Joey Fatone's 3-Ingredient Goulash Is the Easiest Meal You'll Make This Week

Picture this: you’ve just come home from a long day—maybe from work or some other tiresome task—and now you have to get dinner on the table, even though all you really want to do is order a pizza and have someone else take care of it. You probably don’t even have to imagine it because it’s something that actually happens.

Cooking, especially when you just don’t feel like it, is a universal experience—even for someone like Joey Fatone. The only difference might be that his long day includes hours in the studio with one of the most famous boy bands of all time.

Fatone, who sat down with Allrecipes to talk about his Heluva Good! Dips partnership and No Team Required Tour, which will include tailgates across the country with dip sampling, prizes, and a food bank donation for every person in attendance, says that there are a lot of quick foods he makes for his family of three on those busy nights. And while chicken nuggets and pizza bagels are, of course, a staple, there’s one three-ingredient recipe that really stands out.

How to Make Joey Fatone's 3-Ingredient Goulash

“There are a lot of weird and easy things that I've made over the years, especially with my family,” Fatone told Allrecipes. “There's one that's the easiest thing ever. That's like a ‘poor man's goulash,’ if you will. It’s meat, brown gravy, and rice.”

Yes, that’s beef (seasoned and cooked to your liking), a packet of brown gravy mix, and your favorite rice—preferably instant to make cooking time even quicker.

“If you don't want to cook, just make that. A pot of rice, boil it, throw [in a] gravy [packet], mix it up. If you want to do meat, chop up some meat, put it all together—you got goulash,” he said with a laugh.

Traditionally, goulash is made with beef, vegetables (like tomatoes and bell peppers), paprika, and some kind of fat or paste to hold it together, like lard or tomato paste—and it’s served over egg noodles. However, many varieties exist that include different types of noodles and meat, or even turn the stew into a soup by adding broth. So, when it comes to getting dinner on the table quickly, it doesn’t always have to be the most traditional recipe.

Even if Fatone was a little embarrassed by his three-ingredient goulash, I can’t judge—I make my grandma’s egg noodle, tomato soup, and bacon “stew” all the time for convenience. And when I told Fatone about that recipe, he said he’s going to try it—so I think I owe it to him to give this beef, rice, and gravy dish a go before I tell it bye, bye, bye. Come on, you know I had to.