the july 24 loudemile roundup
the july 24 loudemile roundup
summer, babyyy
It’s summer. I’m on my way to Greece for the first time and mentally preparing for how damn hot it is over there. The French rugby team won Olympic gold. Life’s alright.
The tomatoes finally made their way to the farmers’ market, which marks the start of my very own Olympic Games: eating as many of them as I can before the season’s over. My serrated knives are working overtime for the foreseeable.
Despite publicly swearing to work on the list of books I’m already reading first in last month’s roundup, it took me all of 24 hours to abandon them all again and start reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.
While it confirms the idea that I would have never survived a week in a professional kitchen, it’s a damn good book, written damn well, about some damn fascinating stuff. What really sets it apart from the rest of my library so far is that it hasn’t made me crave any of the food (they sure made a lot of aspics in the seventies), but instead has some kind of anthropological quality to it.
I regret to inform you that my burnt out brain kept linking the descriptions of kitchen hierarchy and interactions with my own work as a manager, and I winced at the idea that, had I been another person entirely, I could have written a cringe LinkedIn post about it. God, I bet some people have.
Speaking of (shudder) work, I witnessed a coworker’s own Rémy-from-Ratatouille moment at the company’s summer do, where she discovered her love of fig jam and, crucially, how well it went with the cheese on the rest of the board. I’d give you quotes, but she spent most of the rest of the meal in stunned silence.
I got her a jar of it on Friday – she said she would buy cheese on the way home. If you think you don’t like blue cheese, you likely need to try it with something sweet and tart.
They’re rotating. They’re sandwiches. They’re rotatingsandwiches.com.
After 9 months of a hypermobility-induced shoulder injury creating a lot of inconvenience in my life, I finally found a decent physio who would actually explain exactly what to do about it – in cooking terms.
When I told him his new exercises looked a lot like the ones I was given by a previous physio that had caused another injury, he said it was like if he followed a Jamie Oliver recipe and really messed it up, then wondered why it looks nothing like on the telly. The issue isn’t the method, it’s the execution; the first physio had told me to do way too many reps, way too often, with the completely wrong movement. It was like thinking that cooking something for half as long at twice the temperature would yield anything other than charcoal for dinner.
Then, he started making fun of TV chefs seasoning their food from way up high and I brought the mood down by explaining it actually really helps with portioning and even distribution. Sir, this is a medical appointment. Let’s keep it scientific.
My Substack inbox is still bursting with unread posts I wasn’t able to devote much attention to this month, so don’t be surprised if I talk about July posts in next month’s roundup. Still, here are some of my favourites I managed to read in the last 30 days:
Katie Mather’s “Put fruit in your wine” gives you the blueprint for some of the easiest, tastiest summery drinks you could put together – snack included.
Liberty Hode’s “Fountains Café and Grill – Bradford” is a snapshot of a true community hub living its last moments. Also features some stunning mid-century and brutalist architecture, crazy good type design, and a link to a touching short documentary series about long-since-gone legendary Central London cafs.
Comté Dinner’s “Three ways to use tomato leaves” makes me want to aggressively sniff a tomato vine, and Keia Mastrianni’s “Kitchen notes: Fig leaves and their use” has me stealing from the branches hanging out of posh people’s gardens.
Alicia Kennedy’s “What was ‘Parts Unknown’?” explores why, despite many TV shows’ attempts, there won’t be another Anthony Bourdain – and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In case you missed them, here are July’s posts all in one place:
food on the road – where I bleed the company card dry with expensed pub meals.
how to host when you can’t cook – recipes so simple they don’t even require salt that will still wow a gaggle of guests.
eat with your hands – on the parallel romanticisation and vilification of some eating practices that actually only boil down to “not everything needs to be eaten with cutlery”.
thank you for the shout out!