20 Impossibly Easy One-Pot Meals You'll Want to Make Forever

Is it really a one-pot meal if you’re left with a sink full of dishes?

The promise of a one-pot meal is simplicity. The recipe should be easy to make. It shouldn’t require a lot of hands-on time. Cleanup should be a breeze. And of course, the meal should taste incredible.

While the concept of a one-pot recipe sounds straightforward, developing the recipes for this feature was surprisingly complicated. We spent a lot of time discussing what it meant to be one-pot. Was it OK to toss ingredients in a mixing bowl before spreading them on a sheet pan? If you had to spend significant time slicing and dicing, did that take away from the promise of ease?

We created the following guidelines for our recipe developers to keep the recipes as simple as possible (more on the recipe development process below):

• So simple that you wouldn’t even need to get out a cutting board or knife.

• If a vegetable was available pre-cut (think: diced onions, shaved Brussels sprouts) or frozen at most well-stocked grocery stores, it was fair game.

• We use garlic and ginger paste instead of minced (look for it in tubes in the produce section or in cubes in the freezer aisle).

• The recipes are seasoned with spice blends and jarred sauces, including one recipe featuring our food editor's favorite sauce.

• We even banned mixing bowls—if you couldn’t toss everything together in the cooking vessel, figure out a new plan, we said!

Get the Recipe: Quick & Easy Baked Feta & Tomato Chickpeas

We narrowed the one-pot recipes down to three categories that we know you love the most: casseroles, sheet pans and slow cookers. Our casserole category includes recipes made in skillets, baking dishes and large pots, some in the oven and some on the stovetop. The slow-cooker recipes are truly dump and go—if you roll your eyes when slow-cooker recipes take as much time to prep as you could spend making dinner, these recipes are for you! And who doesn’t love a sheet-pan dinner? Now we admit that we did let a couple of recipes slip into this category that use two sheet pans. If you put too much food on a single sheet pan, it just gets steamy and can turn your food to mush. We hope they’re so delicious that you’ll forgive us.

Related: The #1 Mistake You're Making When You Roast Veggies Is Surprisingly Easy to Fix

We’re positive you’ll fall in love with these 20 brand-new one-pot recipes. Start your day off right with a cozy square of Carrot Cake Baked Oatmeal or a slice of breakfast galette packed with spinach, feta and sausage. If you’re a morning person, take advantage of that extra energy and fill your crock pot with the ingredients for Slow-Cooker Chickpea & Cauliflower Tikka Masala and press start. Or mix frozen meatballs, egg noodles, mushrooms and all of the sauce ingredients for Meatball Stroganoff into a skillet and let it simmer while you fold a load of laundry or watch the next episode of your favorite show. Whatever you make, we hope you rate and review the recipes. Real people read every single comment (really!), and your opinions help us decide what recipes we'll create next.

Convenient Casseroles

Each of these new casserole recipes is cozy, satisfying and delicious. All you have to do is layer or mix in the ingredients in the cooking vessel and bake, so prep and cleanup are a breeze.

Get the Recipe: Pizza-Inspired Pasta Bake

Dump & Go Slow-Cooker Dinners

When your evening is packed with activities and errands, taking a few minutes in the morning to get a meal in your slow cooker helps ensure there's a healthy dinner ready at home when you are.

Simple Sheet-Pan Suppers

What we love most about sheet-pan dinners, beyond ease of prep and cleanup, is that the ingredients that come into contact with the hot sheet pan caramelize in spots for an extra layer of flavor.

Get the Recipe: Sheet-Pan Teriyaki Salmon with Green Beans

Get the Recipe: Spinach-Artichoke Egg in a Bagel Hole (Simple Sheet-Pan Dinner)

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Our Recipe Development Process

Every single one of EatingWell's healthy recipes is created by food experts and reviewed by registered dietitians.

The process for these one-pot recipes started all the way back in October. Our food team began by combing through a list of more than a thousand entries in our database of recipe ideas for ones that seemed to fit the one-pot concept. We shared those ideas with our team of professional recipe developers and asked them to consider those as well as suggest brand-new ideas they were excited about. Then we narrowed the list to the 20 you see here.

The development process was not the easiest. "It was definitely a lot harder that I thought it would be, for as easy as it sounded," shared Test Kitchen Assistant Amanda Holstein. "All of the ingredients had to cook simultaneously, but food doesn't cook like that," added Liz Mervosh, a recipe developer and EatingWell's Portfolio Manager. And then some of the recipes just didn’t go as planned. Test Kitchen Coordinator and Recipe Developer Amanda Stanfield said that she pitched the idea for Meatball Stroganoff thinking, "Oh, that one's going to be cake." But the noodles turned to mush in the oven, so she had to pivot and turn it into a stovetop casserole that worked like a charm. Plus the team had to keep EatingWell’s nutrition guidelines in mind—and they were made all the more complicated since we used convenience products in a lot of these recipes, which tend to be higher in sodium (a nutrient we’re always aware of when developing recipes).

Even though it was more complicated than they thought, the developers did learn some new tricks in the process. Take the recipe for Sheet-Pan Beef & Cabbage Noodles, for instance. Inspired by a sheet-pan stir-fry recipe she saw online, Mervosh suggested the idea, but was unsure of how it would turn out. "It worked surprisingly well," she shared. "The moisture from the cabbage and the starch from the pasta helped thicken the sauce."

Once the recipes were developed, our food editors reviewed them with a fine-tooth comb. How did we feel about stirring Pizza-Inspired Pasta Bake once while it was baking to ensure the pasta cooked evenly? (We agreed it was fine so the pasta would cook evenly.) Was it OK to add farro to our Marry-Me Chicken-inspired slow-cooker recipe 40 minutes before it was done? (We said no, as we wanted this dinner to truly be dump-and-go, so we switched to barley, which can withstand longer cooking times.)

After we reviewed them and made adjustments, the recipes went into the cross-testing phase, which means they were tested again by someone other than the person who initially developed them. This step is really important to ensure that the recipe will work at home for you too! And if the cross tester finds any issues, they’ll work through those until the final results are perfect.

Once the recipes were finalized, they took a trip to one of our photo studios. Those teams photographed the finished recipes as well as step-by-step photos to help you see the process of making each recipe.

The final step was having a registered dietitian review each recipe’s nutrition analysis to make sure it's accurate. They also added the nutrition and dietary tags you see on each recipe page—heart-healthy, gluten-free, healthy aging and diabetes-appropriate, to name a few. This lets you quickly see at a glance if a recipe will work for your needs. It’s a detailed process but important to us, to ensure we’re publishing the best recipes possible for you to enjoy!

Credits

Editors: Carolyn Malcoun and Alex Loh

Recipes & Photography: Liz Mervosh; Amanda Stanfield; Amanda Holstein; Julia Levy; Melissa Gray; Renu Anshie Dhar; Fred Hardy; Victor Protasio; Jennifer Wendorf; Lydia Pursell; Josh Hoggle

Visuals & Design: Jesse Blanner; Maria Emmighausen; Sarah Maiden; Cassie Basford

Special Thanks: Penelope Wall; Victoria Seaver, M.S., RD; Hilary Meyer; Sophie Johnson; Alysia Bebel; Anne Treadwell; Dillon Evans; Matthew Francis; Allison Little; Riley Steffen; and the entire staff of EatingWell.

Read the original article on Eating Well.