Melissa Clark's One-Pot Creamy Goat Cheese Pasta Makes Dinner Easy

Welcome to The Pioneer Woman Cookbook Club! This month, we're featuring Melissa Clark, New York Times food columnist, lover of harissa, hater of dirty dishes, and author of the new cookbook Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals. Ahead, Melissa talks to us about her career and strategies for streamlining the dinner process. She's also sharing her heavenly one-pot pasta recipe that your family will love.

It's always a good sign when an author actually enjoys using their own cookbook to make a quick and easy family meal. "I can tell you right now that we're eating creamy peanut chicken with charred snow peas from the book tonight," Melissa Clark says. She saw peas at the market and had chicken thighs in the freezer… and just like that, dinner in the Clark household was covered!

The idea behind Melissa's new book, Dinner In One is straightforward: 100 easy meals made in a single pot, pan, slow cooker, or skillet for quick cleanup. "I mean, who doesn't love simple?" she asks. But she goes on to clarify that "simple doesn't mean simplistic." With the latter, you've taken out so much that you don't have a lot of interesting flavors left. "Simplistic is when you've dumbed it down," she explains and instead, "these recipes are smartened up." Cook smarter, not harder, right?

Before becoming a James Beard award winner or the author of 30-plus cookbooks, Melissa was like any other college student working a restaurant job. As a coat checker in New York, she experienced her first pull-back-the-curtain moment in a professional kitchen. Unlike home cooks, restaurants "have a whole team of chefs using every single utensil, pot, and pan in the place!" Melissa says. Her goal became clear: Develop recipes that preserve the most complex flavors in the easiest way possible, so you have more time to enjoy food and less time worrying about a sink full of greasy pots.

These one-pan recipes required her to figure out ways to layer on ingredients, so everything comes out ready at once. That's how she came up with dishes like the Creamy Goat Cheese Pasta with Burst Cherry Tomatoes and Olives. Here, garlic sizzles and turns gold in the same pot she used to boil the noodles. She throws in thyme, olives, and tomatoes then cooks it all until they burst. Goat cheese and cream are stirred in, melting into the juicy sweet tomatoes, and the whole thing is topped off with parmesan for a slightly sharp kick. All in all, that's four steps, 25 minutes (give or take), and one pot to clean. Pretty impressive! 

"The Goat Cheese Pasta is such a good canvas; you can do anything to that pasta," Melissa says. If you want it to be more vegetable-forward, throw in a handful of spinach or any leftover veggies you have in the fridge. Don't have fresh herbs? Use dried thyme but crumble it first to help release the flavor. Oregano can also make a delightful substitution. Like the rest of the book, you can use this recipe as a road map with plenty of room for improvisation. 

Whether it's a sheet pan, skillet, or pot, you need to make sure that the ingredients that take the longest go in first, she explains, and there are tricks for each. For example, you have to think almost "geometrically" with a sheet pan dinner. Consider what fits on the pan and when to add it because the ingredients need room to breathe if you want them nicely browned and crispy. This sheet pan technique can be used for Melissa's favorite from the book, Chicken Tagine with Lemon and Olives or her crowd-pleasing Meatball Subs. The garlic bread cooks on one side of the pan and cheese melts onto saucy meatballs on the other. That's a "feed your family, and they'll love you forever" food, she says. "They'll be so grateful, they'll happily wash the (few) dishes there are!"