The Anna Jones Newsletter

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The Anna Jones Newsletter
The Anna Jones Newsletter
Pistachio + courgette pasta (salad)

Pistachio + courgette pasta (salad)

with hot honey ricotta and my failsafe pasta salad formula

Apr 11, 2025
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The Anna Jones Newsletter
The Anna Jones Newsletter
Pistachio + courgette pasta (salad)
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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.

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My pasta threshold is very high. At least once, sometimes three times a week, pasta is our dinner. March saw a trip to Italy with lots of pasta and the few times I’ve found myself going out to eat this month, guess what? It's also been pasta.

Pasta is and always will be my go-to dinner. There is pesto pasta, from a jar of homemade pesto that sits in my fridge under a slick of oil. I have bad associations with the jarred stuff from too many cheap university meals. There is quick tomato pasta, which remains one of the meals I like to eat the most, despite having eaten it weekly for nearly nine years (I always add capers and olives and often parsley to mine). There is slow-cooked broccoli pasta, essentially overcooked broccoli cooked down until creamy (it’s a miraculous transformation) with oil, garlic and chilli. Another meal I never tire of. When I am tired of these staples I delve into the A-Z of pasta, my pasta bible.

But this week, as things turned greener and brighter outside, I have been craving a different kind of pasta. Dare I say it? A sort of pasta salad. If you are anything like me, you may have spent your childhood eating some really bad pasta salads. My mum used to make one with cold pasta, sweetcorn and kidney beans. As a kid I loved it, now not so much. There are still a lot of salads out there misrepresenting the poor pasta salad - an endless stream of bowls of very cold-looking pasta with halved cherry tomatoes, sorry but no.


This is a pasta salad I can get behind. There are a few things which make this and in fact any pasta salad, worth its salt.

First of all and this is key, everything should be mixed together while warm. The warm pasta will soak up the seasoning. No cooling the pasta and then mixing everything together please.

You should eat it just warm or at room temperature. Cold pasta is pretty much universally bad. If you have leftovers bring them to room temperature before eating them.

Dress the pasta as you might an actual salad, oil, lemon, salt and pepper - do this while it’s warm and the dressing will absorb into the pasta and make everything really good.

There are a lot of herbs and vegetables in this pasta salad which makes it about 50% veg and 50% pasta. To me, this is the correct ratio. Too much pasta and it’s kind of boring.

Textures are important here. Make sure you add something with crunch, something fresh and herby.

What I love most about a salad like this is that it is happy on any table. Tuesday night dinner, a barbecue, picnic at the park, lunch at your Nan’s. This pasta salad can go anywhere. It is the perfect summer food, it gets better as it sits and is best eaten at room temp.

This pasta is really an assembly of a few good ingredients. It's a very forgiving recipe and can be easily made ahead. While I am in love with this combination of charred spring onions, crispy olive oil fried courgettes, basil and mint, pistachios, ricotta and lots of lemon you could play around with this recipe format to use what you have and crave all spring and summer.

The basic formula is this;

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