Every week, more or less, since about the January before last.
Sausages, potatoes, red onion, whatever root vegetable is in the bottom of the fridge, oil, salt. Two trays, hot oven, forty minutes, one turn halfway. That’s the recipe and I’m aware it isn’t one.
What makes it worth writing down is what happens to it afterwards.
Two trays
I spent a year doing this on one tray to save washing up, and getting something pale and wet out of the oven that needed another twenty minutes and never really came right.
Things touching each other steam. The moisture comes out of the onion and the potato and has nowhere to go, so instead of roasting you are gently poaching everything in its own liquid, which is a legitimate way to cook and is not what anybody wants from a tray of sausages.
Spread across two trays, same oven, same forty minutes, and it comes out actually brown. The second tray is the entire technique. One extra thing to wash.
Same size
Cut everything to roughly the same size and it all finishes at the same time. This is obvious written down and I did not do it for years.
A tray with big potato chunks and small carrot batons in it gives you burnt carrots and raw potatoes, and then you leave it in another ten minutes for the potatoes and now the carrots are gone. Everything at about an inch. It takes an extra minute at the board and saves the whole thing.
The peppers
Peppers, courgette, tomatoes: last fifteen minutes only.
I put peppers in at the start once. Not soft. Gone. There was a red stain and a suggestion of skin and no pepper.
The three dinners
Night one: as it is, on plates, with bread.
Night two: wraps. The sausages get chopped up, the vegetables get warmed, a spoon of yoghurt, whatever salad is in the drawer. It takes about six minutes and it is genuinely nicer than night one, which is a strange thing to admit about your own cooking.
Night three: whatever vegetables are left go into the soup, which is on the six-meal card anyway, and stop being recognisable.
The rule is that nothing appears on a plate looking the same twice. I know a family where leftovers are simply reheated as themselves and everyone eats them without complaint, and I would like to know how, because in this house a plate that looks identical to last night’s plate is a plate that gets pushed about.
The sausages
Ordinary ones. I bought the good herby ones for a while, from the butcher, and Nell noticed immediately and objected, and after about the fourth week I tried both side by side and she was right — in a tray with roasted onion and potato, the herby ones fight everything else and win.
Plain sausages, therefore, which is cheaper, and which I have to describe as a discovery rather than a defeat.
The back of the tray
The bits at the back catch. Every oven does this, ours particularly, and I have stopped trying to fix it by turning the tray because that just moves the problem.
Tom eats from the back. He has done since the first one and he does not think anybody has noticed.
Things people email to ask
- How do you stop a traybake going soggy?
- Use two trays rather than one crowded one. Vegetables that are touching release steam that has nowhere to go, so everything poaches in its own liquid and comes out pale — the same food spread across two trays roasts properly in the same time. A hot oven, a bit of space, and not covering it are the whole technique.
- What vegetables work in a sausage traybake?
- Anything dense enough to survive forty minutes: potatoes, red onion, carrot, parsnip, squash. Cut them all to about the same size, because a tray of mixed sizes gives you burnt small things and raw big ones. Softer vegetables like peppers, courgette and tomatoes need to go in for the last fifteen minutes or they disappear entirely.
- Can you make a traybake in advance?
- You can cook it in advance, but do not plan to reheat it as itself — it is much better used as the base of something else. Ours becomes wraps the next day with a bit of yoghurt and whatever salad is in, and any remaining vegetables go into soup on the third day, which means nothing appears on a plate looking identical two nights running.
- Is it worth cooking double?
- For this, yes, because the extra costs nothing but tray space. Doubling something already in the oven takes no additional time or decisions, which is where batch cooking usually fails — a heroic Sunday of cooking fourteen portions did not survive contact with our week, but a second tray going in alongside the first has, every time.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
The lentil soup we’ve made forty times
It is not a good recipe. It is a repeatable one — four things we always have, one pan, and a texture that survives being reheated on a Tuesday by a man who is not paying attention.
Six dinners on a bit of card
Not a meal plan. A list of the six things we can make without thinking, stuck inside a cupboard door, which has done more for our week than three years of proper meal planning ever did.
Feeding other people’s children
Nell started being invited places, and then people started being invited here, and I discovered I had no idea what I was doing — including a fairly frightening twenty minutes about a peanut that turned out not to be a peanut.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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