We love the idea of sheet pan dinners — the notion that you can plop everything on a pan, shove it in the oven and pull out something fabulous.

Unfortunately, most sheet pan dinners suck. Either some components are overcooked and others undercooked, the cooking instructions are so involved it might as well not be a sheet pan dinner, or, well, it’s just kind of blah.

I think you know what I’m talking about.

But I kept thinking a glamorous one could be dreamt up. Something with deep, interesting, evocative flavors — a dish so transporting that by the time it floated to the table you’d forget it was a sheet pan dinner. And yet it needs to be easy. And to work as advertised.

I love the smell of Moroccan spices cooking with tomato and cinnamon (as it does in a chicken and lamb couscous, for instance), and I thought that would be lovely to inhale on a busy weeknight. I put that together with that thing canned diced tomatoes do when you roast them, getting nice and concentrated and deep, and imagined them — zhuzzhed up with cinnamon and harissa — on top of chicken thighs with Moroccan-ish root vegetables. And onions cut so the edges get a little charred. Like that couscous dish, the one I dreamt of would have turnips and carrots.

I didn’t realize the dish would make its own pan sauce. What a delightful bonus!

So, how to you put together this dreamy deal?

First make a spice mix — toasted and ground cumin and coriander seed. Stir a little into a glug of olive oil, and toss the root vegetables in that. Put the turnips on the sheet pan first, and give it a 15-minute head-start in the oven, while you coat chicken thighs in the same mix plus cinnamon and a little harissa.

When you pull out the sheet pan to add the chicken (skin-side down), the pan is hot enough to give a little sizzle — perfect. Scatter the spiced carrots and onions around and back in it goes. Fifteen minutes later, flip the thighs and spoon on top of the tomatoes, and slide it in the oven again. Your kitchen fills with those beautiful smells, you have 35 minutes to relax with a glass of wine while the chicken finishes cooking.

It’s so simple you’ll have had time to clean up everything even before that last 35-minutes of roasting.

In fact, you’ll even have time to make a green salad — or roast some broccolini — and still enjoy that glass of wine.

For the broccolini, you don’t even need a recipe (though we’ll supply one just for kicks). Here it is in talk-through form: Toss two bunches of broccolini on another sheet pan with a thin-sliced lemon, a tablespoon of olive oil, half a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of Aleppo pepper. Pop it in the oven during the last 20 minutes of your Moroccan-spiced sheet-pan chicken dinner, and everything comes out at once.

Easy peasy. And pretty damn good.

RECIPE: Sheet Pan Chicken Thighs with Turnips, Carrots and Harissa

RECIPE: Roasted Broccoli with Lemon and Garlic

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