Bon Appetit magazine has been on a sheet pan dinner kick. Very paleo, or keto if you prefer to call it that: sheets of chicken parts and vegetables that all roast as one, just for instance.
And yesterday, a day of enforced rest and TV watching of the type I rarely do, I ended up watching some food/kitchen show with Geoffrey Zakarian, someone I like a lot and whose presence is probably the only reason I can stand watching that long dark haired skinny dip who was married, once upon a time, to Billy Joel who divorced her because she was having an affair with her clothing designer. I don't even know her name, but she's one of the three other 'talents' on this show. I believe she hosted the first season of that chef contest, no longer on, but was replaced by that the tall good-looking Aussie chef Curtis Stone.
But anyway, where Bon Appetit categorically calls these Sheet Pan Dinners, this kitchen show used the name Cheat Sheets, which is kind of cute and would appeal to Rachel Ray fans, which shouldn't even be neccessary but that's the world we live in. But you know who they are--the people always looking for ways to make cooking simpler. That said, they had two good ideas. Roast a modest selection of vegetables, then pour over a dozen eggs whisked with a dash of milk or water and some seasoning--bake 12 minutes, voila! A thin, rectangular frittata. They left it at that, but I thought it had some elegant possibilities for layering on toast like an open-faced sandwich.
Another idea was to again roast vegetables, and then distribute two cups of Moroccan couscous over them, then a cup or so of boiling water, veggie broth or chicken broth, cover tightly with foil, set aside for about eight minutes. Uncover, there's your dinner, ready for augmentation with any or all of things like mint, olive oil and lemon juice. Or nothing at all.
Besides cooking bacon this way exclusively, for years I've made sheet pan meals of duck, split and roasted with thick slices of fennel, red onion and potato. Anyone else have any sheet pan favorites?
Oh, and a little bully pulpit: I also watched a few episodes of Guy Fieri. Not a fan of the show and I've probably only seen two other episodes in my life, but yesterday I got seduced by a Maui episode and then watched a few more. I begrudgingly admit he's pretty adept at being in front of the camera and making whoever he's with feel comfortable, but the repetitiveness is quite annoying. I also noticed that every single thing that got served between buns, be that a hamburger, a Cubano or a ban mi (I thin an 'h' belongs in there somewhere), all, ALL, included mayonnaise sweetened with sugar. Yes, sometimes other ingredients too but in multiple cases just mayonnaise--but with sugar. No wonder America, as a whole, has a sugar addiction if extra fat and sugar have to be added to everything to make it taste 'right'.
(Says she who won't eat mayo on anything.)
