I love one-pan meals. I don’t usually mind recipes that have multiple steps, but as I’m not cooking in a commercial-grade kitchen, I don’t have endless countertops on which to put dirty cutting boards and mixing bowls when I’m finished with them. This one pan skillet meal has a bunch of steps, but they all take place in the skillet, so I don’t run out of counter space halfway through the recipe or have tons of dishes to wash. Oh, and it’s super delicious!

Here’s the recipe, which comes from the America’s Test Kitchen cookbook One Pan Wonders.

The first step was to make the yogurt sauce. Easy yogurt sauces have appeared in a number of ATK recipes that I’ve made, and I love the freshness and tanginess that they bring to dishes. They also aren’t an exact science—for this one, for example, I simply bought a container of plain Fage yogurt, added lime juice from the partial lime I already had in my fridge, which was a little more than a half, and stirred in some salt and pepper. Then I popped it in the fridge while I made the rest of the dish!

The next step was to start cooking the chicken. We wanted this recipe to last for two dinners, so I bought four pretty large chicken breasts. Before starting, I pounded them out a bit, not in an effort to get them super thin, but just to try to get them all to an equal thickness so the cooking time would be the same. I placed them all in the pan with oil and browned them on one side for 6 minutes.

While the chicken was cooking, I chopped up the onion, then browned it for 5 minutes.

While the onion was browning (see a pattern here?) I prepared the cauliflower. Trader Joe’s sells bags of cauliflower florets, so we picked up one of those instead of starting from a whole head. I did have to chop a couple of them down to get the florets uniform, but it was much easier than starting from a head. We also subbed in baby spinach for the Swiss chard, which also came in a bag from Trader Joe’s.

 

So once the onion was brown, I added the cauliflower, then the spinach. The recipe calls for the Swiss chard to be cut into 1-inch pieces, but I found an easy workaround here. I would pull a handful of spinach out of the bag, ball it up in my hand, then tear pieces off of the handful and add them to the pan. Then I’d give it a stir to start the wilting, and repeat until all the spinach had been added.

This is the point where the spices are added—only curry powder and garlic!—plus the broth and the chicken. Then it’s covered and simmered until the chicken is cooked through, which for my giant chicken breasts took about 12 minutes.

We’re at the last step! To finish, the chicken. came out of the pan and the couscous and raisins went in. I re-covered the pan, moved it off the hot burner, and let the couscous fluff up and the raisins soften for 5 minutes.

Then all that was left was to plate and eat! I had made this recipe once or twice before, but to be honest, I had forgotten how good it was. The method of cooking the chicken—browning it, then simmering it in broth in a covered pan—yielded incredibly moist chicken that soaked up all the flavor of the broth, curry and onions. The couscous, as couscous always is, was delightful, and the sweet raisins and savory cauliflower and spinach round out the dish beautifully.

I can never get my yogurt sauce to drizzle, so I had to settle for dollops. It’s not as pretty, but it was just as delicious. And this did end up making enough for two dinners. It has certainly earned its place in our weeknight rotation!