Since the dawn of time, my working lunch has been yogurt, fruit, raisins and sunflower seeds. But when the photo team was working in my house, shooting the images for my latest book, “Dorie’s Cookies,” there was lunch every day for the crew — and lunch wasn’t apple and yogurt. One day we had my Farmers Market Frittata; on another, Claudia Ficca, the food stylist, made salmon burgers. We’ve had baked rigatoni, quinoa salad, stuffed peppers and lots of green salads with chunky vegetables and tomatoes from the garden.
And then one day, when time was short, we had this dish: chicken, apples, onions and kale, cooked on a sheet pan and ready in a smidge over half an hour. We declared it a triumph, and it has become one of my go-to dishes.
The expression “sheet pan dinner” is trendy now, but really the one-sheet meal is not all that different from a one-pot meal, except that it’s so much faster. The essence of a sheet pan meal is that it is, indeed, a meal, and the key to making the meal great is that everything you put on the pan has to cook in the same amount of time as its neighbors. It’s a bit of a juggling act to find foods that go together and have the same cooking times, but you can usually make the dish work by paying attention to how you cut things. Chunks cook faster than wholes; chicken and fish cook faster than beef, depending on how you slice, dice and chop; and seafood cooks super fast.
For this dish, I chose bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts — big ones; the two halves weighed in at about 1 1/2 pounds total — and then I hacked them in half crosswise. Because I’m a sucker for meat and fruit, and because it’s the season, I included cored and halved apples. There are red onion wedges alongside the apples, and kale hides under the chicken; make sure to tuck in as much of the kale as you can, so that only a few frilly edges peek out and singe under the high heat. But what really makes the dish is the seasoning, a mix of vaguely Moroccan and kind of Middle Eastern spices.
The main spice is ras el hanout, a North African blend that’s rarely the same from one spice mixer to another. It typically includes sweet spices, such as cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and allspice; musky ones, like cumin; bright notes of ginger, galangal, coriander and pepper; and some floral notes, often from rosebuds. (Here’s a recipe for making it at home.) It’s exotic, and it’s made a touch more exotic and more citrusy when you add ground sumac to it. You can substitute garam masala for the ras el hanout and lemon zest, and a tad of additional salt for the sumac, and the dish will still be terrific.
You can also change the spices completely, of course, and you can add a head of garlic, cut in half (or swap it for the onions), use pears instead of apples, or include wedges of sweet potato. Don’t skip the fresh lemon juice on the finished dish. The juice adds vividness to the spices and perks up the roasted onions and kale.
After having this quick, hearty, satisfying dish for lunch, it’ll be hard to go back to a steady diet of apple and yogurt — and maybe I won’t.
Photo by Dixie D. Vereen. This story originally appeared in my Everyday Dorie column for the Washington Post.