Kirstin asked a relevant question the other day: when is it a sheet-pan dinner and when is it a tray bake? (The answer it seems, like so many things, comes down to semantics and geography. They mean the same thing.)
Similarly, as we sat down to eat this delicious dinner, we asked, “If you use some other type of cooking vessel, can you still call it a sheet-pan/tray bake dinner?” The question was inspired by the fact that I used the baking tray I use to make sheet cakes, but definitely isn’t a sheet pan.
We went back and forth on it, and didn’t reach any conclusions.
The reason for the replacement pan was that I cut the recipe in half, because I knew that 500 grams of orzo would be entirely too much for us, and I wasn’t keen to have more leftovers kicking around in our refrigerator. This meant that I needed a quarter-sheet pan, and the closest thing I had to that was this cake pan. It worked fine, but it meant this dinner was less of a sheet-pan one, and more of a bog-standard one.
Are you still with me? In any case, my hang-wringing about the pan turned out to be irrelevant, because this was delicious and we definitely would eat it again. It’s not unlike any of the number of viral Tik-Tok recipes where you bake the orzo in the oven with stock (along with other goodies), which we’ve also enjoyed.
This was a winner. Not only was it relatively straightforward to make (the thing that took the most time was slicing all the mushrooms), but it did not require a great deal of interventions while it was in the oven (which is what makes tray bakes so glorious), and it was super tasty with minimal effort.
This one is a winner.
A cookbook a month 