I made them this week because, to be extremely honest with you, I was in a weird funk of joy: that strange numbness that one gets when one’s dreams come true (and I hope I’m not alone in that feeling).

My book is a bestseller again for the second week in a row. There are roses in my garden. I get to swim in the pond at Knepp, which is one of my favourite places on Earth, whenever I want; and I didn’t get a single duck mite bite from plunging in last weekend. The vicar, who is our friend, came round to talk with us pre-wedding and she brought the most amazing blousy peonies which are throwing themselves gloriously across the kitchen counter. My book is a bestseller for the second week in a row, this goal I’ve been striving for my entire working life, how to be happy enough!

The point is that too much of any feeling is not good for my equilibrium: I’m a delicate ecosystem, I’m a temperate rainforest! Anyway luckily I know what to do in these moods. Let me tell you something very important: there is an absolutely flawless four-part cure for too much happiness, too much sadness, or too little energy, or too much or too little anything.

It is unfortunately very simple and very easy to implement but it often does not feel like that….but it is. It is so simple and if you complete all four steps you will feel better.

I went outside and cut some rosemary from the garden, which continues to blow my mind with beauty. I talked about this with Alice Vincent last week in a Live, which I have never done before.

The most fun part was when she did a quick-fire round of “Chic or Not Chic?” which is the best interview question I have ever asked. Trifle? Chic. Coloured glasses? Only chic if you REALLY believe in your own powers. The Vaseline-lens effect of my camera is unintentional and to do with having a very old phone, but quite flattering in my heatwave semi-nudity— and if you subscribe to Alice you can see it all (all the video, not all my nudity. I have a dress on the WHOLE time).

So anyway: I went into the garden (Step One) and cut some rosemary and called up a friend to see if she wanted to have coffee (Step Four) and I said I would go to her house so I had a reason to walk somewhere (Step Three).

I cut three big sprigs of rosemary and shredded them very finely; then weighed out everything else. Step Two in action.

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I just made a pot of coffee: the moka pot makes me so happy, the coffee makes me so happy. I just reintroduced caffeine into my life. They say this one tastes like poached plums, and I drank it black in a little mug from Porty Books which I think is so beautiful. It’s like an enamel camping cup, but china. I wish I had more exactly like it in different greens, different stags and unicorns, different strange designs.

Someone who lived here before us planted a hazelnut in a pot and now it is a hazel tree, roots bursting through the plastic and deep into the ground, and it’s probably a problem but it’s so beautiful too. I put the red blanket on the bricks and cut the mouldy part off a peach with a sharp little knife and ate the rest, and the cat was standing on the wall.

At four this morning I saw a fox standing on the roof opposite and the fox saw me and we stood there both for what felt like a long time, just seeing each other.

I keep looking at the little picture my publishers sent me that says Instant Sunday Times Bestseller across my book. I keep looking at it and the Waterstones Non-Fiction list, on which my book is outselling, e.g., Voice Of A Generation Lena Dunham, and feeling so strange, so electric and so happy and so strange.

If you missed it, The Kitchen Book is an instant Sunday Times bestseller. I don’t know what to say about it except that we did it; I made it for you, with you. I made it because I wanted to make art in my own way. I wanted to do it in a way that felt alive and real and that was alive and real, no artifice, no trying to game the system, no algorithmic tricks.

I got sent a book this week, a proof, with much ceremony and beautiful wrapping, and I am quite certain there are at minimum passages in it that are AI. It’s a memoir sort of book, and I think there are things in there no living being would construct: the feeling I get when I read it is the feeling that there is something between me and the author, something inhuman. It’s been done expensively and well. I won’t name the book, in case I’m wrong, but I think I’m right. I see it more and more on here; more and more on Instagram I see “And honestly?” or “perfectly captures” or whatever, and I feel this bleak sick feeling in my throat and before I know it I know it, if you know what I mean. I know I’m looking at something that isn’t real.

It happens more and more lately and I suppose in this book, my book, I wanted to make the opposite of that: a book no robot could replicate, a book that was from me and of me and for you. I didn’t want anything artificial anywhere in the text or the pictures, and though of course I would never usually cook six to ten meals in a single day, we did eat absolutely all of it through the simple mechanic of “having friends round”. No tricks, no robots. I was just making a thing I wanted to make, and it is a Sunday Times bestseller.

I wrote directly to you, and I hope that you know me, and I know so many of you. Signing books at Porty last Saturday I thought I know these people and it was like it was Christmas, you know, writing cards for your friends: this is in my hands, soon it will be in your hands. We made it. We did it. I made a book that was the work of my heart and I did it because you gave me the space and the money and the time to do it. It blows me away. I cannot process it: my book is a Sunday Times bestseller, and I made no compromises to make it. I made a book that was everything of my heart and people like it and I am verklempt.

Which is spooky timing, because what happened just after I sat down to write that was that I heard the letterbox go, and I went upstairs, and it was a proof of the sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book from which I learned the word “verklempt”, as well as so many other things. I just read the first three pages, in between writing that sentence and this one, being as careful with the spine as if someone might want it back, and I felt this lift inside me that there is more of the thing: more of the thing I have loved for literally twenty years.

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My book is out, and it is out because of you.

Here are the acknowledgements, and here you are.

I am writing this from the very deep bath of a very fancy hotel. I am eating very hot, very salty French fries, and I am drinking very cold champagne, and I just got back from Broadcasting House, and my book is out today, and I am the luckiest woman in the world.

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So when we saw this house for the first time, we got back in the car and drove in silence for, like, five full minutes. We had seen approximately forty houses and flats in approximately eight locations in the previous six months.

Then R said: “Well, I think we feel the same about that?”

And I said “Yes!”

Then at the same time I said: “We offer NOW, right?”

And he said: “Another total shithole.”

I had thought he was playing clever hardball with the estate agent; he thought I was trying to make the estate agent feel better for having to sell such a mess. Anyway, we bought it, and here is why:

1. a deceptively spacious walled garden

2. fireplaces in every single room

3. proximity to both the sea and the South Downs

4. the kitchen flagstones

5. the size and shape of the kitchen

The kitchen was the only kitchen we saw, in all those forty-plus houses, that I thought I could work in. I would show you what it was like when we saw it first, but it had all the previous tenant’s stuff in it, but it was like a crowded family sitting room— homework, wet laundry, birthday banners— on top of what was very obviously a lot of damp. All the paint was peeling off and you could see black mould in the corners. An ancient boiler; a broken tap. They used all the rooms upstairs as bedrooms, and all their living had to happen in here. It is a basement room, although it has two windows, a Dutch door with a third window, and a stairwell. I loved it on sight.

We thought we would tackle the damp first, just in this one room. The survey thought it was probably brick, so we would surely be ok? Hahahaha. The gypsum plaster had blown, and underneath it was not brick. Underneath it looked, unfortunately, like this:

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A real bed! With a mattress! I have been sleeping on a mattress on the floor for….quite some time…and I am a thousand years old. The last time I slept on a mattress on the floor for a prolonged period I was a youthful slip of a person and I didn’t understand why people complained about sleeping on the floor. Ha ha ha! Now I grow old and my spine grows even older somehow, and I have never been more relieved to have a bed.

I bought these mocha-and-cream striped sheets from IKEA, and they are incredibly chic, plus pure cotton and nicely heavy with good buttons. I have spent a long time trying to get on board with e.g. Piglet In Bed, very fancy, but I can’t get cosy in linen. I know this is the words of a heretic, but give me nice heavy cotton every time. (I like textured cotton too, look at these!)

I am in bed, in these nice sheets, and I am not looking at a single box. This is because I have put every single box in the spare room, which is a terrible pit of all our clothes: we don’t have anywhere, and I mean anywhere, for clothes. I don’t know how to buy a wardrobe. I don’t know how to get a wardrobe up our narrow terrace stairs.

I actually read an American blog the other day which would have classified our house as “a tiny house”. Hahahahaha. To me, it is a palace, albeit a palace in which I cannot get a wardrobe up the stairs and everything is going to have to be custom-built to fit the spaces available. My dad and R and AG have already hacked apart several hapless Billies to Frankenstein a wall of built-in bookcases. I am going to paint these re-worked Billies Dock Blue, which is the colour of the walls in there, and then, when I have stopped spending all my money on other frivolities, I am going to do the backs in this extraordinary paper.

Look: I put peonies in there.

We are leaving the wall on the left raw plaster: too blown to paint, but actually so pretty in that soft goldy-pink.

How spooky is this, though? I was looking for paintings, kind of aspirationally, for the house: lots of our previous art doesn’t quite work here, for whatever reason, and I was having a browse. And then I fell in love with this, which appears to have been painted of these peonies, my favourite flower, for me, and this room of pinks and blues and golds.

Who are you, Lilia Orlova-Holmes! How did you paint this picture for me! Alas, it is £6500, which is so significantly above my current art budget that I must simply yearn. But isn’t it fantastic? Isn’t it perfect for my house? Won’t I mourn not owning it forever? I don’t have £6500 so don’t tell me to buy it. But I love it. The little dashes of gold!

Especially as this kind of gold-y-orange-y-rust is kind of the through-line of the house: I limewashed the hall and stairs and landing pale gold, with a fantastic wallpaper (which I will show at a later date), and upstairs the bedrooms are two different soft soft pinks, and they are going to have (at a later date) very soft gold woodwork, probably my precious Madeleine. (I have still not found anywhere for Bombolone: a harder colour than you might think.)

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The naming of things is important to me. I wanted to call The Secret Detectives “The Book of Naming Things”, but it had zero commercial potential for the under-twelve set. All I care about is looking at things and naming them, which is a Hera Lindsay Bird paraphrase that seemed to me to sum up the difficulties of being my main character (also me). I have been trying to get into exercise over the last year, which has actually been great and interesting for a number of reasons, and one thing I have figured out that I will only really give it my all if the exercise in question has a charming name: a curtsey lunge, for instance, is totally doable, with even the heaviest weights my trainer1 can throw at me, but a burpee (yuk) is foul until I mentally re-dubbed it FDF (frog-dolphin-frog). I love ring rows mainly because I thought for ages that I was being asked to use the ring rose: two beautiful words. I identify very strongly with the older guy from Love On The Spectrum who loves to play with words. I love nice words, which is probably why I circle around Green Goddess Dressing despite not knowing very much about it. A beautiful name!

And so let’s call this Little Dryad Dressing: like green goddess, but maybe not so Junoesque.

On Sunday we limewashed the hall gold in big fat swoops, my mum lying on the floor with a tiny brush to get the frog-taped skirting edges, me clasping Rich around the legs as he made a series of wild, brush-handed lunges for the third-storey cornicing.

It is unbelievably tiring to limewash three storeys of hall, even or especially when the hall is very narrow, and especially when I was having a minor meltdown over the colour every 2-4 minutes. The thing about limewash is that it says on the tub of limewash not to panic after the first coat. Let me tell you: I was panicking after the first coat. I was panicking before we even had a first coat. The colour was “Chickpea” and online it looked a very pale and soothing hummus colour. The sample swatch was a little darker. The first coat went on pure brown. The chickpeas had been roasted and toasted to within an inch of their lives: a muddy, unclear– yet fully transparent– wash of filthy liquid. Do not panic after the first coat! I panicked after the first coat. I kept saying “I hate it, I hate it,” which was not good for morale at all.

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This is kind of a promotional post, but really a heartfelt one, because a) I have things to say to you, specifically, reading this letter, and also b) I cry all the time these days (see: my many horses, letters passim). I am on the edge of my feelings all the time. I wrote you a book. You made it possible for me to write a book. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever made; the best work I have ever done; and you made it possible for me to do that by reading these letters. I am verklempt; I am wordless; I am trying my best; I am writing to you from a train. As I always am these days, specifically I am writing to you from this train that runs between London and the sea.

This particular train, I have just noticed, is one I have to get off in mere minutes— my relentless regime of changing at East Croydon is nothing if not relentless— just as I have plugged in my laptop and secured a seat at a table. Curses! But not too many curses as I have written AND FINISHED a book and now you can buy it.

If you like these letters, you will love this book. That is a 100%, sure-thing guarantee: it is exactly like this newsletter, but with all-new recipes, more than one hundred of them, and MATRIXES for designing recipes of your own, and also, it is even better maybe than these emails, because it has the photography of my beloved friend Yuki Sugiura (my first photo book!), and the design of Luke Bird (a maestro to whom I kept sending gravestone photos and Delft tiles and 1930s housewife manuals), and the editorial skills of publishing demon genius Louise Haines, who is also (!!!!) Nigel Slater’s editor, and listen: I am not too jaded a woman to be thrilled by that fact on a daily basis.

Also, I am not too jaded to be thrilled by getting emails from Nigel Slater about how much he likes this book. Nigel! Slater! Likes! My! Book!

When I got this particular email I was in a very bleak moment in which I thought maybe the book sucked and also that I had bought a stupid money-pit house that would never be nice and would always be wet. It was January— this January just gone!— and I was truly just despairing, pretty much, because that is what it is like writing a book. And then! Nicola Lamb! THE Anna Jones!

You can tell those people mean it because they said nice things to print on the cover, and at the time they said nice things they had only seen it in a genuinely depressing PDF. Now it is not a PDF. Now it is this book, which I think is easily the most beautiful and delicious of all my books, in any genre. I enter into a green era. The time of the blues is over! Now we have the green of grass and velvet and the Maldon salt bucket. Now we have the soft soft deep lime-wash green of my new kitchen, which is now, please God, watertight as hell. Please pre-order my book as it has cost me all my savings, every penny, to watertight this fucking kitchen.

Please pre-order my book as it has cost me every penny I have to try and make a kitchen I don’t have to leave in two years or one year or ten months.

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This recipe is for probably the best baklava I have ever had. You think you can’t do it, but you can. You fully can! It’s just a layering job. And the fennel-cardamom is mind-blowing.

Kate! Please! Tell us about baklava.

I’m going to make baklava this weekend.

I’m going to chop nuts and melt butter and spoon out spices and fill my kitchen with the sweet scent of all of it. I’m going to think about eating baklava in Istanbul and in Brisbane and in Newington Green and then I’m going to take some squares downstairs to my friend who lives in the flat two floors below me.

Long before I started blogging or sharing recipes or writing cookbooks, my weekends were filled with baking projects. I started thinking about what I might bake on approximately Wednesday of each week, would consider what fruit would be on Broadway Market, who might be around that I could make something for. I’d fill my handbag with ingredients on the way home from work on Friday, would stumble off the Overground laden down with butter.

I wore only tea dresses and cardigans back then, because of Trinny and Susannah and compulsory heteronormativity. It was 2012; England was covered in bunting and so was I. I was a girl who baked, and I wore it like an identity – if you knew me then, you probably gave me cake tins or a spatula for Christmas.

In most people’s hands, baking is an entirely benign, lovely hobby. It doesn’t have to be deep. But it’s possible now for me to see my performance in it then, my slightly desperate need to be baking because it felt like doing femininity correctly. And because it was a sure-fire way to please people, to be doing hosting and adulthood and life correctly, in the years when the ground beneath my feet felt unstable.

Ironically, though I have less of a regular ritual of it, I enjoy baking much more now. I stress about it less, am as happy to bring out a nice cheese or some fancy fruit as I am to bring out a cake. I bake when I know I’m going to find delight in it. I’m less concerned than I was with something structurally impressive, much more interested with something I know I’m going to nail, that tastes unbelievably good.

All this to say: making baklava could so easily feel like a thing from years ago, a sort of surely you’re not actually making that kind of dessert. A performance of a pudding.

But this book, my latest, is full of the food I really cook at home, all the time. Years after writing it, it’s still the food I’m cooking. It’s food I hope you might want to cook too, because it sounds delicious, and because in reading the recipe you might think: yeah! yeah, I could do that!

I promise I’m not trying to downplay it when I say: making baklava is pretty much a layering task. Pastry, butter, pastry, butter, etc, covered with a deep pile of nuts and spices and sugar. Then more pastry, more butter, more pastry, more butter, on and on until you run out of filo sheets. It’s a deeply satisfying thing to build, each layer of butter you paint on reminding you of how good the whole is going to be.

When it bakes, the water in the butter steams, and the fat browns, ensuring the layers of filo say separate and crisp. The drowning of the whole lot in syrup towards the end of its bake might suggest you’re going to end up with a pan of sweet, soggy pastry. But no! The syrup sweetens everything and seeps between the layers, turning the shattering crunch of the layers into a still crisp but more robust dessert. And then you’ll have freshly baked baklava in your house, and I truly can’t imagine anything nicer.

I’m going to make some baklava this weekend. Maybe you want to too?

Almond and Walnut Baklava*

125g whole almonds
75g walnuts
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cardamom
2 tsp fennel seeds, finely ground
50g soft brown sugar
250g butter, melted, plus extra for greasing the tin
250g packet filo pastry

Syrup

150g caster sugar
125g honey
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp orange blossom water

Equipment

20cm square cake tin (loose bottomed, if you have one)

* You can play around with this recipe, if you like. If you’re not a walnut fan, try doing all almond instead, or replace the whole lot with pistachio. If you don’t like fennel, try more cardamom instead.

To make the filling, blitz the almonds to a fine rubble in a food processor (or chop them by hand) – they should not be as fine as almond meal, but not too chunky. The texture of walnuts is different, so do these separately, and blitz them to a similar rubbly size. Tip the nuts into a bowl, and add the ground spices and sugar.

Grease the cake tin with a little melted butter and line with greaseproof paper, ensuring it’s flat against the sides of the tin and the paper comes up high enough that you will be able to grasp it to lift out later.

Pour 2 tablespoons of melted butter into the nut and spice mix, and stir through.

Unwrap the filo pastry, and place a damp and well wrung out tea towel over the top of the sheets so they don’t dry out.

Next, you need to do a little playing around with your pastry and tin, to ensure the filo fits right to the edge and that there’s an even number of layers across the whole tin.

You can cut or fold the sheets; just ensure that you don’t miss the melted butter between any of the layers. Start to layer: drop one sheet of pastry into the tin and paint melted butter on top. Follow with a second sheet of pastry, then repeat until you have used half of your filo sheets.

Tip the nuts over the pastry layers and smooth out. Don’t press the filling down too hard, as the butter and air between each layer of pastry is what makes baklava so deliciously flaky.

Layer the remaining sheets of filo on top of the nuts, brushing melted butter between each layer. Finally, brush a generous layer of butter over the top. Transfer the tin to the fridge for 30 minutes; the butter will harden and the baklava will be easier to cut into squares.

Preheat the oven to 180C. Slice the baklava into 4cm squares, and transfer to the oven for 50 minutes, until puffed up and golden.

Towards the end of the cooking time, prepare the syrup. Put the sugar, honey, fennel seeds, and 150ml water into a small saucepan and simmer for 5–10 minutes until the syrup is viscous and rich. Take off the heat, then add the orange blossom water. Pour the syrup over the baklava, return to the oven for 5 minutes, then allow to cool in the tin before lifting the baklava out (using the greaseproof paper), slicing down the cuts you made earlier to ensure the pieces are separated.

Wrap or store in an airtight container, and your baklava will stay delicious for a week.

Thank you so much, Kate, for being here and for sharing your recipes with us and your life with me! I love to have a life with you in it! I love to eat your baklava and cook your chilaquiles! This is the end of the Dinner At Mine? exclusive extract series, and from now on you will just have to buy a copy.

Or! Enter this ongoing giveaway!

Once again: to win, you need to follow me and Kate, like the post, and leave a comment under the post with an ingredient you would most like a new idea for.

If you are not on Instagram, but are a paid subscriber here, please email me with the answer to this question, and I will count you in to the draw too.

Next Thursday, a week from today, I will pick a winner at random, and send you a nice parcel of Kate’s book and a card. Also next Thursday, a week from today, everyone will kind of be a winner, as we will do a JOINT POST linking to a great recipe for every! single! one! of your ingredients.

Stuff that’s coming up after that and normal service resumes: these godforsaken cottage cheese and fennel meatballs, as soon as I get them perfect; a broccoli bake (!) I made on Tuesday that six adults, a small girl and a toddler all went nuts for (she asked for thirds, which I have never in my life seen happen); inexplicably, and by audience request, my curly-hair routine (lol but I have actually cracked it at last). Probably some rhubarb stuff. A coriander mussels thing. Green stuff, bright stuff, cold-but-sunny stuff. Loads, actually! Stay with us. Tell your friends.

I don’t do very much “subscribe now!” type outreach and actually wouldn’t know where to begin so please do tell your friends that it’s nice in here. Here’s a box to subscribe in, if you’ve been forwarded this email for some reason. You Get In Love And Then… is a project entirely supported by readers, and it means I am able to develop recipes and buy ingredients and (life stuff incoming)

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Say you’ve written a little book and you love your little book.

Say you’ve written a little book and you’ve put your whole heart into the little book.

Say you’ve written a little book and you want it to be a big book, you want everyone to see that this book is the book of your heart and that you’ve put everything into it and that this book is actually something pretty special.

In the olden days of publishing, this is when the publishers would throw you a launch: an enormous party, much champagne, candles, catering, etc. I know this because I have seen Sex And The City. It’s a major New York event! The book launch is news! In the city that never sleeps!

Everybody who has ever been to a book launch in London in 2026 watches that Sex and the City episode and crumbles to dust. Book launches now are famous for two things, which is 1) bad lighting, and 2) warm white wine.

This is a terrible problem if you love things to be gorgeous; and everyone to look gorgeous; and for the wine to be extremely cold and, ideally, expensive champagne.

Fortunately, if you love gorgeous things and cold champagne, you are probably already surrounded by the kind of people who can make things happen. My number one advice to anyone who wants to make anything is to surround yourself with people who also make things, and ideally some of those people should be people who make things happen. You need a peer group. You need colleagues and companion in this creative war we wage against entropy. Writing— and all art making— is against the natural order of things, which is to fall apart and disappear: it is a very difficult task to try and pin down a moment, an emotion, an idea, and you will need people on your side. You will need people who can make things happen, and you will need to become a make things happen person.

All the best things I know were made by someone for someone; and made in a kind of community of people making things for someone. If you want to make art, you must make art with your friends. And then, when you want everyone to know that your art is the art of your heart and that it really actually is actually quite something, you will have a team ready to lift you up. And of course there are publishers and editors and marketeers and publicists. Of course those people are amazing and wonderful and when they are good they are the best at what they do. But nobody will love your art, lift up and support your art, like the people who watched you make it. Nobody will love your art more than the people for whom you made it, and those people are the ones you need if you want to, for example, make a Sex and the City style major and gorgeous Event.

We launched Kate’s book by throwing a dinner party for thirty-five people in what is, by day, a brightly-lit and glass-fronted café. We got the space because Kate works there sometimes as a barista; and Kate works there as a barista because she spent so much time writing this book in there, talking to people, which is the whole thing. Be in community with people who make stuff, even if what they are making is coffee and/or a local café space and what you are making is a romance novel or a cookbook. Be in community!

I actually thought it might be helpful to talk a bit about the practicalities of throwing a launch, in case you wanted to feel glamorous and gorgeous and special about your own art. I think, really, it is one of my favourite things we have ever done as a collective: it made me feel like I was exactly where I wanted and needed to be, and that all the work we have all put into building community together had achieved something pretty amazing. Kate just asked loads of people she loves and most of them made it, and I think you should do this if you have made anything lately that you feel could do with treating like the beautiful thing it is. (These tips probably work for most kinds of parties but they are for throwing yourself a beautiful luxe art launch.)

Here is how we did it. (A long list incoming, plus the recipe for some unbelievable carrots with carrot-top salsa.)

1. We quite literally unscrewed almost all of the lightbulbs, much to the dismay of the photographer.

2. We lit a million candles, ditto.

3. We made sure that there was an excellent— if dismayed— photographer coming (Kate’s wonderful friend, Tom Jacob: see again, community!) who was happy to be a roving eye. A beautiful time is beautiful but a book launch has to be seen to be believed.

4. We kept the wine very cold, and also, we asked everyone to bring a bottle of cold wine. (Community again.) We had so much wine and so much champagne and I had one single perfect glass and yet took so many bottles down to the recycling. This is party. This is living.

5. Writing beautiful menus. I insisted on this bit, even though Kate had one million things to do, and I feel completely vindicated by how great they turned out I thought it would be nice for people to have a souvenir! I love to have items from beautiful events and I love to stick things on the fridge. Kate has exquisite handwriting; and, plus, the local print shop— who of course turned out to be run by the boyfriend of someone Kate knows, community again!— printed four to a page for us from a scan of her writing and it cost five pounds forty.

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In this way:

You cannot believe how delicious this bowl of eggs and tomatoes and onions and crisps is; how delicious and how nourishing and how cheerful. A Mexican breakfast that works perfectly for dinner, especially at this time of year, when the tomatoes are sad and spring feels so necessary. Brightness, but also cosy, please, I beg you!

You think: this cannot be allowed! But it is, and also, as our goddaughter used to say, what a treat!1

That is what it’s like to know Kate: a real treat. I call Kate at least once and usually two or three times a day in order to ask her questions like Do you know what HMRC want from me and What should I do with this elderly tomato and these rapidly-decaying tortillas where someone ripped the bag open without resealing and Do you think this season of Bridgerton is the best and is that because of Katie Leung. Fortunately Kate has answers to all of these questions and more. I am lucky to know her. Everyone who knows Kate is lucky to know her, and what is exceptionally nice is that she has written the kind of book that means you can know her too.

In celebration of this fact, for the next three days we will have three exclusive extracts from this book. Three full recipes! Each of which is beautiful! And I chose myself as three of my faves. These will be nowhere else on the internet.

I know. Extraordinary. You can’t believe it and nor can I: unprecedented niceness. But wait! There’s more!

I am also going to give ONE of you a copy, which I can get Kate to sign for you if you want, and I will wrap it up and post it with a card from me and probably some small treats I find on my way to the post office (and I live in a little bit of town where I am surrounded by treats).

This will be an Instagram prize draw and if you don’t have Instagram but are a paid subscriber you can email me your answer and I will still count you in. To win, you need to follow me and Kate, and leave a comment under the post (coming as soon as I send this, the one that will say GIVEAWAY and I’ll link to it tomorrow too) with an ingredient you would most like a new idea for.

On Thursday 24th March, I will pick a winner at random.

I really believe in this book, and you can tell because I bought the book I am giving away with my own actual money, and I will also be the person who pays for the wrapping paper and the postage. The publishers have not paid me for this content and I was not asked to do it. (I’ve taken it boldly upon myself! I don’t even know if they want it to happen!).

This is the kind of book that has answers to everything, up to and including what the HELL is for dinner. All food writers or most of us are trying to answer this question and while I do it with rage and passion, Kate does it with grace and elegance and infinite ease, & Nigella Lawson thinks so too.

I mean! The queen herself.

(Incidentally, Kate has also cooked for the crownéd heads of Europe. This is what we’re talking about here. She’s the realest of deals.)

What matters to us, though, over here in this email is that at the weekend I was washing up eight million glasses from launching Kate’s book with a dinner party (more on THAT tomorrow) and formulating a superb idea, i.e. that it would be incredibly nice after so many years of writing you emails about how good Kate is to simply show you, and give you some of her recipes. I hope this will make you buy the book, or at least give you three perfect things to make for the rest of your life. (These recipes are an exclusive extract for paid subscribers here and you will not be able to get them anywhere else on the internet.)

This is double exciting for me as a) I don’t think I have ever written about someone else’s recipes before, and b) I did the cooking for this photoshoot! I don’t usually do cooking for other people’s books but cooking with Kate is one of my favourite things to do in this life. I made those crisps and eggs up top! Our friend Yuki photographed them, as I hope she will photograph everything we both do (at least, foodwise) forever, because we love her so much and she can find the light in the darkest of rooms.

One reason I feel very confident in telling you to buy this cookbook is that I have cooked quite literally every single recipe in this book and they are all delicious and worth it, and also Kate has no dishwasher (see above re glasses) so you know that I have signed off on the washing-up levels. (My most hated job.)

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I have written already, not very long ago, about writing about food while bad things happen. Specifically, I have written about writing about Middle Eastern food while bad things happen in the Middle East.

Food is feeling; feeling is place. Place is politics.

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Do not adjust your set! It is celery! But it is a whole and gorgeous thing! Please stay with me.

If it helps, maybe I am more amazed than many people to be talking about this, because I began life as a celery refusenik.

My first full recorded sentence— and this is true, not an exaggeration for effect— confirms this fact: presented with a stick of celery to chomp through (presumably with my minimal teeth) family legend has it that I handed the celery back to my mother, saying, firmly the full-bonko phrase “No thanks, Mum, it’s wood”.

No thanks! It’s wood!

When I think about a baby saying this to me, a person trying my best to nourish the baby in wholesome ways, I feel very sorry for my mother.

Nevertheless, the things I have hated about celery have been many, and continuous. For three decades, more or less, I have been opposed to celery in all forms, making an exception only for mirepoix. I avoided it even in salads.

Partly this was textural. Stringy? Limp? No thank you, no thanks. It is bad wood.

Partly, though, and I’m sorry to hit you with this— but maybe that’s what you’re here for?— it goes deeper than that.

I was a chubby pre-teen: I grew up in an era of red circles around the fat thighs of Jessica Simpson and the muffin tops of Britney Spears; where it was vital to be as thin as possible, and then a little thinner, like we were hoping to be ballerinas despite no natural talent.

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So consider please this as a possible solution: blood orange & white miso spatchcock chicken, w/ a marinade good enough to drink, slow roasted shallots in beautiful little ammonite whorls, slow roasted fennel, bronzed slivers of citrus. Green-flecked buttered orzo; crispy greens. Also, it is pretty much a doddle, and goes from fridge to table in approx. one hour, and most of that is roasting time. It is the most unbelievably beautiful little guy: dinner party ready, or midweek hero. It is easy and it is lavish if those two words mean anything to you. (They mean everything to me.)

Plus, Vitamin C. I have had three big colds this winter and I can feel a fourth one about to sneak up on me. Everyone I talk to appears to be coming down with or just getting over something, and then so we breathe on each other, absorb the bad germ-filled breath of the other, and go about our way, sneezing sadly.

For this reason, and others, I cannot get enough oranges this year. Is it an especially good year for oranges, or have I just found a supplier with supreme power? I am eating an orange a day, especially the Waitrose blush oranges, which are so nice and reasonably priced (compared to, for example, the unbelievable ones I am buying at the deli, which are practically two pounds an orange. Two pounds! And yet. Something nice, sort of, about a two pound luxury: nobody in the world could be eating a better orange than me for my two pounds.)

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Good afternoon! Hello!

I feel like a huge thing has been lifted off me, like I have been waiting for this book to be Officially Out for months, which I suppose I have. It has been a wild year for reasons I cannot get into at this time, and will later, but the whole year has been like I was a very large ant storing up things for the winter. Usually I sing all summer but this year: no. This year I was a big big ant, and I worked very hard, and now it is the winter and I feast.

The first course of the feast is happening right now, this second, as I write this at a table with a window and a plug socket on a train to London, on a Great Western train, which is a real treasure of a trainline because the seats are enormous and comfortable and you can tell they are made to ferry wealthy commuters in and out of the City. There are other trainlines I love- LNER for the views and the tiny oat milks in the tea service, the line that runs down the North Welsh coast for, you know, the North Welsh coast— but Great Western has, in my experience, the most luxurious feeling train experience. And I have thought this even when standing pressed up against ten strangers and some woman’s elaborate two-storey cat carriage (and her two Siamese cats). On what other trainline would someone bring two Siamese cats in a two-storey cat house?

But I digress, listen: there is a very little mist that is pushing gently at the glass of the windows and the countryside is very almost the countryside of my childhood, which is I think the kind of landscape you feel as a default, which is not a landscape I have lived in since I was 15! But my mind still thinks this is what places look like, and when I am in places that feel like this— lo, the flat hills of my homeland, etc— I feel very happy and safe. A small mist, the flat hills, half an excellent croissant that my friend Kiran bought me this morning from a beautiful little bakery in an industrial estate outside Oxford.

I am charging my phone— my chief advice to young persons: always charge your phone, drink some water, and have a wee if you are given the opportunity, even if you think you don’t need to— and writing this letter and I feel happy. I feel happy! I have spent a lot of this year unhappy or I suppose anxious for reasonable reasons about things, and also for unreasonable reasons about things, and now I find myself on this train confronted with the undeniable fact that this book is out in the world and people seem to like it. I hope you like it. It felt like it would never get finished, and never get done, and now here it is, real, and in bookshops in piles and stacks and neat little tables, and I am signing my name in it in Sharpie. Last night I was doing an event in Oxford with Kiran and I got into the cab from the station and I felt this unbelievable sense of luckiness descend upon me to be in a cab on someone else’s dime to go to a room full of people who had paid to be there, waiting for me to tell them about ideas I had in my own personal mind. Extraordinary life! Extraordinary luck! It felt like I had been touched on the head- bop!- by the good fairy.

It made me want to write, not just this letter but more and bigger things, and I opened up a document on my phone right there in the cab and started typing something new for the first time in months and months. It felt amazing, and being in the room felt amazing, and right now on this nice train there is a goods train rolling right by on the parallel line, and one thing I love is to see a goods train because I find the movement of commerce to be intensely compelling. Shipping containers! What a miracle of international co-operation! I really feel this, by the way, even though I know I sound like that guy Parker from that one episode of popular 90s sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S. where that one guy Parker who is Phoebe’s new boyfriend is so extremely hyped about everything— the cars on the Long Island expressway, etc— that Phoebe breaks up with him. “I’m a positive person!” he says, when she is breaking up with him, which I am not.

But I do like to see car lights on a long road moving astigmatically through the windscreen. Even if they are not “aglow with the lights of a thousand fairies”, they are…as Phoebe says…just brake lights. But I like them, and also I like to see a goods train go by, and I like to think about the fact that my books were just crates and crates in a shipping container until today, and now they are in shops and you can buy them. I like thinking about all the people who made my book after it stopped being a Google Doc. I like thinking about the movement of people and objects! (There is a fantastic book called Deep Sea and Foreign Going, by Rose George, which I really recommend; plus for real losers there is an excellent guide to shipping container spotting which makes me happy in ports and on ferries and on trains. I like to know where things are from! Yes I am on the autistic spectrum, how did you know! But I think actually everything is interesting if you look properly. Which, incidentally, is the opposite of that guy Parker, played by Alec Baldwin, from popular nineties sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S. He is not looking at all. He is merely spinning. Which is why Phoebe breaks up with him.)

Anyway, the goods train, and the croissant, and the little mist, and writing, and what I am saying is, my book is out today, and I am happy, and I am writing about it because, you know, the Vonnegut thing: if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

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Today’s post is a replay of last year’s Bumper Edition Soup Spectacular, because a) I am still sick, which reminded me of the need for these soups and b) this thing took me three months to write and it’s the best thing I think I’ve ever done here: twenty of the best soups on the whole internet.1 I don’t do reruns over here traditionally, but I wanted my magnum opus to get a little more airtime, and plus, I am a husk, and, plus, you know what? I think you might need a reminder of the great soups of the world, any and all of which could be yours for the eating as soon as tonight. As soon as now!

I tested so, so much soup for this one. I made one million soups! Which is loads, given that my partner doesn’t respect soup. (Men are so often so weird about soup, no?) The freezer was— as it is, in fact, right now— jammed with soup. I am still using my main tip from this post, which is: should you ever need to make a lot of soup/stew/ whatever in advance, the soup goes in a Ziplock bag; the Ziplock bag is laid flat on a baking sheet; the baking sheet goes into the freezer. When the soup is frozen solid and perfectly flat (!), remove the baking sheet, and STACK atop your other frozen sheets of soup. This may be a thing you already do but it’s been revolutionary to me because then the Tupperwares aren’t forever all in the freezer. Also, because more things fit in! And you can also then just break off enough soup for you, and defrost just that broken off piece, thereby negating the need to repeatedly reheat it and then panic about botulism.

My freezer is (still and freshly!) full of flat-pack soup, and it’s very satisfying. So, yes: every recipe here has been tested. Now, a year later: I have tested them even more by making them loads, and making more recipes based on them, and just, you know, generally loving these soups for one whole year. I stand by every soup in this pack! A year of soup and these are still my top bananas!

Honestly, I am unsurprised that I still love them: they beat out approximately 30 others after the testing stage, and approximately….450 others at the “reading the recipe, making notes on the recipe, running the recipe through in my head” stage. There were so, so many good soups and I was ruthless. And, you know what, it worked, because I am still making these twenty soups in particular. (Fuck these six fish in particular, as a very bad poster on the wall of someone else’s halls used to say.)

I had three key criteria for choosing these soups.

First, the toughest one: the recipe had to be in a link that anyone could access. This was because with someone’s homemade recipe, I knew I would want to tweak, and edit, and recipe test a whole bunch more, and then that person might be offended or hurt; and also because if this post contained twenty long-form recipes, it would be too long for Substack. This was a horrible rule to have because so many people sent me beautiful family secrets, but the more I worked on this soup project the more I realised it was necessary to make this work without sinking the ship entirely.

(For total clarity: I broke this rule twice. I’m sorry. More on that below.)

Back to it: so, links only, mostly, for ease2.

Then, second, and the key to all good soup: the soup had to be more than the sum of its parts. This is the thing with soup, right? It had to be more than the sum of its parts. Some perfectly nice soups are not on this list because they taste exactly like you would expect them to taste from the raw ingredients, and not— for instance— better than if you hadn’t soup-ed them up. Like: a butternut squash soup with cream and salt and nutmeg in it that tastes, ultimately, of creamy, salty, nutmeggy butternut squash? Delicious! Sure! But a) you can do that on your own, without a recipe, and b) according to my files, every single person who reads this newsletter already has that exact recipe, and each of you believes yours is the very best one. Go with God! The soups here, then, had to be more than that. Not better, exactly, but more. There had to be something surprising or special or notable. There had to be some little alchemy in there that made it feel like a magic trick when you ladled it out or blitzed it up, you know?

Which was really the gateway to the third, and most vital criterion: after all the soup, the freezers full of soup, the stacks and stacks of it, soup for lunch and soup for dinner…I still had to be thinking about that soup in particular.

I still had to be thinking: maybe we could have that soup for dinner tonight? The soup had to be so good that after a long day of making soups, I had to want to make an extra-curricular bowl of this soup. I had to still be excited about this soup in a sea of soup. These are those soups.

These are the soups that my recipe testers have taken to their hearts and made repeatedly (even as I beg them to please, for the love of God, make any of the other fifty soups on the longlist that all need testing, we have no more room for soup, someone help me out here!!!). In some cases, and I will tell you which ones these are, they are the soups that the Soup Hating Man has actively requested I make again. Which is staggering as he truly is not a soup fan.

OK, enough chatting. Onto the Soup Stakes. Spoons ready, kids.

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