Roast strawberries

and what to do with them - one salty, one sweet & a playlist for July

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.

Before we get to the recipes this week I wanted to tell you about something exciting coming up next week. I’ve put together a very special summer menu inspired by Easy Wins with my brilliant friends and zero waste food delivery brand, DabbaDrop.

Available 9th-11th July in London, the menu is a celebration of summer with bright flavours for warm weather. The menu - Roast sweet potato with sticky chilli chutney, Aubergine, peanut & tamarind curry, Lemongrass Dal with garlic and curry leaves and Double lemon pilaf.

We discount for you all ANNAJONES30 for 30% off 3 orders, including my Easy Wins x DabbaDrop. This isn’t an ad, it’s a female run business I love run by friends.

Salty

Back to the strawberries - maybe the most universally loved fruit of all? I’ve never met someone who doesn’t like them, and I’m not sure I want to.

It’s been the best year for strawberries, thanks to the very dry spring. The ground has been parched, and for strawberries that’s a good thing, they have basked. Starwberries are early, they are sweet, they are ripe, they are bright post-box crimson red right to their tops.

The best I’ve tried were from Newlands Farm from the great green grocers Shrub. They were perfect and I have thought about them every single day since - 10/10. At this time of year, supermarkets do a good job at ripe, tasty British strawberries. To keep pace with the amount of strawberries we eat I will buy them wherever and whenever I see ones that look nice.

Strawberry season will forever remind me of my summer job as a teenager on a pick-your-own farm. I worked in a little room making fudge that was sold in great big slabs in the farm shop. My boyfriend worked on the farm on the pick-your-own strawberries. On my break, I would walk through the straw-thatched fields to see him stopping to eat every perfect strawberry on my way. So treasured were the berries on this farm that there was a car check as people left, the temptation to put a few extra punnets in the boot was too much for some. Luckily, there was no way to measure how many were eaten.

As Head of Fudge (self-appointed) I was in charge of not just making the classic sweet shop fudge but was also allowed to use the pick-your-own ingredients to create my own seasonal fudge flavours. I’d never cooked as my job, this was the start. Each summer my favourite would be the brown sugar strawberry fudge. Pale pink, crumbly buttery. I’d crush kilos of strawberries and stir them into the fudge as it cooked in the fudge kettle (niche).

This week, I’m leaning into those strawberry feelings with a recipe for roast strawberries which can be taken different ways. If you have one punnet of perfect strawberries please do not make this, enjoy them. Eat them as they are. But if you have been to the pick-your-own, seen good-looking ones on offer, or have under or over-ripe strawberries this is a very good way to amp up their flavour and make them last longer.

Salty v2

Roasting intensifies the strawberries and makes them more themselves, slightly jammy but still fresh. As they roast in the tray, the juices turn the most vivid scarlet and that juice is just as valuable as the roasted strawberries themselves.

I’ve taken two recipe routes with the strawberries, one salty and savoury and one sweet but not too sweet. I’m also giving you a long list of how to use them.

This week's recipes (three of them) are for paid subscribers. If that’s you, thanks for supporting my work and recipes. I’ve made a playlist which we listened to while making and eating these. The link is below for everyone.

Sweet

Roast strawberries +

Strawberry halva yoghurt sundae +

Ricotta, basil & roasted strawberries