Dinner on a Sheet Pan

Original Post date 1/12/15 on Sunday Supper Chronicles Blog

GS: Dinner on a Sheet Pan, a Bon Appetit article I've been saving since March 2012 said, "Fast, easy, fresh. Take a hands-off approach on weeknights and let your oven do the work." I'm in.

I only do recipes with photos because I want to know what the finished results are supposed to look like and this one looked tasty. There's a few recipes to this BA article, but I thought I'd start with Parmesan Chicken with Ceasar Roasted Romaine. As usual I did do certain things differently - I used chicken thigh meat as opposed to breasts for fear that I would dry out the chicken. I didn't use one type of cheese, I used a mixture of all the recommended cheeses - Parmesan, Pecorino and Asiago. I also didn't add the olive oil into the panko mix, I drizzled it on top instead and because I had a box of mushrooms I threw that onto the baking sheet to roast as well. End result? This really was fast and easy! I got a tasty, crunchy topping on moist chicken (that got cold super quick on a cold plate). Verdict, however, on the romaine was not as great. I'm just not a fan of wilted lettuce no matter how much texture or salt (anchovy) you put on it.

The following weekend I wanted to try another twist on a recipe in the same article, a wasabi salmon with bok choy, but I didn't read through the recipe until the day of cooking and was sorely disappointed with it. I bake salmon all the time and this recipe was almost no different from how I would typically make mine. The "wasabi" was just a blend of wasabi and mayo and was meant to be used as a dipping sauce on the side. How is this a challenge? This was no similar to a meal we would make on a weekday. Annoyed, I made my salmon, but instead spread a siracha mayo sauce on top of the salmon and baked it with the bok choy and shiitake mushrooms as they had instructed.

For dessert, PC literally whipped a blackberry souffle just as quickly as I made dinner.

PC: Strolling through the 99 cent store I came upon some blackberries. Automatically I'm thinking souffle so with two packages in tow that was to be dessert. I can't remember the exact recipe, but I ended up cutting down on the volume of sugar. I imagine someone can substitute some other sweetener, but I opted for some granular sugar and ground it down with the hand blender to get it to a more fine state. One boo boo, which would have made this dessert better was if I used a fine strainer to push the blackberry puree through in order to eliminate the seeds, pesky seeds. Souffle rose as it should, could have probably gone slightly longer to firm it up but live and learn, right? Overall not bad.. I give myself a B+.