Sheet pan meal

A sheet pan meal is a dish cooked by roasting a protein and one or more vegetables together on a single baking tray, usually tossed with oil and seasoning before going into the oven. It is one of the simplest entry points into batch cooking because it needs almost no active cooking time once the tray goes in.

For meal prep, sheet pan meals scale well: a couple of trays in the oven at once can produce most of a week's dinners with very little hands-on work, and there is only one pan to clean per batch. Cutting vegetables to a similar size and giving denser vegetables a head start before adding quicker-cooking ones keeps everything finishing around the same time.

A common mistake is overcrowding the tray, which traps steam and leaves vegetables soft and pale instead of roasted, so it usually works better to split ingredients across two trays than to pile everything onto one. Lining the tray also cuts cleanup and helps the food release without sticking.