30+ Quick One Dish Dinners That Make You Drool (2024)

30+ Quick One Dish Dinners

Quick One Dish Dinners, those words together sound so good they might as well be a swear word. One dish means that many dishes to do after the meal is cooked. ONE. Yep, simple is a simple does, and that works for this quirky gal.

I might just loathe meals that require a ton of dishes because there was an incident when I was about twelve years old. Back a few more years than I care to admit, during the summers my mom would have me babysit my younger brother and sister. During one particular warm South Carolina summer day, the two of them were driving me up the wall so I decided it was smarter to rage clean rather than smack their heads together (Did I mention I had a wee bit of a temper back then?)

During my rage cleaning fit, I figured I might as well do the dishes. Remember I was only 12 years old at this point, and probably had never used a dishwasher in my life. At least that’s the excuse I’ve remembered because the event was rather traumatizing.

The sink was overflowing with dishes, and I thought it would be a genius idea to load the dishwasher. When I cracked open the undersink cabinets, there were a bajillion different bottles in there. None of them were labeled “dishwasher”, that would’ve been to easy. Rather than call my mom and bother her at work, I figured my know it all self had this and picked a bottle at random. Glug, glug, glug into the dishwasher it went, and off to scold my siblings skipped I.

Not twenty minutes later a drip, drip, drip sound was leaking from the kitchen. Sure that one of my siblings left the faucet on, I rumbled over to the kitchen to turn what I thought was a drippy faucet off.

As I turned the corner, a mountain of bubbles were slowly creeping towards me like the Blob. With my eyes as round as saucers, I stood there in horror as the dishwasher seemed to be foaming at the mouth. Panicked, I gingerly waded through the bubbles, turned the machine off, and dashed as fast as I could to find the mop. I’d be damned if my siblings would witness this monstrosity and hold it over my head.

Luckily, the mess wasn’t as big as my rushing brain thought it was, and I was able to clean it up before my mother came home from work. Needless to say, I didn’t really offer to do the dishes again before my mom showed me how to actually use the dishwasher. (Nor did I admit to her that I’d almost flooded the entire kitchen in a sea of fluffy bubbles).

Yep, that right there is why one dish dinners are one of my favorite syllables in the English language. No more dishwasher disasters for this gal. Well, that and the fact that after you’ve spent the time cooking do you really want to have to clean a bajillion dishes afterwards? Doesn’t sound like a good time to me?

Hopefully you haven’t been traumatized by a dishwasher like I have, and are just looking for quick easy dinner ideas to whip up for your family. There are over fifty quick one dish dinners for you to choose from. You can even snag this free printable meal planner, so you can bookmark your favorite recipes, and use our free printable meal planner to keep your meals organized to. With 30 quick one dish dinners to pick from you, you could have a different recipe every night of the week!

30+ Quick One Dish Dinner Recipes

Baked Salmon Salad