Cooking with intuition
Food writer Anna Jones talks pandemic cooking with ELLA WALKER, and tells her why it makes sense to factor in climate change when planning dinner
FOOD has always punctuated our days – three meals, a snack, a packet of crisps, a slice of cake (and then another)... The need to eat is central to being human, but the need to cook? For many of us, that’s felt absolutely relentless over the last year.
Anna Jones puts pandemic cooking more charmingly. She calls it the “rhythm we have been building our days around”.
“I know people have become jaded with it at a times. Even I, as a cook and a writer, have become slightly jaded with cooking for a family three times a day,” she admits. “But it’s something that’s giving people life, and something they can control and be excited about.”
The practicalities of lockdowns – especially the great flour rush of March 2020 – have arguably shifted perspectives too. “We’d become so used to convenience and being able to just put our hands on anything we want at any time. Not being able to was a bit of a wake-up call,” considers Anna, who says circumstances have forced us to improvise a lot more in the kitchen. They’ve even made her “pare back” to the everyday essentials.
“I used to have every flour, lentil, pulse, every spice in the house, and I’ve stripped back my cupboards.”
Anna reckons as a result, many of us will now cook “with slightly more intuition than just following a recipe”. Recipes are Anna’s game though and hers have been designed as launchpads for home cooks, not definitive end points.
Her new cookbook, One, reflects that. It features easily tweakable noodles and pasta dishes galore (like her lime and double ginger soba noodles), as well as simple traybakes (leek and potato with romesco sauce), salads (roast carrot and grain) and grown-up desserts (chocolate, olive oil and rosemary cake), while the ‘10 simple ideas’ section (eg. four ways with peas, broccoli, peppers) rattles off swift dinner ideas.
The core of One though is “to knit two things together”.
First, “the cooking I find myself doing now” – by which Anna means the kind of cooking you do with a small child around (her son is five), as opposed to the cooking you do pre-parenthood.
“I’m a cook and a chef, I can chop things and cook things a bit quicker – so I’d make more complicated recipes and people would be like, ‘But that would take me an hour-and-a-half!”’
Now, quick and simple notches higher on the priority list.
“That’s the cooking I do for my family... those weeknight dinners, that are the most important to make delicious and be interesting, and make sure they’re full of vegetables and things that are going to make our bodies feel good,” Anna adds.
The second factor she was keen to weave in was sustainability and climate change.
“We all know that eating vegetables is the most impactful thing you can do for the planet. The second is making sure the food you buy and cook, you don’t waste,” Anna – who’s been vegetarian for around 12 years – explains matter-of-factly.
Her intention is not to overwhelm with stark facts and figures (“they are pretty gloomy”), but to provide “life-friendly, achievable sustainability information” shared via a format that feeds into how we choose and buy ingredients.
“Cookbooks are where I go before I go shopping, they’re where lots of people go before they plan meals,” Anna points out. So surely it’s no bad thing “flicking through a few recipes, and being reminded to take your tote bag (shopping), or to have a look at where your blueberries are from”.
It’s thought we each make around 35,000 decisions a day.
“A good portion of those will be around food and shopping,” says Anna. “And those we can control.”
She sees each day as an opportunity to make positive food decisions – using up leftover, learning where your veg was grown, finding out what’s seasonal – that are achievable for your life and budget.
“This year, more than anything, has proven our capacity to make rapid and radical behavioural change. Who would have thought we’d all have basically stayed in our houses for a year?
“It’s a lesson in how adaptable we are, and if we can tackle climate change in that same powerful way, then all of our individual changes will add up and make massive change,” adds Anna.
There’s power in choosing what to have for dinner, and with that comes great responsibility.
This year has proven our capacity to make rapid and radical behavioural change. If we can tackle climate change in that same powerful way... Cook and food writer Anna Jones