5:30 Challenge: Make this sheet-pan supper truly meant for a weeknight

Sheet pan harrissa chicken and potatoes.

Sheet pan harrissa chicken and potatoes.

When it comes to weeknight dinner, there are few styles of recipes more appealing than sheet-pan suppers. Lauded by proponents as quick, all-on-one-pan meals, these recipes promise ease and speed. Truthfully, they rarely deliver on both.

Even those recipes by sheet-pan supper hero Melissa Clark of The New York Times, are often fussy and require marinating times and a shopping list’s worth of garnishes. These recipes are fine if you’ve got more than an hour to get dinner on the table, but they’re not exactly 5:30 Challenge material, unless you do some serious editing.

This week’s recipe does just that. Consider it a heavily redacted version of Clark’s recipe for harissa-spiced chicken and potatoes, showered with fresh herbs and a yogurt sauce. To streamline and speed up the recipe, eschew bone-in chicken for boneless thighs; these cook in less than 15 minutes in a hot oven. And cut out the spices. Rely instead on the very best harissa you can find in your grocery store, such as Mina spicy red harissa, found at Kroger.

To speed things up, give the potatoes a head start in the microwave while you preheat the oven and prepare the chicken and the yogurt sauce (which is, by the way, just whole milk yogurt seasoned generously with salt and pepper). For the herbs? Pick out one of your favorites — cilantro, mint, parsley or dill all work — or use a combination of whatever you’ve got on hand that needs to be used.

Once everything is in the oven, wipe down the counter and microwave a bag of frozen peas to serve on the side if you’d like. Or skip ‘em and keep your dinner truly one-pan.

MORE 5:30 CHALLENGE:
Warm chickpea salad
Steak fajitas

Scallops with Fennel and Grapefruit

Spaghetti and Meatballs

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