Easy one-pot dinners: 16 weeknight meals, one pan to wash

What are the best one-pot dinners?

One-pot orzo with tomato and feta, chicken and rice, and a white bean and sausage braise are the 3 strongest. The first takes 20 minutes, the second 30, and the third looks after itself for an hour while you do something else.

The trade-off in one-pot cooking is browning. Anything that would normally be seared separately loses a little, so the aromatics have to work harder at the start.

Compensating for that is straightforward once you know it is the issue. Tomato paste fried for a minute until it darkens, a spoon of smoked paprika, or 2 anchovy fillets melted into the oil each add the savoury depth a separate sear would have produced. Skipping that step is why one-pot recipes sometimes taste thinner than the same ingredients cooked in stages.

Twenty-minute one-pot dinners

These cook the starch directly in the sauce, which is what makes them fast and also what makes them fail if the liquid is wrong. Weigh the pasta once and you will not need to again.

• One-pot orzo with tomato and feta. Fry onion and garlic, add 200 g orzo and 500 ml stock with a tin of tomatoes, simmer 10 minutes uncovered, then melt feta through at the end.
• Garlic butter pasta. Spaghetti snapped in half, 500 ml water per 200 g pasta, and a lot of butter and parmesan stirred in once the water has almost gone.
• Shakshuka. No liquid beyond the tomatoes. Reduce the sauce for 10 minutes before the eggs go in, or they poach in something watery.
• Gnocchi in tomato sauce. Gnocchi needs 4 minutes and no pre-boiling, so it goes straight into a simmering sauce.

Thirty-minute dinners with rice or lentils

Rice in a one-pot dish is the most common failure point, and the cause is nearly always lifting the lid. Add the liquid once, cover, and leave it for the full time.

• Chicken and rice. Brown the thighs skin-side down, remove, soften onion in the fat, then 300 g rice and 450 ml stock. Return the chicken on top, cover, 20 minutes, rest 5 more.
• Coconut dal. Red lentils, a tin of coconut milk and 300 ml water, 20 minutes, finished with a tarka of cumin and garlic in hot oil.
• Spanish-style rice with chorizo. The paprika oil from the chorizo is the flavour base, so render it before anything else goes in.
• Mushroom risotto. The exception to leaving it alone: liquid goes in gradually and the pan needs stirring, which buys you texture.

Braises that cook themselves

An hour of unattended cooking is easier than 20 minutes of watching a pan. These 4 need 10 minutes of work at the start and nothing afterwards.

• Sausage and white bean braise. Brown the sausages, add onion, garlic, tinned beans and stock to halfway up, then 45 minutes with the lid ajar.
• Chorizo and potato stew. Potatoes cut large enough to survive the time, liquid just covering, 40 minutes.
• Chickpea and spinach stew. Twenty-five minutes of simmering, with the spinach added in the last 2 minutes so it keeps its colour.
• Beef and lentil ragu. Ninety minutes if you have it, 45 if you do not, and better reheated the next day either way.

Which pan should you use?

The pan decides how much liquid survives, which means it decides the recipe. Choosing the wrong one is the second most common cause of a failed one-pot dinner after mismeasured liquid.

Scaling matters too. Doubling a one-pot pasta in the same pan gives you a crowded pan that steams rather than simmers, so either use a wider pan or accept 2 batches. Liquid scales with the starch, not with the pan, which is the part people get wrong when cooking for 6 instead of 3.

How do you plan a week of one-pot meals?

Pick 2 fast pasta dinners, 2 rice dinners and 1 braise, then let the braise cover 2 nights. That leaves 2 evenings free for leftovers or something raw, and it keeps the shopping list short because the base ingredients repeat across most of the week rather than pulling in a new set each night.

1. 1Choose the braise first, because it decides the weekend shop and feeds 2 nights.
2. 2Put the 20-minute dinners on the busiest evenings, not the calmest ones.
3. 3Repeat 1 pan across 3 dinners so there is nothing to reorganise mid-week.
4. 4Buy the aromatics in bulk. Onions, garlic and tinned tomatoes appear in most of this list.
5. 5Keep 1 pasta dinner unplanned. It needs nothing fresh, so it absorbs whatever the week does to your schedule.

The weekly version of this is covered in meal plan for a week and the cooking-ahead version in batch cook for the week. For families where 2 people want different dinners, meal plan for a family is the relevant one.

If you want the same convenience with fewer minutes, 5-minute meals covers the cupboard end of this. For keeping the collection somewhere searchable, ReciBites vs Plan to Eat and ReciBites vs Recipe Keeper are the closest comparisons.