Occasional cooks: roast chicken, and being green in the kitchen

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Share what you're cooking this week, ask for tips or recipes for a dish, tell us about your meals out.

via Good Food

This one-tray creamy potato, mustard and tarragon chicken looks like just the thing for a cool autumn night.

The recipe does raise a question that I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on. 

It calls for the tray to be covered first in baking paper and then foil. I try to avoid using single-use products as much as possible (I'm far from perfect at this, but I'm trying).

So what's the alternative? Is a tray with a fitted lid going to do the job (if you could find one)?

What other things do people do to remove waste like this? I have some of those stretchy silicone lids, for storing opened containers in the fridge, but just as often I go for just placing a plate on top of an open container - not quite air-tight, but it mostly does the job.

But I wonder about baking things like pastry and dough, where often you're directed to cover with plastic to chill the pastry, or to proof the dough. What did we do for the hundreds and thousands of years we've been baking, before plastic wrap? Damp tea-towel?

And custard recipes want you to use plastic right on the surface of the custard while it chills - a tea-towel is not going to work there.

Anyway, I'm building up a rant so I'll stop there.

What do you do at home to reduce waste?