Cleaning up many dishes after dinner can deter you from cooking when you don’t have much time. We believe in you, so don’t give in and order takeout. These one-pan dinners are great because they easily clean up and cook quickly. With these recipes, you can make your favorite pasta, shrimp, and chicken dishes in a single skillet.
On this list, you’ll find classic dishes like Coq au Vin and Pad Thai that look like they would be hard to make but aren’t. Let’s show our favorite kitchen tool some love with this list of best skillet recipes that can be made in a skillet.
Best Skillet Recipes
Some of our favorite recipes are shown below. We hope that you’ll like them. Read on for more information about the best skillet recipes.
Garlicky Lemon Mahi-Mahi
If you haven’t tried Mahi-Mahi yet, you should do so as soon as possible. It’s a firm, mild fish with beautiful flaky, tender flesh when cooked. It’s also very versatile because you can bake, sear, grill, or fry it and top it with many different sauces or dressings. The way we like to cook it the most? Cook it on the stove with fresh asparagus, then cover it in lemon butter sauce.
Chicken Fajitas
The classic fajita comes from the Tex-Mex style of cooking. The word first used meant a strip of grilled meat wrapped in a tortilla. You can get fajitas with steak, chicken, shrimp, or even vegetables. These can be on your table FAST because they take little time to prepare and cook. Top them with sour cream, Pico de Gallo, and guacamole, and make your flour tortillas for a special treat. If you want your fajitas to be a little spicier, you can add chili powder, cayenne, or paprika.
Classic Coq Au Vin
Coq au vin, or chicken with wine, is a classic French dish that isn’t as hard to make as it sounds. For the best sauce, chicken is cooked in a silky wine sauce and then topped with butter. Use an excellent red wine, and if it’s from Burgundy, that’s even better. This dish has a lot of flavor from the bacon, mushrooms, and pearl onions. It’s one of our favorite chicken dinners to make for guests, and they’ll be blown away!
Shrimp Fettuccine Alfredo
Fettuccine Alfredo is one of the best foods for making you feel good. It’s creamy, cheesy, full of carbs, and has a ton of flavor. This version is perfect because the shrimp adds a lot of flavors and some lean protein. If you avoid the mistakes below, you’ll be able to cook this dish like a pro in no time.
Goulash
We like that everything in this goulash, including the pasta, cooks in the same pot. When you cook the macaroni in the goulash, the pasta soaks up all the beef and tomato flavor while releasing some of its starch into the pan. This makes the goulash thicker and makes a hearty, comforting stew. Once you’ve tried this way to cook pasta, you’ll never go back to boiling water.
Chinese Beef and Broccoli Noodles
Chinese Beef and Broccoli Noodles is your favorite beef, and broccoli stir fry with noodles added. Everyone loves this dish because it has a lot of tasty sauce, soft meat and broccoli, and slippery noodles. This is Chinese beef and broccoli dish with stir-fried noodles instead of rice.
Cheesy Taco Skillet
Why does it drive us crazy to put all the parts of our favorite dish into one pan? It could be because it’s the best way to get the perfect bite every time. This Cheesy Taco Skillet has all your favorite Tex Mex flavors: spicy beef, savory black beans, fresh vegetables, and of course, lots and lots and lots of cheese.
Perfect Chicken Alfredo
Oh, chicken alfredo! It’s the classic pseudo-Italian pasta dish we can’t get enough of. You can buy a lot of pasta sauces in jars, but it’s straightforward to make alfredo sauce from scratch. This is a great basic recipe for making pasta in one pot.
Best-Ever Pepper Steak
We love home-cooked beef and broccoli, but some people won’t join the church of broccoli, no matter how hard they try (but we’ll keep trying). This version of your favorite stir-fry doesn’t have broccoli and has quickly become one of our favorites. We like to use red and green peppers because they make the dish look so pretty, but you can use whatever colors you like best. If you want things spicy, you could even add a jalapeno. Serve it with rice, and you’ll have a tasty dinner ready.
Fettuccine Alfredo
One of the simplest and tastiest dishes ever, fettuccine Alfredo is also one of the most straightforward dishes to prepare. Our recipe is not mainly traditional (it calls for heavy cream), but it is effortless to put together compared to the others. It’s so simple that you can even commit it to memory! This delectable sauce may be made with only half a cup each of butter, cheese, and cream.
Pad Thai
Our simplified Pad Thai recipe is a quick and easy way to get noodles without ordering takeout. The United States has a lot of Thai restaurants, and our simplified recipe is more like the American-Thai versions of this dish than the ones in Thailand. This recipe is easy enough for a beginner cook to make. But it’s important to note that we didn’t use some traditional ingredients like dried shrimp, tamarind, pressed tofu, and bean sprouts. Instead, we used things you can get at your local grocery store. Fish sauce is an essential part of our recipe. It’s easy to find in almost any grocery store and adds a punch of umami goodness that can’t be beaten.
Shrimp Fried Rice
Chinese fried rice is usually cooked in a wok over high heat. It is one of the best ways to use up leftover rice. Don’t worry if you don’t have any rice left over. You can use freshly made rice but rinse it first, so the grains don’t stick together. (Here is more information on how to cook rice if you need it.) When the rice is done, spread it out on a baking sheet for 5 minutes to cool down before you start making the stir fry.
Swedish Meatballs with Chicken
This classic comfort food has less sat-fat, but it still tastes great. By cooking with ground chicken, almost 9 grams of saturated fat are taken out of each serving, but the flavorful sauce and heavy cream keep the meal plenty tasty. Making this comfort food healthier is simple without taking away the flavor.
Salmon Patties
With the help of canned salmon, these easy salmon patties make a great midweek meal. Green onion, dill, and lemon are added to make the flavor pop. Salmon patties, also called salmon cakes, are easy to make. You can make salmon patties with canned salmon, shredded bread (or breadcrumbs or even saltines), chopped onion, and an egg to hold it together. The salmon patties are then quickly fried.
Why is a Cast Iron Skillet Good?
Cast-iron cookware is the best at heating and holding heat. This means that it gets very hot and stays very hot. This is important for many reasons, especially when searing meat to give it a nice char, making great hash, or pan-roasting chicken and vegetables.
Cast-iron skillets can be used to sauté, pan-fry, sear, bake, braise, broil, roast, and cook many other types. Most home goods stores will sell a good-quality skillet for $15 to $20. Cast-iron keeps and spreads heat just as well as some of the most expensive cookware. This makes it easy and inexpensive to take your dishes from good to great without spending much more money.
Are Skillets and Fry Pans the Same?
Skillets and frying pans are the same things. If you can believe it, the only difference between a skillet and a Frying Pan is in the name. “Pan” is a general term for many different cooking pots and pans. A frying pan is a shallow cooking pan with sloped sides that can be used to fry food. The word “frying” is used to make the term stand out.
A skillet looks the same and does the same thing because it is the same kind of pan. Even though cast iron skillets are usually called “skillets,” you could also call the same piece of cookware a cast iron frying pan. In other words, both words can be used to describe the same kind of pan.
Fry pans or skillets don’t have lids and have flat bottoms, sides that flare out, and a shallow depth. Because of these features are perfect for shallow frying, flipping food, stirring, searing at high temperatures, or grilling meat at high temperatures.
Conclusion
This list of these simple dinners that can be prepared in one pan will come in handy on those days when you don’t have the energy to make something worthy of being served in a restaurant. The following are some of our top choices. These recipes require fewer ingredients and less time and effort than others, and it is so easy and quick that even your children can accomplish them! So, give one of these recipes a shot if you need a quick dinner idea!
