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40 minutes or less: a quick Paleo dinner

Written by Julie Kelly

Jan. 23, 2015

I had some serious writer’s block the other day. After taking an extended break from blogging over the holidays, I have a lot to write about, but I was having a hard time getting back into my groove. Enter my awesome friends and followers on Instagram! One quick post about needing some inspiration and *wham!* there it was! A friend transitioning to Paleo wanted some ideas for the nights where dinner needs to be ready in under 30-40 minutes, and you’re completely out of leftovers. These are the nights she finds it difficult not to reach for old standbys in the grain and dairy category. I think this is a great topic, no matter what stage of Paleo-life you’re in.

I take great care to make most of my meals in less than 40 minutes. If it takes longer than that, I need to make it on a weekend or when I have someone else is around to entertain Ivy. I talked about some of my other time-saving kitchen rules in this post, but it’s important to keep three things in mind when you want to make Paleo meals (or any meal) faster:

1. Keep the formula simple.
2. What you have on hand matters. A lot.
3. Think about your plan of attack for prep and cooking methods.

To keep it simple, I have a formula for EVERY meal I make. I didn’t make this up, but repeating it every day I cook has really ingrained it in my head. Now when I open the fridge, I see variables that fit nicely into this equation instead of ingredients for recipes I don’t know. It also makes shopping and planning really easy.

MEAT + GREEN VEGETABLE (raw or cooked) + (3 or 4) OTHER VEGETABLES (cooked)

We can look at it another way, too. How I build a plate. Fresh green on the bottom, cooked veg on top and meat. Done. This leads into what you have on hand.  

I try to always keep a big bag of mixed baby greens or salad lettuce on hand. This not only adds some green freshness to each plate, but it satisfies the second part of the equation above. The third part of the equation is usually some sort of sautee mix typically yellow onion or leek, some type of leafy green like kale, chard or cabbage and a more sturdy vegetable like cauliflower, broccoli, portobello mushrooms or zucchini. If part two of the equation turns out to be broccoli, cauliflower (whole, mashed, or riced), zucchini, or any of the more sturdy vegetables, then I add more leafy green to the saute and keep it more simple.

If you have a lot of quality produce and meat on hand, you can’t really go wrong with this formula. Ultimately, I’m working with 3-6 types of vegetable and one protein. Check out my shopping list in our free e-book, What We Eat, for more ideas.

Whole food is easy and fast if you think about your plan of attack. Because the formula never changes, the only thing I need to think about before I cook is a.) what order of prep will get everything done at the same time and  b.) what cooking methods will fit into my time slot.

Let’s use a dinner I made this week as an example. This dinner took 35 minutes including prep and plating. I even made some delicata squash, which is more of a carb than we typically eat. I just changed the way I prepared it, so it would cook quickly.

 Lamb Shoulder Steaks with Curried Vegetables and Delicata Squash

To start, I gathered my supplies and started to prep everything while I waited for the oven (375F, convect bake) and my frying pan to pre-heat. This took about 10 minutes total.

• I started by opening up my lamb steaks and setting them on a plate to come to room temp while I worked on the vegetables.
• Next, I cut and cleaned the squash and laid it out on the baking sheet. The squash went in the oven as soon as it was ready since they take the longest to cook.
• Chopping the vegetables can happen throughout this whole process, there are always a few minutes here and there when you are waiting on something else and that is a great opportunity to chop another veg. Here I chopped a red onion, cauliflower, swiss chard, fennel, half of a red cabbage, and a leek.
• I seasoned the meat and put the squash in the oven, and by then the frying pan was hot and ready to sear the meat on both sides.
• Once seared, I put the meat on another baking sheet and popped it in the oven for 8-10 minutes.

• Next, I added a half a cup of broth to the meat drippings in the pan and stirred to loosen up the brown bits.
• Then, to the pan, I added the aromatic vegetables I had already prepped, red onion, leek, and fennel, and some curry paste I had on hand. I stirred and let simmer for about 5 minutes before adding the rest of the vegetables.
• With the rest of the vegetables in the pan, I stirred and covered to cook while I took the squash and lamb out of the oven and got the plates ready.
• I plated some fresh salad greens and the squash first. Then gave the vegetables the remaining 10 minutes of my 30 to cook on low before plating over the salad and topping with the lamb. This gave the lamb a nice little break to rest before we dug in to eat.

So there you have it. A simple dinner, made with quality ingredients, using a well organized approach got this Paleo meal on the table in well under our budgeted 40 mintues! I hope this helps the next time you’re under a tight dinner deadline.