Potato and chorizo tray bake

Potatoes, chorizo, cauliflower and spices: if that does not sound enticing enough, I'll add that there's minimal washing up afterwards.

Problems with tray bakes

A tray bake – or a sheet pan dish – is not very often successful in my view. If you take chicken with some kind of vegetables for instance, the chicken will hardly have started cooking by the time the veg are turned to mush.

Fish and potatoes – the other way round, so you have to cook the spuds first, remove the tray from oven, add the fish – and it has long ceased to be a tray bake.

Not a tray bake if it's pasta bake

If you concoct a tray bake only out of vegetables, it’s fine in terms of cooking time but isn’t it then just roasted vegetables? If you dump together pasta, meaty bits, cheese and some other such, it’s obviously a pasta bake and most of those bits had to have been precooked. Hassle, rather than dump and go.

Tray bake out of cupboard staples

My tray bake, I must admit, was what I call ‘an accidental fiend’: a good recipe stumbled upon by accident; a fridge clear-out turned into dinner. I had potatoes – I always have potatoes since we grow them, even though we normally forego them on a daily basis. I had a cauliflower. I had a sizeable amount of spicy chorizo, and the herbs, ketchup and all are cupboard staples.

Perfect tray bake ingredients

It turned out extremely good, as accidental fiends often do. The cinnamon was such an inspired touch that on several following days I tried adding it to everything I cooked.

And the best bit about this is that the three key ingredients: sausage, potatoes and cauliflower need about the same amount of time to bake or at least won’t come to harm if mildly overcooked (I add the cauli a bit later overcautiously because I prefer it al dente). That’s what I call a proper tray bake.