A number of Christmases ago we decided to roast salmon for our main dinner. My family has never been much enthused by the idea of a "traditional" Christmas turkey; not that turkey is really traditional! Roasting salmon was a much quicker and simpler affair and went well - well, apart from the fact that my youngest son always complains about eating fish. We have tried variations on this - mainly successful. However, a delicious-looking idea for honey roast salmon once went awry when the honey trickled away to burn onto the pan!

My Dutch wife used to be very sceptical about the British roasting habits. She was probably put off by the Sunday lunch palava of my parents and some other people. However, I am convinced that roasting can be a way of simplifying cooking.

For much of my life my only experience of roast vegetables was roast potatoes or parsnip to go with roast meat. However there are plenty of other root or other vegetables that taste good roasted. Carrots roasted for half an hour acquire a sweet taste. Many begin to caramelise.

In the last few months I have been increasingly combining roast vegetables with roast fish. Tonight we decided that we needed to use up some of the stuff in our freezer. We had a few salmon steaks - what was left of a side of salmon we bought months ago. There was also a somewhat tired fennel,  a carrot and a leek in the fridge. It is a while since I cooked with ginger and the occasion seemed opportune to use it too.

We sliced the fennel, a knob of ginger and carrot about 1 mm thick using a mandolin. The leek would not slice well on the mandolin so we sliced by hand into about 2 mm thick slices. We tossed the vegetables with a little salt and vegetable oil and laid them in a roasting pan. We then seasoned the salmon steaks and laid them on the bed of vegetables and roasted at about 180 C.

Roasting times for salmon depend on the thickness of the fish. The only rule of thumb I have seen published  is 5 minutes/cm thickness plus 10-15 min standing time. Our steaks were about 3 cm thick and we had them in the oven for 20+ minutes. Five minutes before the end I squirted a little liquid honey on the salmon. The fennel and leeks caramelised slightly and with 20 minutes in the oven the fennel loses the strong aniseed flavour it has when raw.

We served the salmon and veg with couscous, but with hindsight it would have been perfectly fine just on the bed of vegetables.