Chicken, potato, and rosemary tray bake

I want to tell you about the day I learned that chicken skin does not travel.

I had made this tray bake on a Sunday and it came out of the oven exactly right: skin crisp enough to hear, potatoes gone golden in the fat that dripped onto them, the whole tray smelling like the inside of a decent pub. I portioned three lunches into boxes, felt enormously competent about it, and went to bed a man with his week under control.

At 13:00 on the Monday I opened the box in the office kitchen and found that the skin had, overnight, become a pale wet blanket. It had quietly reabsorbed every bit of moisture in the container and taken on the exact texture of a plaster. The potatoes were fine. The chicken underneath was fine. The skin was an insult, and I ate it anyway, and I thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.

So this recipe carries one instruction a normal tray bake recipe would never bother with. If you are eating it the same evening, leave the skin on and enjoy yourself thoroughly. If you are packing it for later, pull the skin off before the chicken goes into the box, and eat it standing at the hob on Sunday night as the cook's fee, which is frankly where it belonged all along.

Everything else here is deliberately boring, in the way that good weeknight cooking is boring. Chicken thighs, potatoes, red onion, courgette, rosemary, lemon, oil, salt. One tray, one temperature, and a single moment halfway through where you open the oven and shake it. Forty-five minutes of the cooking time are entirely yours to spend somewhere else in the flat. It makes three portions out of about four euros of shopping, and after the second time you will stop reading the recipe, which is the whole ambition of a Sunday dish.