A roasting tin dinner formula and a favourite lemon and courgette bake

And while the oven is on...

Hi, I’m Anna Jones and welcome to my newsletter, a celebration of cooking, vegetables and life. It’s great to have you here. If you have found yourself here but are not yet subscribed then you can sort that out below….

My cookbooks (there are five) are available here. The latest is Easy Wins, a Sunday Times bestseller. There are also hundreds of free recipes on my website which you can find here.

I find myself in-between in a lot of ways. Big in-betweens, small in-betweens. In-between jackets, (big black puffa and spring cotton jacket). In-between Easter eggs and spring peas and asparagus. In-between devoting myself to my children and the pull of the work I love. Life, it turns out, is a lot of in-betweens.

Another in-between. I’m a cook who values spontaneity, who loves to make food for the exact moment and mood I am in. To hear the sizzle of the pan as garlic turns brown around its edges or tomatoes blister when they hit oil. But right now, the time of life I am in (small kids, not much time) I find myself wanting to be a different kind of cook. A plan ahead cook, who thinks about dinner more than 30 minutes before we are ready to eat.

I find it hard to cook away from the immediacy of a hot pan on the hob. To pull a piece of pasta from a frothing boil to check if it's cooked, to stick a spoon into a pot every few minutes to check for salt and spice. My impatient (Aries) nature means leaning into these visceral cooking moments.

But when I turn my oven on, I challenge myself to cook our whole dinner in it and this makes me a more thoughtful and organised cook. And every time I do this I’m reminded of how easy and calming a dinner cooked in the oven is, news to no one but me. Less washing up and more hands off time. I like it. So my cooking at home is now in-between the two.

This lemon roasting tin dinner was what came about from an oven only dinner. My veg drawer full of courgettes from Italy, the first of the British new potatoes and a few lemons leftover from an unhinged lemon order for this. It became a dinner I’ve repeated and repeated over the last few weeks.

But before we get to that I wanted to share with you a roasting tin dinner formula. It can be found in my book The Modern Cook’s Year and it's one of the flavour maps, choose your own adventure recipes, that I have been punctuating my books with for the last ten years. I’ve updated it for you to feel more like how I cook now.

I write them in the hope that they are useful when you are thinking about what to cook but the constraints of a recipe feel annoying or if you have a couple of ingredients that don’t fit neatly into the ingredients list of the recipe. These are the closest I can get to sharing how my brain works when I am thinking about what to cook for dinner.

A formula for a great roasting tray dinner;