Start the year as you mean to go on
I have started and restarted this entry a handful of times now. My friend Procrastination and I are still going strong. Super tight. Inseparable. But here we are. 2023, let’s go. I have ideas that I hope to bring to life this year but let’s start with itty bitty tasks first, like finishing this post.
Recipetin Eats STAN.
I’ve been cooking quite regularly from Nagi Maehashi’s website, Recipetin Eats, and her debut book, Recipetin Eats: Dinner which was released just before Christmas. For whatever reason, I decided I could live without it (the book) and could refer to the website for my recipe needs instead. Ba-bow. I was one of the headless chooks looking for it after it seemingly sold out EVERYWHERE, and nabbed a copy from an independent bookstore that isn’t necessarily known for its culinary section. Winner-winner, so many chicken dinners since.
I love Nagi and her furry companion, Dozer. They recipe test the bajeezus out of everything and use accessible supermarket ingredients so I’m not travelling across the state looking for a bit of mushroom dust to bring a dish together.
Here are the recipes I’ve cooked so far, and no exaggeration, 10/10 recommend all of them.
Salmon Patties (works with canned tuna)
Broccoli Fritters (with rice) - Dinner book only - but very spesh, because I love broccoli and I love rice and why didn’t I ever think to make them into lovely little patties?
Anyway, Nagi. Your cookbook has ‘Australia’s most popular cook’ emblazoned across it and I didn’t know Recipetin Eats existed prior to seeing your book in every store (is that bad?). Admittedly, I’ve been slow to your fan-wagon, but let it be known I am well and truly on it.
Alicia and Domestic Writing.
I have feelings I am not always able to convey about Alicia Kennedy’s writing. She is a writer, former bakery owner and vegan, soon-to-be lecturer, and a total badass. She’s intimidating to me – like the kind of intimidation you feel from reading something written by someone incredibly intelligent, who has very strong opinions, and sometimes (oftentimes) the concepts and ideas shared just fly over your head. Alicia is prolific in her writing (and so generously shares a lot of it on her free and paid subscription tiers), and has lovely conversations with some great personalities on her podcast.
Anyway, that is a long-winded spiel to lead into what I want to say, which is, I adored her recent post about Domestic Writing.
Immediately I was able to identify that I too adore the genre of domestic food writing with all my being, and up until now, didn’t know how to describe or refer to this category of food writing. What does it mean when I say I want to be besties with Nigel Slater? Why do I want to read about Ella Risbridger’s book about how a midnight-roasted chicken saved her life? Why do I want to emulate the homely style meals styled across an old wooden table vs. fangirl my way through a restaurant cookbook? It’s all neatly packaged up into domestic food writing.
Cooking, the real cooking that is the stuff of daily life, is something we have to consistently reassert as significant, important, because it is so rare that the world acknowledges it as such.
Thanks, Alicia. Again, I don’t have the words to express why this feels important and revelatory to me. And thanks for sharing the link to this Smitten Kitchen recipe for chocolate chip sour cream coffee cake, which has now been baked twice in a week. Once to save me from wasting a large tub of sour cream (yeeeowww), and the second time to relive the joy of this cake.
Stationery, not stationary.
It should come as no surprise that I love stationery. I have issues that have manifested in the form of a study, and a desk at work, full of pens, pencils, art supplies, and different types and weights of paper for different purposes. I also have notebooks. Filled, half-filled, abandoned, torn apart, and the category that makes me believe I have issues: blank notebooks. More blank notebooks than any in the preceding categories.
Here is a link for my fellow stationery lovers and hoarders. May we have the courage to crack the spine of our notebooks, spill ink on the first page, and have the will to go on when we’ve made a ‘mistake’ (see? I told you I have problems). And if you’re in the market for a new one, maybe there is a new type of notebook to try that piques your interest in this post:
Gourmet Traveller, Lunar New Year and Lee Tran Lam.
I’ve always loved LNY and how it is celebrated in my family. It’s low-key, it’s goofy, and it’s heartwarming. The family reunion, which generally falls on New Year’s Eve but doesn’t always align for my family, gives me good feels. The type of feels that sustains me until Easter when we typically see each other again (well, in the same numbers anyway). So when Lee Tran Lam asked me if I wanted to contribute a piece to Gourmet Traveller print (GOURMET. TRAVELLER. PRINT.), I hyperventilated a little before very quickly responding that I would love to (keep it cool, Diem, keep it cool).
Beyond the family and feels, I love the feast. And a LNY feast is incomplete without banh chung. Even my parents know I love this glutinous rice cake more than the little red packets of lucky money I still generously receive from my aunties and uncles albeit being very much in my mid-30s (hehe, yikes).
In this luscious-red covered issue, is a love letter to banh chung, my Vietnamese heritage, my grandmother and my parents. Thanks Lee Tran. My emails and messages to you will always be filled with gratitude for this lifepath you’ve helped me unlock.
Beyond my love letter, are several others from the likes of Ange Seen Yang, Hetty Lui McKinnon, Victor Liong, Kevin Cheng, Max Veenhuyzen, and my friend and partner-in-food-writing-crime, Harvard Wang. Harvard, look at us little imposters lurking in the pages of this beautiful magazine.
What should be obvious to me, but isn’t, is that issues like this are a big risk for editorial teams. Why? Well, that could be a whole other post. But as Joanna Hunkin, GT editor-in-chief, shares in the post above, publications only get to keep taking said risks if issues like the LNY special sell.
So with all my heart, thank you to everyone who has so enthusiastically supported this issue. May the 2024 LNY issue of Gourmet Traveller be manifested into reality for the year of the Dragon.
In the baking section.
AKA cookbooks I’ve preordered all skew towards my sustained interest in baking:
Table For Two by Bre Graham
Sweet Enough by Alison Roman
Love is a Pink Cake by Claire Ptak
Savoury Baking by Erin Jeanne McDowell
Making an appearance on my to-bake list are babka (MORE BABKA), shokupan, focaccia (I love that focaccias moment is still going. Fresh focaccia is the tits), caneles (my cousins spoiled the crap out of me on my most recent birthday and ordered the most exquisite copper lined moulds. I am not worthy), and tarts. Watch this space!
A baking book that was released late last year that has made a regular appearance in the kitchen and as bedtime reading is Emelia Jackson’s ‘First, Cream the Butter and Sugar’ – I owned it for all of an hour before I went out and bought another 2 copies to gift. I have lost count the number of batches of choc chip cookies I’ve baked. Excellent. Truly excellent. And in true baker style, so generous in the information and variations. A baker’s dream.
Reading.
Start the year as you mean to go on. Last year, I returned to reading with a vengeance. I devoured fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks with an insatiable hunger. It was joyful and restorative to find it again – as strange as that may sound. The year prior, I logged 12 books. In 2022, I finished 36 books.
So, I hope this habit and outlet remains a constant in my life this year, and all the years to come. I revel in the thought (and reality) that most nights, I see out the end of the day between the pages of a book nestled next to my partner who is heroically slogging through the world’s longest fantasy series in the history of ever (lol I joke, but honestly – go you, and go Rand).
I had the great privilege of being one of the first readers of Charlotte Ree’s pending memoir, Heartbake, which comes out in May. I love its egg yolk linen cover already. I can see it sitting next to my copy Nigel Slater Kitchen Diary III, similarly covered, albeit in blue linen (I see what you did there, Charlotte). I shared my thoughts about the book over on Instagram and honestly cannot wait to cook a meal from the recipes that will be included in the final published version:
Other things.
Keeping on the theme of ‘starting the year as you mean to go on’, here is my photo essay of how delicious and filling I hope 2023 will be for us all. Thanks so much for being here.
I have missed seeing your Sunday side project updates! Thank you for sharing what inspired you and what you loved lately 💗
I too loved that Alicia Kennedy piece. It made me think a lot about my approach for the year ahead. The great thing about Subsatck,if I want to write a domestic piece I don't have to convince an editor that I'm the right person to do it.