Chef Jamie Oliver’s ‘One: Simple One-Pan Wonders’ Shares Budget-Friendly Recipes

British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver “geeked out on the data” when he wrote his latest cookbook. “I really wanted to understand what people were buying in the grocery store, how long they wanted to spend cooking, what they enjoyed in the kitchen, what they didn’t,” Oliver told AARP over email. The result was One: Simple One-Pan Wonders (January 2023).

Flatiron Books

Cook With Jamie

Oliver shared three recipes from One: Simple One-Pan Wonders for AARP members to try:

Smoked Salmon Pasta

Spinach, scallions, lemon, curds and parmesan combine with salmon for a quick delectable dish.

Rosemary Roast Chicken

Crème fraîche pairs with sweet leeks and lima beans to elevate this weekday staple.

Baked Lemon Cheesecake

A buttery Biscoff cookie base, cream cheese and raspberries elevate this decadent dessert.

Oliver, 47, has found success and popularity through creating simple meals. He’s published more than 20 best-selling cookbooks and has led or been featured in multiple television shows, including The Naked Chef and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. He’s also an accomplished restaurateur with more than 60 restaurants around the world.

For One-Pan Wonders, he wanted to streamline cooking into one vessel and focus on simplicity. Oliver’s recipes in this cookbook use eight or fewer ingredients and have a cooking time of 30 minutes or less. Oliver also turned a keen eye toward budgeting. In the book’s introduction, he shares that more than half the recipes are approximately $3 per serving and that the ingredients are easily found at most box grocery stores. “Most importantly,” Oliver says, “[they] had to make as little mess as possible — people really hate washing up!”

Five staples comprise his “One” pantry: olive oil (for cooking), extra virgin olive oil (for dressings and finishing dishes), red wine vinegar, sea salt and black pepper. These ingredients boost flavor and are the backbone of each dish. The recipes run the gamut and include frying pan pastas, vegetarian dishes, burgers and chicken, large batch recipes and even desserts.

He’s most proud of the pasta dishes. “Those fresh lasagna sheets are the ultimate hack, and they are all just delicious,” Oliver says. Starting with fresh, soft lasagna sheets allows home chefs to trim the pasta into whatever shape they want, including tagliatelle, spaghetti and stracci (rag-shaped). Because the pasta is fresh, it’s not only malleable, it cooks faster than dried pasta. Many of the frying pan pastas, such as the smoked salmon pasta with scallions, spinach, cottage cheese and lemon can be tailored to make one serving. “So many people out there hate cooking for themselves and will instead get a takeaway, so I wanted to bring the joy back to solo cooking,” Oliver says. “It can be faster and so much more fun than takeaway.”

One ingredient that Oliver relies on throughout the cookbook is mushrooms. Button mushrooms appear in the carbonara along with smoky bacon, and Oliver uses portobellos in the roasted mushroom salad with blue cheese, basmati rice and walnuts. Cremini mushrooms star in the shakshuka with beans, tomatoes and chorizo. Featuring mushrooms prominently was a no-brainer for Oliver. “Mushrooms are varied and delicious, and a great replacement for meat,” he says. “All the recipes in the book have options for meat-free cooking, and mushrooms give you close to the flavor and texture of meat.”