Having been brought up to roast dinners at home, for many years I thought that the principal use of the oven was for roasting large joints of meat or for baking bread or cakes. I am more and more convinced that the oven can simplify some meals and help deal with a crowd - with 13 people in the house over Christmas that is my focus at present.

In October when I was trawling around for ways of cooking quince, I wandered into Waitrose and picked up a recipe card for pork, pear and parsnips done in the oven with maple syrup. It required the use of hard British pears which were in then season and sort of in line with my thinking on quinces. My wife tried it and it went reasonably well apart from the maple syrup burning on the roast pan. What really appealed to me was the fact that everything was chucked into a single roast pan meaning that once the roast pan was prepared there was little to worry about for 45 minutes. This seemed like less work than fussing over pots and pans on the hob.

We have worked on refining the recipe and the pan shown here is a recent variant that included sweet potatoes. However I am convinced that the basic idea of the single tray roast meal is very sound.

A few years ago with our kids showing little enthusiasm for roast turkey we tried roasting salmon for Christmas. Our motive was that we all liked salmon (though admittedly to varying degrees) but that it roasted in less than an hour. The roast potatoes were the limiting factor. I liked something I read which suggested resting the salmon on slices of onion (rather than leaving it directly in contact with the roast pan) and stuffing the fish with lemon and rosemary. I had gathered that the onions were not intended to be eaten but I like the way they absorbed some juices from the fish.

I have read of oily fish being roasted with vegetables such as celery, fennel and carrot so have tried that a few times. If the roast takes about half an hour one problem with the fennel is that it loses its aniseed taste and seems indistinguishable from onion. On Saturday we roasted 6 trouts (3 to a tray) on a bed of onion, carrot, lemon and celery. All the vegetables were sliced thinly (about 2 mm). Half way throught the roast I added some thinly sliced fennel and chorizo; this ensured that the fennel taste was not lost and that the thin chorizo slices did not burn. We served everything with rice and (since our guests are big potato eaters and the oven was hot anyway) roast potatoes as an alternative. I was pleased that we cooked for 12 at that meal (one side of roast trout each) with one oven and a rice cooker. Of course it could be said that the 'traditional Christmas turkey' is almost completely done in the oven too but our meal certainly took a lot less time to cook. The main work was chopping the vegetables thinly.

About a month ago Mrs Oregano saw Nigella Lawson prepare her 'lamb, olive and caramelised onion tagine'. This basically involved chucking diced lamb, olives, capers and caremelised onions in a tagine or pot, emptying a bottle of red wine on the lot and putting the pot in the oven for 2 hours. Mrs Oregano tried this and we had mixed feelings about the results. We were not so convinced of how well the olives and capers went with the lamb - our taste I suppose - but thought that the lamb was very tender. However we did find this a very straightforward way to cook. A key advantage was that we left the pots alone and did not have to worry about whether the stews were burning on the bottoms of the pots; no fussy stirring.

This was put to good use in the last days. On Friday evening Mrs Oregano and I prepared four dishes. Mrs Oregano did a carrot and corriander soup, then a chicken soup. I did a venison stew and a spicy lamb stew. In both cases we put the stew ingredients in large steel pots and put them in the oven at a low heat for 3 hours. Our two largest pots just fitted into our oven! With our fridges full we were thankful that the weather was below 5 degrees C and so could safely put the pots on a table outside our kitchen door as a natural fridge.

Yesterday we served the soups in maincourse size portions with ciabbata; just needed to heat them up on the hob.

Today we served the stews with couscous and as an alternative roast sweet potato and parsnips. We offered Dornfelder red wine with the stews; Dornfelder is a wine I first tried in a restaurant near Heidelberg and somehow it goes very well with venison - it is unfortunately hard to find in the UK - it is one of the few German red wines. Thankfully it all seemed to go well and almost everything got gobbled up.

We are not roasting any birds tomorrow but plan a staged buffet with both hot and cold things.

...Meantime Happy Christmas all!

O.