Lemon Chicken and Gnocchi Sheet Pan Dinner

I haven't had a freezer for the past few months, so I've been exploring other quick and easy, but still tasty, meals.  Sheet pan dinners have been really popular online lately.  I admit that I have been skeptical of them. Generally sheet pan meals have potatoes, vegetables and meat all cooked together on one tray, and some of the ones I see seem like the meat would be way overcooked before the potatoes are tender.  However, I do love this sheet pan chicken tikka, and it convinced me to take a look at more sheet pan dinners for quick non-freezer meals.

Previously for the chicken tikka I have put the chicken in the marinade and frozen it to simplify the process and make it a freezer meal.  Lately I have been just making the marinade and putting the chicken in it a day in advance since I didn't have a large freezer to do bulk freezer cooking.  In this way it works as an easy meal when you don't have freezer meals, or as a freezer meal where marinading  and portioning a bunch of meat in advance does simplify things.  Really any meat in a marinade in the freezer is an easy and common way to do food prep in advance.  Look at your favorite marinaded meat dishes see what you could prep and freeze to simplify your life.

Coconut Green Curry

I have been working on this recipe for about a year and a half now.  The first time I made this it was very tasty, but I wasn't fully satisfied with the proportions of the different ingredients to each other.  I wanted to try again but still had five batches of the original in the freezer that needed to be eaten first.  When we finally did finish eating all of them it took me a while to get around to making it again.  So, here we are a year and a half later, and I am finally posting the recipe.  This is why posting here is so irregular.  The development process for freezer meal recipes is a long one.  This curry is delicious though.   I think it's worth the wait.

Difficulty: Moderate
Category: Simple Side
Recipe Column: CF

Peanut Chicken Noodle Bowls

I wrote previously about smoking, shredding and freezing whole chickens.  These noodle bowls are one of our favorite ways to utilize our pre-cooked chicken.  They're delicious and very refreshing for hot summer days.  We have these regularly when we have guests as they are always a big hit and each person assembles their own bowl and can customize it to their specific tastes.  The peanut sauce is easy to make and freezes well, so you can make up a big batch and freeze it in smaller portions to save you the work the day of or you can easily whip it up when you're getting your bowls ready. This is a "Some Assembly Required" meal, but it is very easy to throw together.

Adapted from: Smitten Ktichen
Difficulty: Easy
Category: Some Assembly Required
Column: BN