Hello my friends. I hope you’re all having lovely, relaxing weekends, and gearing up for a spooky Halloween, if you celebrate it. We’ll be swerving it this year, as I’m just coming out the other side of a week of illness with my family. We’ve had Covid, I discovered, shortly after sending out this noodle newsletter - seemingly of the retro, hardcore variety, and what started as an intense bought of illness has given way to fatigue, and finally a sense of climbing the walls somewhat. Thank God for Substack, and our garden, which have both bought snatched moments of relief, oh and Hey Duggee, which has got us through some knackered parenting scrapes. I’ve lost my sense of taste and smell, which is at once depressing and quite scary, though friends have assured me it’ll come back, there’s always that horrible anxiety that it won’t, and then where will I be? Eating without tasting is so utterly unsatisfying, I can barely get through a plate of food, so really not living up to the name of this newsletter right now…
It’s all been an unwelcome flashback to the dark days of the pandemic, and perhaps as a sort of reaction to that, I’ve found myself craving connection and inspiration more intensely than ever. Which is what brings me here, to your Sunday inbox, not with a recipe, but with a flutter of excitement about kicking off a new thing that I’ve been thinking about doing for quite a while, but have been procrastinating about. I’m calling it, simply, ‘The Sunday Slice’, and it’s a new, regular (though how regular will depend, I’m thinking once a month to start with) thread for my paid community that starts a discussion down in the comments about what we’ve all been cooking, eating, reading and enjoying. Some weeks there might be a leading topic or theme, but let’s see how we get on. The main idea though, is that this will be collaborative.
Think of it as like a sort of cosy, newsletter version of grabbing coffee and slice of cake (French apple cake, perhaps?) with a friend and catching up, and I’m hoping that you might find the time to carve out five minutes with a cup of something nice to connect with me here, and with some of the other members of this wonderful growing global community. Who knows, maybe one day this could turn into an IRL get together with IRL food. I’d love that. Sometimes it’ll include a voice note and video from me, just not when I’m hoarse and pasty-faced and ill. I’ll spare you that.
It’ll also serve as a dispatch of sorts from my week, with more personal/candid insights, seasonal reflections and recommendations from my life and home by the sea. This week I’m talking about loosely about nurture, specifically what I’ve been cooking to help us heal (even though we’ve not felt like eating), as well as a new cookbook that’s been a true source of escape and comfort.