Sh*t in a pan: A love story
When cooking for one, washing up multiple pots and pans feels like extreme overkill and is incredibly tedious. Growing up in a meat and 3 veg household meant my default setting was usually a frypan, 2 saucepans and maybe a microwave dish. As an adult, struggling to maintain this dinner ethos is probably where cooking for myself first started to come unstuck.
Enter 'Sh*t In A Pan'
Pretty straightforward - it's what can be cooked using only one dish. It's fast and convenient and uses whatever is on hand. I'm not talking about batch cooking or things like lasagne. This is all about those one pot wonders that get dinner sorted just for tonight. Results are pretty 50/50 and really depend entirely on how much effort I've got in the tank. I've had some pretty great wins, and a spectacular amount of fails so bad even Darryl Kerrigan would struggle to complement them.
Sh*t in a pan fail: An absolute horror show of a curry. Well, something more curry adjacent. It needed vegetables so I threw in a bag of chopped frozen spinach which then made it watery. With no cornflour to thicken it, I experimented with using powered psyllium husk which gave it a fascinating, almost gel like consistency. Not good. And of course because I kept adding things to try and make it better, it turned into a family sized meal. I got one bowl down and put the rest in the fridge to die. Should have tossed it out on the spot but why do that when I could look at it in the fridge and feel guilty about it until it's no longer safe to eat?
Sh*t in a pan win: Cous cous with cherry tomatoes, fetta, nuts (usually walnuts) and fresh spinach mixed through with sliced steak. Season with whatever condiments you have in the fridge if you're feeling fancy. Counts as 1 pan because you can prep the cous cous in the bowl you're going to eat it in. This is a consistent winner and something I put in semi-regular rotation for a few weeks at a time. It adapts really well to whatever you have on hand. Basically the formula is protein + fetta + nuts + veg that either don't need cooking, or can quickly fry off in the same pan as the protein.
One of the big drawbacks of one pot wonders is that after a while all the textures start to feel the same - hot, wet and soft (that came out wrong but you know what I mean). It became a bit of a joke with one of my other friends (who also, as we later found out, also has ADHD) to send a photo of my latest win or fail. Despite all this, it will remain in the toolkit and continue to serve me mediocrely and I will never not enjoy calling it shit in a pan.
Had your own one pot wins or disasters? Share them in the comments!
