The brightest winter chopped salad

and where I find inspiration

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.

What question do you get asked all the time? Is it about your job? Your hair? Your favourite hot sauce? Whatever the question, it probably reveals a lot. For me it’s - where do you get the ideas for all your recipes? And it's one I find hard to answer without sounding like a dick.

If I say to you they just come to me, then I come across as an annoying food savant. To say I am inspired by travel is also annoying (and currently completely untrue). Claims recipes are passed down the line of family cooks is well used and nostalgic but certainly not my life.

The way I most often answer is to say I'm inspired by the everyday and that's the truth, if also a bit trite. I’m inspired by the 20-minute window I have to cook between other life. Or the fact I pressed my mouse-pad 3 times instead of once for broccoli on my veg order. Or that we all have a cold that needs feeding and soothing. Often it's someone else's recipe that starts a craving and acts as a jumping-off point. Recently this one had me in the kitchen experimenting with flapjacks and a yellow sauce from Bee Wilson’s brilliant book The Secret of Cooking gave me an idea.

Sometimes I need to dig deeper though, often after a long project like a book. Something I love to do but, when it’s finished, my creative well is empty and that's when I lean on things outside food to bring in new ideas.

I'm bad at protecting creative space for myself. But in news to no one, if you carve out some space to think creatively then whatever else you're doing seems to flow better. And yes I did buy a copy of The Artist’s Way about 20 years ago. Yes I did do the morning pages, once.

A still life at the studio

I've been going to a lot of galleries recently. I'm not sure it's been intentional but I ended up at three different Picasso exhibitions, the British Museum, The National Gallery and Tate Modern and The Courtauld in a matter of weeks. Best of all was The National Gallery with my son’s class, nothing like looking at Renaissance art with 8 year olds.

I’ve also been working on a project rooted in art so I’ve had a lot of art books on my table and I’ve been looking for favourite paintings of food. It's a project with a dear friend Kate Sessions and I can’t wait to tell you more.

As well as books and galleries I’ve been image-searching artists and diving into their work (actually a fun and relaxing way to use the internet). It might seem like a not great and lo-fi way to view art. But after spending 15 minutes looking at Vanessa Bell paintings I felt great and it reminded me that you don't need to go to a gallery, own an art book or a paintbrush.

It's one of those self-fulfilling prophecies, the more you look at something the more you see it all around you. From menus to book covers, colour and art have been filling my winter.

I’ve been messing around in my kitchen making still life images that reminded me of food in art I love and the unbelievably colourful produce around in January and Feb.

This salad was one of the things I made. A way to use the rainbow of vegetables that I’d ordered, colourful January veg. I cooked other things that day too, the bright green pasta from last week and some more things to come. But this salad became my favourite of the day. Bright, fresh, optimistic (if that does not make me sound like too much of a jerk). The orange and caper dressing softens the veg a tiny bit as it sits, but still keeps a very decent level of crunch.

I ate this on its own for lunch the day I made it, next to a toasted sandwich another day and with some feta and flatbreads the third day. I can also imagine it would be great on some warm sesame oil-tossed noodles with more sesame seeds on top and a frilly-edged fried egg.

A salad that is much better the next day. A salad that brings some colour and brightness when there is none. A salad for winter days.

Find my favourite paintings of food in art and the galleries I go to for inspiration below, the recipe for this big bright bowl of winter colour.

Favourite paintings of food and art I have been inspired by