Sausage, potato, and pepper tray bake

The night I understood the single tray was the night I did not do the washing up.

I had made a proper dinner, by which I mean the kind that uses three pans, and I had left all of it in the sink because it was late and I had stopped caring. In the morning it was still there. I stood looking at it while the kettle boiled, with the specific hatred that only cold cooking fat in a cold sink can generate, and I thought: how much of that was actually necessary.

The answer turned out to be almost none of it. I had used one pan to brown a thing, a second for a vegetable, and a pot for a starch, and all three of those items would have been perfectly content in the same tray, at the same temperature, for roughly the same length of time. I had been cooking the way recipes are written rather than the way a Tuesday actually goes.

This is the dish I made the following week, and I have now made it, with variations, something like two hundred times. Sausages, potatoes, peppers, red onion, oil, salt. One tray, 200 degrees, forty-five minutes, and one shake halfway through. The sausages render their fat down onto the potatoes. The peppers collapse into something sweet. The onion goes dark and slightly burnt at the tips, which is the best part of the tray and which you should be prepared to fight for.

It makes four portions out of about five euros of shopping, and the washing up is one tray and a spatula.

The only real rule is space. Everything must sit in a single layer with gaps between the pieces. Crowd the tray and it steams into a pale grey stew, which is edible and disappointing, and which is the fate of about half the tray bakes ever attempted.