Jones - A modern way to eat: over 200 satisfying, everyday vegetarian recipes (that will make you feel amazing)

Foreword by Jamie Oliver

It gives me great pleasure and pride to write this foreword for dear Anna, one of my first year students at Fifteen London. Here she is, eleven years later, publishing her very own, beautiful, well-thought-out cook book. This book deserves a home in any cookery collection because it shows you how to celebrate vegetables, something we should all be doing. It has a clear sensibility about eating well, balance and embracing the seasons, all of which gives you, the reader, a real sense of how Anna puts delicious, simple, doable meals together. Youre going to get lots of opportunities to see the family tree of how you can take something from the same humble beginning to all sorts of totally different endings, and thats what cooking is all about responding to whats around you, whats in season, how you feel and who youve got to feed. Its all very well saying that, but you need someone to explain it and get you to visualise how you can tweak, evolve and perfect any recipe, just like Annas done so effortlessly in these pages. Well done, Anna this is a great cook book and Im super proud.

For John
no words suffice, how lucky I am

Id like to make a few promises about the food in this book:

It is indulgent and delicious

It will make you feel good and look good

It will leave you feeling light yet satisfied

It will help you lighten your footprint on the planet

It is quick and easy to make and wont cost the earth

And itll impress your family and friends

The way we eat is changing

We demand so much of our food nowadays that the idea of meat and two veg every night for dinner seems prehistoric. We want food to be delicious, healthy, local, fast, cheap and good for the planet. This book shows you how to make easy meals that will impress and, more importantly, nourish your friends and family, quickly and simply.

Today, almost everyone you meet, of any age, is becoming super-conscious of what they eat and the effect on their health. They also understand the importance of a home-cooked meal more than a couple of nights a week to stay healthy and on budget. Alongside that, our awareness of provenance, quality and sustainability has come so far that if we look back at what supermarkets sold ten years ago and what we can buy now, the change is astounding. Interesting varieties of vegetable are the norm, and more unusual herbs, interesting and different grains, spices and ingredients from afar now line the aisles. So with all this choice available to us, where do we go now?

All my friends, whether or not they are vegetarian, want to eat more simple, seasonal, vegetable-led food. As the number of vegetarians in the UK slowly creeps up, the number of people reducing the amount of meat in their diet is sky-rocketing. We all know that eating lots of meat may not be the best for our bodies or the planet. For me being vegetarian is easy and how I live; for you it might be different, a few nights a week without meat maybe. However it works for you, I think we all need some new ideas.

We are reaching a middle ground, bridging the gap between heavy cheese- and stodge-laden vegetarian restaurant offerings, and the nutrition-led green juice diets. We want the best of both worlds, mind-blowing flavour that does us good: a stacked-high burger that is super tasty but also healthy, a brownie that is devilishly chocolaty but boosts our energy too, a breakfast pancake that feels like pudding but is packed with nutrition.

But I also believe that eating should be joyful and as soon as rules, pressure and diets are linked in with eating we lose track of that joy. While I eat healthily almost always, I also feel strongly that eating is one part of our brilliantly fallible humanness. So there is a place for the odd too-good-to-pass-up chewy salted caramel brownie alongside a clean bowl of grains and greens.

I want to eat in a way that satisfies but leaves me feeling light and happy at the same time. Too much healthy food leaves me miserably hungry but equally I dont like to rely on a lot of heavy carbs or dairy to fill the gaps. I use spice, texture, flavour and easy-eating grains to satisfy without heaviness.

So in this book I have tried to bring together a type of food where clean and healthy meets delicious, where sustainable meets affordable, where quick and easy meets hearty. These recipes will make you and the planet healthier; they will make you richer and wont mean you need to spend hours in the kitchen. This is a new way of eating, the way I eat, the way my friends want to eat and, I believe, how we will all move towards eating in the future.

A change in how I cook

My cooking changed when I became vegetarian all of a sudden I had to look at cooking in a completely different way. The building blocks that I had grown up with and the rules I had learnt as a chef didnt quite fit any more. So the challenge to find new ways to add texture, interest and flavour to my food have meant using a new palate of ingredients and some new techniques in the kitchen.

I am led by the things that got me so excited about cooking in the first place. The haze of citrus oils spritzing off the skin of a freshly zested orange. The deep purple brilliance when you slice into an earthy beetroot. The warming scent of ginger and brown sugar baking into a crumble, the Willy Wonka magic of melting chocolate over a bain-marie, and so many more moments when my taste buds start dancing and my heart beats a little faster.

When I write a recipe or cobble something together for dinner I always have three things in the back of my mind that shape my cooking: how will this taste? How can I make it most interesting to eat by layering up the textures? And how can I make it look the most beautiful on the plate?

Taste for me is about making the most of the ingredient I am cooking. Sometimes that means a little scatter of Anglesey sea salt and nothing else. Other times it means balancing herbs, spices, sweet and sour, backing up the natural character of a deep dense caramelly piece of roasted squash with warming spices or spiking a tomato sauce with a hit of vinegar.

Textures are often forgotten in cooking but to me they are just as key to a good plate of food as flavour, particularly in vegetarian food. I think about how children respond to food we are tuned into texture just as much as flavour. Toasted seeds tossed into a salad, charred, oil-drizzled bread next to a bowl of soup, the crunch of some peppery radishes inside a soft taco. Its texture, just as much as flavour, that hits the taste buds and tells your brain that this is delicious and helps you to feel satisfied.

The beauty bit comes from my day job as a food stylist. For the last ten years I have been making food jump off the plate and getting you to want to eat what is on the page at that exact moment: the slick of chocolate drooling out of a chocolate fondant, the drops of water on a freshly washed leaf of the freshest, crispest salad, the melting cheese and crumble of perfect flaky pastry around the edge of a tart. I know that when I cook for friends the simplest salad put on a plate with a bit of thought, or an easy bowl of pasta topped with some bright herbs and a flash of red chilli, means we start eating before weve even got a fork in our hands. But even when Im just making a quick breakfast or hurried lunch, I take a few extra seconds to make the food I have cooked the very best it can be.