My husband keeps emailing me recipes for sheet pan suppers. For the uninitiated, a sheet pan supper happens when you take a large jelly roll pan, place a protein source on it (salmon, feta cheese, chicken, etc.), then scatter vegetables around it in a show of controlled disarray – nothing touching anything else, so everything can breathe and therefore brown. Then you shove the pan in a 400-degree oven and roast for 40 minutes or (in my case) until you smell something burning.
I’m afraid the fact that these recipes keep showing up in my inbox – usually in the mornings, before my husband gets down to answering emails, working on art commissions and running work-related errands – suggests that he’d like something for dinner besides boiled cabbage and a tuber.
Which I just find so inconvenient. I’ve had it with cooking. Ditto showering, washing my clothes and keeping abreast of what year it is. In short, I’ve had it with doing pretty much everything that keeps people functional, relevant and out of institutions. The only thing I have not had it with is pickleball. Long after the world implodes and there is nothing left but ash pyres and laughing cockroaches, I will be standing in the smoking ruins of what used to be Earth, swinging a paddle and screaming, “HEY! Will somebody serve already?!”
I think the allure of sheet pan suppers has something to do with the illusion of simplicity. Like one-pot meals (also popular right now) and three-ingredient sides (Real Simple magazine practically made these a religion), sheet pan suppers lure you in with the promise of ease (it’s just one pan!), effortlessness (just baste and bake!) and brevity (seated and eating in under an hour!).
In truth however, unless you buy – prewashed and prechopped – the massive quantities of vegetables you will need to bring even just two people to the brink of satiety – then sheet pan suppers are not easy, effortless or fast. As every recipe attests, the vegetables shrink in cooking, so you should use more than you think you’ll need. This is akin to saying the oil in my Jeep Renegade burns away quickly so I should top it off every few weeks, when in fact all of the oil ceases to exist moments after my husband pours it into the car. Bottom line: You’ll need WAY more vegetables than you think. Really, if you’re going to eat more than one sheet pan supper every six months, you should probably forget about building that deck you’ve been dreaming of and plant a garden instead.