Sheet Pan Peanut Chicken and Vegetables Is a Weeknight Dream
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Chicken and vegetables in spicy peanut sauce is one of my favorite things to order at restaurants — especially because it makes such great leftovers for lunch the next day. This easy sheet pan recipe combines all that spicy, salty, nutty flavor I love so much into a lightning-fast weeknight meal. It’s full of protein and vegetables, and it cooks in about 30 minutes on just one pan, so cleanup is easier and you don’t even have to wipe off the stove afterwards. It’s great for a fast meal, or for meal prepping at the beginning of the week.
The key to this recipe is mixing up a batch of peanut sauce, drizzling it over vegetables and chicken, and letting everything cook on a sheet pan at the same time. It takes a lot of steps out of the process, and you can cook everything in the sauce instead of just applying it to the cooked food at the end.
To make the sauce, start by combining peanut butter, coconut milk, soy sauce, and lime juice with some grated ginger and whisking it until the concoction is smooth. If you like spice, you can add a bit of Sriracha to the sauce for heat, which I think sounds like a very good idea, because peanut sauce is especially good when it’s spicy.
Slice your chicken breasts into chunks, salt them, and put them in a bowl to marinate in a mixture of soy sauce, lime juice, garlic, and grated ginger. Then pour half your peanut sauce over the chicken and stir it together.
While the chicken marinates, toss your favorite vegetables in the rest of the sauce and arrange them on a sheet pan. The author suggests using sweet potatoes, broccoli, bell pepper, sugar snap peas, and sliced red onions to go with your chicken. That all sounds great, but this also seems like a good opportunity to use whatever vegetables you like best or whichever ones you happen to have in the house at the moment. Really, most vegetables are good when tossed in spicy peanut sauce, so you pretty much can’t go wrong here.
Let the vegetables cook about half an hour, then nestle the peanut-coated chicken chunks in among the vegetables and return the pan to the oven. In about 10 minutes the chicken should be cooked through and ready to eat. Move the pan up to the broiler at that point and let it cook for a few minutes to get a nicely browned exterior on the chicken, and it’s ready to eat.
Get the recipe: Sheet Pan Peanut Chicken and Veggies from Food With Feeling