Leftovers #73: Bumper Edition!
The -ification of everything, scammers reviewed, the Joe & The Juice bread dupe, the renaissance of basic halloumi bowls!
I spoke to a man called Paolo from DHL Portugal. He had a kind voice and once I hung up the phone I thought about how this would be a great rom com plot line – an update of Nora’s Sleepless In Seattle. I then started thinking about how Paolo could very feasibly be AI and it started feeling like Spike Jonze had entered the chat. This occupied my mind for about three and a half minutes, then I had to call DHL back and I didn’t speak to Paolo but I’ll always remember the way he waited patiently for me to spell out my name. This is romance in the time of no romance. Anyway, here are all the things I’ve read, written, eaten, cooked and consumed during this late summer heatwave.
Alison Roman has opened a corner store in upstate New York and it looks beautiful and I couldn’t be more jealous because if I’m being totally frank, that is my literal dream: corner shop meets community hub meets space for designers to sell kitchen/cooking/eating related designs, and maybe somewhere for people to play gigs and cook food. Would you be in if I did this?
I thought this Grub Street piece on the decline of the celebrity chef was really interesting, especially in the context of brand culture and TikTok. We went through this trend of wanting the personal experience (like: we prefer content created by individuals not brands) but it seems to be inverted in the restaurant world. We don’t want to know about the person who is the restaurant: as they write, “we dine out on vibes.”
Saw this chicken schnitzel, so I made this chicken schnitzel with a spicy slaw and a tangle of lime-miso peashoots (I’m a broken record). Recipe-not-recipe coming next week!
You know how obsessed I am with scammers, in particular Caroline Calloway - she is truly fascinating! I loved this New Yorker review of both Calloway and Natalie Beach’s books (she’s the best friend who wrote the damning piece about Calloway in The Cut). I think Calloway has done this incredibly clever thing which is create an entire personality around the mistakes that she’s made – but she actually has talent and she has a story to tell. The thing about Beach – which the reviewer comments on – is that her best essays are the ones about Calloway. Proof that good stories outweigh good writing every time.
[Beach] explains that, after rereading the draft, she understands why Calloway couldn’t allow her to finish the manuscript. But the draft also made her furious: “It only confirmed what I’d always believed: together we could have written a solid book. And by herself, Caroline can write a great book, maybe the book she always imagined.” It’s in moments like these, when Calloway and Beach describe overlapping events from different angles, that the duelling memoirs arrive at something closer to the truth. Two writers trapped in an endless collaboration, each the perpetrator and victim of the other’s scam.
My favourite person in the world has started a Substack all about motherhood. Whether you’re going through it or not, I’m going to encourage you to read
’s words – she has a way of penning such precise and painstakingly vulnerable moments with true writerly dexterity. This is her latest post and I loved it as much as I love her:Another New Yorker piece but this time about the ‘-Ification Of Everything’ which I loved, especially as a prolific user of this extremely prolific suffix. Any piece that discusses millennial culture, colloquialism and grammar in one go, I’m hooked.
I’ve never been fussed about Le Labo because it seems so inordinately expensive and I think it’s weird that you can’t smell your own scent (so why pay £200 for one) but I caught a whiff of Thé Noir at my friend’s house, popped into Le Labo to get a sample and now I understand the hype.
Finally found a bread that kind of simulates the Joe & The Juice rye: it’s the Warburton’s soft wholemeal pitta – I saw a TikTok of a girl making the tunacado sandwich using this, and she toasted it in a sandwich press to get that criss-cross outside etching. If you’re using a toaster, toast it high once then low once more for the perfect amount of crunch. The key to replicating the JATJ sandwich is thin layers! And a liberal amount of pesto.
Meryl Streep in Only Murders In The Building confirms that she is one of the best actresses in the world!!! Even The Atlantic thinks so! Also the fact that Avery from Grey’s Anatomy is playing Selena Gomez’s love interest is catnip to me.
Categorically obsessed with all the details of this kitchen design – dials on walls, prosaic metal burners and sleek white tiles.
Some things I’d like to eat: roasted chicken legs with a Greek salad. This pasta e fagiole as soon as it stops being 30º. Same sentiment but replace it with rice cooker Haianese chicken. These adorable egg and spring onion onigiri. Something that is annoyingly referred to as a ‘wellness bowl’ but is really just halloumi, chickpeas and other delicious things thrown into a wide, shallow vessel.
I forget how smart and simple the format of Interview Magazine is. Here’s a conversation between Daniel Kwan (director of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once) and Ayo Edebiri (Sydney in The Bear) which was a very real and honest account of dealing with sudden and widespread celebrity.
My brain on a page. For the record that isn’t Paolo’s number and I wrote his name so I could remember who to ask for… not a girly ‘writing my crush’s name in my notebook’ situation although I have been known to do that too, well into my early-thirties, so sue me.
Speaking of, here’s the recipe-not-recipe for whatever I scrawled in this note.
I didn’t know what to expect reading a piece titled “Listening To Taylor Swift In Prison” (The New Yorker) by a current inmate called Joe Garcia. But it was touching and I respect the magazine for publishing it.
Taylor Swift is currently the same age, thirty-three, that I was when I was arrested. I wonder whether her music would have resonated with me when I was her age. I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Hers must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them. “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,” Swift sings, and I think of the three-by-five-inch plastic mirrors that are available inside. For years out there, I viewed myself as the antihero in my own warped self-narrative. Do I want to see myself clearly?
Leandra Medine told me to buy dark denim overalls from Carhartt WIP, so I did. Now you can be mindlessly influenced too:
Finally stopped cancelling my 7.30am spin class at 6.51am after four snoozes of the alarm and as a reward I ate a pain au chocolat and filter coffee in the sun at Jolene Redchurch Street. If anyone is looking for a great spin class, I am a loyal follower of Frenchy Peak who teaches at Boom Cycle in Monument. I don’t go to anyone else’s class because no one else plays Pendulum, Taylor Swift and Sixpence None The Richer one after the other. It just makes sense.
Equally as fascinating as scammers is the culture of tradwives. There have been a few articles published recently on this, like this one on The Cut (debating whether Tradwife content is stupid or dangerous), this one The Atlantic (about the crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline) and Anne Helen Petersen’s day in the life of a tradwife on Elle.com (and also her follow up piece on her Substack). But my favourite by far is AHP’s piece and interview with Meg Conley about The Edenic Allure Of Ballerinafarm from 2022. This quote was particularly poignant:
Maybe because Mormon culture often tells girls they should grow up to be something kind of like an AGA. Always on. Divided into compartments — one that is ready to receive whatever needs warming, one that is always prepared to produce something sustaining. A surface that is not too hot to the touch. But enough warmth to extend to all the people in the space around you, all the while burning through more fuel than you can shake a damn stick at.
From one of the above articles I learnt the definition of “imbricate”, which means: overlap or cause to overlap; and also “proselytising”, which means: the action of attempting to convert someone from one religion, belief, or opinion to another.
Saw this Instagram post of nostalgic 00s rock songs that are now 20 years old, felt old but they still bang. Here’s a playlist full of them in case you too want to shout-sing them in the dark from the comfort of your bed at midnight.
