Hello my dears, I hope you had a very delicious couple of days since I fed you my favourite moules frites. I know it’s not historically like me to come bounding into your inbox twice in one week (the gall, the energy!), but I just had to share this wonderful conversation I had on Thursday with my lovely friend, the incredible chef, podcaster and food writer Margie Nomura of the brilliant, eminently successful newsletter ‘Dinner Tonight’ (if you don’t subscribe yet, then you really should). Thanks so much to all of you who showed up to watch our chat, and to Margie, who was kind enough to hang out with me and talk all things cooking and Substack for waaaay longer than expected this week during my first ever live ‘Kitchen Hang’. I’ve known Margie for many years, and am proud to be able to claim that I actually played a very minuscule role in encouraging her to come over to Substack, and was actually a very early guest on her podcast Desert Island Dishes when it was in its infancy. More recently, guests have included the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Ruby Wax and Diana Henry.
We got together virtually over coffee in our respective kitchens and chatted about everything from viral recipes (some of Margie’s have hit millions of views!) and our very different journeys into food, to why we love Substack (aka you guys!) and the kitchen essentials we swear by (fewer than you’d think). We also shared our thoughts on the rapidly changing landscape of food media, mulled over how wild it is that neither of our jobs — as we now know them — existed when we were getting into food (see below), and swapped tips and solidarity on what we feed our fussy little ones (we’re only human!). Here’s a couple of little teasers below.
If you want to watch the whole conversation — all 45+ minutes of it, because, turns out we could have chatted all day, I’m sharing it below for my paid community. It was a super relaxed catch up with a friend over coffee, and it reminded me how much I love and am energised by these sorts of conversations.
As an aside, this wasn’t my first stab at ‘going live’ (see below, lol). In my former life —before kids, before COVID, back when I lived in London — live TV was a semi-regular part of my world as a jobbing food writer and cookbook author. I made frequent appearances on Sunday Brunch and Saturday Kitchen as a cook and presenter (equal parts terrifying and fun). But it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this, so fair warning: I’m a little rusty (and running on fumes after a 4:30 a.m. wake-up, which weirdly did hark back to my morning telly days). So it’s a bit on the rustic side, but honestly, that’s kind of the charm.
Anyway, I really hope you enjoy, and as always, do drop a comment below, or give this post a like or a share, as it helps spread the word.
Thank you so much to
