes for "sheet pan whatever chicken." But I have a few I've used that I've adapted so I'll give them here. Whatever you do, basically you just mix the sauce and pour it over the chicken and/or vegetables and throw it all on a sheet tray and cook it in the oven. (Specifics below.)
4 tablespoons dark soy sauce (I've tried both dark works better)
4 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons neutral oil
2 teaspoons Sriracha sauce
4 cloves garlic , minced (or ½ teaspoon garlic powder) (I use pre-minced jar garlic for ease)
1 tablespoon gochugaru red pepper flakes (if you don't have these just either use a smaller amount of regular red pepper flakes or just more sriracha. This shouldn't be really HOT, just tangy. )
Do Broccoli and Chicken with this, and mix it all in the sauce. It makes the absolute best broccoli EVER. Like I just want a plate of this broccoli it's so GOOD.
1/4 cup feta cheese crumbled
(Sub pre-juiced lemon juice and jarred garlic for ease.) Marinate the chicken in the mixture for like 30 minutes first if you have time. Onions, bell peppers and zucchini is good for this. Don't add feta until the last 3 minutes of cooking, sprinkle feta over it and then put it back to get a little melty and browned.
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1½ teaspoons paprika (may substitute smoked paprika)
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
3 tablespoons neutral or olive oil
You can again marinate the chicken for a bit if you want. But you don't have to. I recommend cauliflower for this, with whatever else you like. Grape tomatoes are good too. For this one I sprinkled the veggies with curry powder to make sure they got seasoned because there wasn't that much of the marinade.
So for ALL of these the process is this:
Spread the frozen veggies all over a sheet pan (wrap the pan in aluminum foil first for easy clean up.) You can drizzle them with oil, salt and pepper, or a little of the sauce/marinade and toss to cover. Toss the sheet in the oven while it's still preheating. This will get the veggies started and defrosted before you add the chicken so it will all cook together.
Meanwhile get the chicken ready/wait 10-15 minutes for the oven to heat and the veggies to start cooking. (If you're using smaller/more tender veggies you can cut this time. Skip this entirely if you're using fresh.)
Mix your thin sliced chicken pieces with the marinade/sauce. Remove veggies from the oven and push to the sides to make room for your chicken in the middle. You can also simply lay the chicken pieces over veggies if you don't care about the veggies getting carmelized. Arrange your chicken and dump all the sauce. Return to oven.
Cook for about 20-25 minutes. You can check the temp of the chicken with a thermometer, but it's so thin it should be fine. This is why we start the veggies first so they can get mostly cooked and have time to start browning without overcooking chicken.
Serve with rice. I have been going the ultra-lazy route of using frozen microwaveable rice, but some of you may have rice cookers.
Congratulations you have a super healthy meal. If you feel crazy you could make a second tray of veggies at the same time and just have less meat with each meal to stretch your $. You could also add beans to your veggies and same.
My husband and I can get dinners for 4-5 days out of one of these meals. But neither of us eats a lot at a sitting, so ymmv on that.
You can also probably see how to adapt this. Find a sauce/marinade recipe, choose veggies and meat, and go! You will have to figure out the cook time for different kinds of meat though.
