BUNG IT ALL IN.

Some of the best and easiest dinners are a scrum. So here’s how to come out on top.

Let’s see. What would happen if I put everything I wanted for dinner into the roasting tray and baked it all in one go?  Sausages, tomatoes, chickpeas, zucchini, red onion, olives, herbs, cheese, chilli, the lot? (Not the red wine. I’ll keep that separate for now).

This would happen. 

The tomatoes get all soft, juicy and squishy so the whole thing is practically like a self-saucing roast. The sausages and zucchini bake in the same time as the tomatoes. The red onion at the base softens in the tomatoey juices, and the chickpeas take on more flavour as well. All this good stuff wouldn’t happen if they were individual team members and not in a scrum.

You could also throw in some torn mozzarella or a handful of those boring bambini bocconcini for the last 10 minutes to melt into cheesy blobs. This has the added advantage of making it feel like you’re eating a pizza topping.

It also makes you feel like you’re a scrum master.

What’s a Scrum Master?

 Tedious gender-specific terminology aside, a scrum master is one who manages a scrum, or a team of disparate people with a common aim.  If you’re already familiar with the term, then look away while I invite Australia’s most interesting business software developers, Atlassian, to define it.

“Scrum is an agile project management framework that helps teams structure and manage their work through a set of values, principles, and practices. Much like a rugby team (where it gets its name) training for the big game, scrum encourages teams to learn through experiences, self-organize while working on a problem, and reflect on their wins and losses to continuously improve.”

So a scrum master is highly valued, highly paid, and trained to help business teams help themselves, guiding them through daily ‘standups’, ‘sprints’ and ‘retrospectives’.

But here’s the thing - don’t we do all that every time we head into the kitchen to cook? We’re all about daily stand-ups (chopping, cooking, washing-up), sprints (achieving desired results within a set period of time), and retrospectives ( “not doing that again”).

So here’s how to help those tomatoes, sausages and chickpeas work as a team and be the best versions of themselves. Let’s scrum, team.

ROAST TOMATO, CHICKPEA AND SAUSAGE SCRUM

• 1 kg good tomatoes eg truss, cherry, heirloom

• 1 red onion, halved and finely sliced

• 1 cup tomato sugo

• 1 tsp ground cumin

• 1 tsp cinnamon

• extra virgin olive oil

• 400 g canned chickpeas, drained and rinsed

• 2 chunky pork sausages per person

• 2 zucchini, thickly sliced

• Half cup black or green olives

• Half a red chilli, sliced

• Sea salt and black pepper

• 1 mozzarella ball, drained and torn apart (optional)

• handful of fresh coriander

Heat the oven to 220C. Line a baking tray with baking paper, strew with most of the red onion, and drizzle with olive oil.

Combine tomato sugo, a dash of olive oil, a dash of water or wine, cumin, cinnamon and chickpeas in a bowl, stirring, then pour the mixture over the onion.

Arrange sausages and zucchini on top.

Tuck in the tomatoes – cut most in half, leave smaller ones whole – and scatter with olives and chilli.

Season with sea salt and pepper and another drizzle of olive oil.

Bake for 30 minutes, turning the temp down to 200C after 20 minutes.

Add the torn mozzarella, and bake for a further ten minutes or until the sausages are crisp-skinned, tomatoes are squishy and zucchini is softened.

Strew with coriander and remaining finely sliced red onion and serve.

# Consider serving with wedges of lemon, or indeed, adding them to the scrum.

# Swap out the snags for chicken thighs, or leave out the meat altogether because there’s enough going on.

#  Serve with pesto, or garlicky aioli; neither of which it needs but both of which it could handle.

Thanks for dropping by! And as always, thanks for your comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Terry for the sausages that started this pile-on in the first place.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands and waters upon which I work, live, cook and play; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to the continuing strength and resilience of First Nations people and their communities and cultures.