Leftovers #131
Kettle Objects reveal, winter salads, secret muses, anthems on being messy (free for all subscribers!)
500+ miles driven in the last week for various shoots across Gloucestershire and Yorkshire. Something about sitting by an aga, thick curls of soft Lurpack placed (not spread) on cooled, crunchy toast and a 6 minute egg flecked with salt. Something about dogs by the fire and pots of brothy beans steaming outside and little glimmers of desire. Something about a chicken pie and a glass of pinot noir eaten alone in a near empty pub and two hours to do nothing but read. Something about driving home listening to the same song on repeat, the sun fading right in front of your eyes.
Kettle Objects Sneak Peak
Kettle is a collaborative design project I started dreaming up a couple of years ago. It’s finally come to fruition with the first set of objects being glazed as we speak by my wonderful friend Alex, aka Zola, whose ceramics skills and patience with voice notes from across the world referring to Cornish coast and California canyon colour palettes and not really getting how volume and ratio actually works. We’re using 100% reclaimed and recycled clay from her Bow studio which has been such an interesting journey from shrinkage inconsistencies to unknown glaze outcomes. The final set will be available for pre-order on 9th December - just in time for me to whip down to the coast and get my dear friend Amelia to shoot it against the backdrop of a cold Cornish winter.
Winter salads, roasted roots, crispy sage
Planned and produced a photoshoot for Mother Root in Yorkshire, and the menu looked like this:
Maple roasted crown prince squash with crispy sage
Roasted golden + red beets on whipped yoghurt and toasted hazelnuts
Radicchio, fennel and blood orange salad with maple miso vinaigrette
Brothy beans with lemon zest and soft sourdough
Gingery coconut daal with roti and cucumber raita
I’m wanting to cook Mlookhiyeh - a traditional Middle Eastern dish with variations from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan. Chicken + earthy green stew + rice? Yep, I’m in.
Secretly looking forward to some colder nights so I can make manestra, a Greek orzo and tomato situation that I’m going to try with lamb mince.
Roast chicken stuffed with buttery rice from Cabbages World!
Actually one of my favourite things is a seafood chowder and I don’t ever make it but this changes now.
I’m making this crispy miso mushroom oven-baked rice tonight and I can already taste the umami
Drink of the season: lambrusco sbagliato
1 oz sweet vermouth
1 oz Campari
1 oz Lambrusco
Secret Muses + Chaotic Artists
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse, Vanity Fair
Absolutely gobbled up this spotlight on the renegade cowgirl behind one of America’s most iconic authors.
Things happen to her that happen to characters in literature—McCarthyan things. For instance, a month ago, when a stream was carving itself out of an epic flash flood, Britt was saddling up at midnight to rescue more horses from the desert than her barn had even lost. Setting out for three runaways, she returned at daybreak flush with 12 horses and three spooked cows. “But,” she laughs, “they just wouldn’t stop joining up.” That evening after the flood, she says, she came home to a burglar shuffling through her house while McCarthy’s love letters lay strewn about her kitchen table, and she kneecapped him with the nonlethal bullet of a Byrna pistol she keeps in her purse for just such occasions.
The Extremely Chaotic Life Of Jamian Juliano-Villani
Love me a story of balls-to-the-wall, burns-too-bright fame that implodes (but still leaves a brilliant mark). This such a cleverly paced profile of the artist who might have flown a little too close to the sun.
The debate that day was whether to be transparent about the fact that Juliano-Villani’s pieces for the Gagosian show were made by a team of painters in China. “We should fly the whole village to the opening,” she said. “If we don’t tell anyone and Roberta walks in thinking Jamian painted them, is that a disaster?” Phillips asked, referring to the New York Times’ longtime art critic Roberta Smith. “It’s about speed,” Grant countered. “If Jamian is painting for months, it wouldn’t be the same. Besides, all big artists use teams” — which is true, but not all artists design their paintings and then send the ideas and dimensions to Chinese fabricators.
New anthem unlocked
Can’t stop listening to this and wanting to scream shout it in the street. Lola has been ALL over my TikTok algorithm. Serious earworm.
