Show Notes
Welcome to our Christmas special! Also special as we recorded this episode in front of our first audience at the Henley Community Garden with the Gladesville Happy Hens. We hope you enjoy listening to us talk about our book advent (list below) while also prescribing something to eat and something to read for two letter writers. The list of books discussed is below and there will be more information about this and the recipes discussed in the Shownotes. Thank you for listening to us this last year, and we look forward to returning with a Summer special in January. Until then, happy holidays to all. Sophie & Germaine xx We started our episode by offering a couple of sweet treats taken from books we have both loved and talked about this year. Sophie and Nigel Slater’s Christmas Cake It was always going to be a Christmas cake for me. And always, my favourite recipe by Nigel Slater from the Christmas Chronicles (but also available here online). Germaine and Ella Risbridger’s Three Ingredient Brownies I was intrigued to try such an easy recipe after we read The Year of Miracles: Recipes about Love, Grief and Growing Things in Season 2, Episode 4 so decided to try it. It is easy. And tasty! Simply Nutella, eggs and flour. Here is a similar recipe to Ella’s if you haven’t read her book. Book List * Advent by Anja Dunk * Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson * Festive Spirits by Kate Atkinson (Lucy’s Story) * How to End a Story by Helen Garner * Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling * The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller * The Christmas Chronicles by Nigel Slater * Seeing Other People by Diana Reed * Small Things Like These, Clare Keegan * Overheard: the art of eavesdropping by Oslo Davis * Wombat Divine by Mem Fox * Cooking for Claudine by John Baxter Letter 1 Thank you for this! I am emerging from a marriage break up and I need some lightness and happiness in my life. Maybe a bit of courage too. Germaine’s book prescription Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty is one of my favourite books that I return to whenever I am feeling in need of a reminder that life always contains lightness alongside the need for courage. Kalman is perhaps best known for her children’s book illustrations and as a contributor to the New Yorker magazine, however this illustrated memoir is a different way of reflecting and understanding the meaning of her life. Her quirky illustrations, existential questions and melancholic observations are very powerful. I prescribe it as a completely different way of reading about life. Kalman walks the streets of New York and draws the people she sees. Her daily walks in Central Park with an old friend also impact on her sense of wellbeing. She reminisces about her childhood and the past. It’s a visual journey through her mind! Sophie’s recipe I think it has to be cake. Specifically, a sponge, though one with structure so it won’t deflate on you or be finicky about travelling. Something you can cut and come again and keep in the fridge. Take to work to share, take to a morning tea with your friends. You can’t not be cheered by a sponge. And you can take courage that this recipe will work! As Nigel Slater says in Christmas Chronicles, “there was something about the way my mother would put a cake on the table that made me feel all was well. Safe. Secure. Unshakeable’ Here’s my sponge cake recipe, please try it, fill it with jam, cream, curd, love, whatever you have to hand! Letter 2 I am going ‘home’ for Christmas for a number of reasons. It may well be our last - or only- ‘family’ holiday with all 6 of us that we will remember, as my eldest is 19 and will be moving on with his life - a fact we celebrate and mourn, and my youngest is 11, and therefore too young to remember our trips before the Covid years. Included in the trip are 2 weeks in the UK to have our first English Christmas with my family, and our first one all together in 7 years. It is always a little bittersweet without my Dad, w
More from Something to Eat and Something to Read
Our book this episode is the joy bomb that is Victoria Hannan’s I Love the Whole World! This novel stars Leslie McDonald, 43, newly divorced and feeling diminished by the experience and her ex-husband, physiotherapist Dennis (who left her for his Alexander Technique teacher). Her art history degree, and her love of art has been put in a box, forgotten for the past twenty years, and her relationship with her adult daughter, Moose, is prickly. Then Leslie starts entering competitions and wins an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas. Her best friend pulls out at the last minute, and Leslie goes anyway. It’s the year 2000, and she discovers, as the book’s title suggests, that she actually loves the whole world. It is thoughtful, guileless, funny, generous and earnest. We both loved it.
How would you cope if time fell apart for you but kept ticking on for the rest of the world? This is what happens to Tara, the protagonist of this episode’s ‘book guest’. The Calculation of Volume, Part 1, by Solvej Balle. Tara Selter is an antiquarian book dealer who keeps waking up on November 18. She realises that she is trapped in a time loop and seems to be reliving this one day indefinitely while the rest of the world, including her husband, friends and family, all move on to November 19 completely unaware. While everyone and everything (except the food she consumes) resets to their exact state each morning, Tara ages and her memories accumulate. This first volume was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, and the judges said, “It takes a familiar narrative trope – protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day – and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist.” It gave us plenty to talk about in this episode, and as always, you don’t have to have read the book to (we hope) resonate with the threads we pull from it. And there are no spoilers. Links and show notes are coming to subscribers shortly. Something to Eat and Something to Read is a podcast for people who love reading and eating and reading about eating (and cooking), hosted by Sophie Hansen, a food writer and farmer from Orange in central-west New South Wales and Germaine Leece, a bibliotherapist and psychotherapist based in Sydney. Germaine and Sophie x We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we are recording today – Sophie on Wiradjuri Country in central-west New South Wales and Germaine on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation in Sydney. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people listening.
Hello and welcome back to Something to Eat and Something to Read, a podcast for people who love food and cooking and reading, hosted by Germaine Leece, a bibliotherapist and psychotherapist based in Sydney and Sophie Hansen, a food writer and farmer from Orange in central-west New South Wales This episode’s book ‘guest’ is the hugely successful Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. And the conversation we have around it is a juicy one, spanning everything from returnism, the ‘performance’ of eating, cooking and parenting, friction-maxing, trad wife culture, cooking as care vs cooking as control and how this book ‘misses the most important point of all’. What did you think of this page-turner? Show notes are coming to our subscribers shortly. Germaine and Sophie x
Today’s book ‘guest’ is Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day by Tamar Adler and how reading it has nudged us both to think more about noticing the small pleasures we can so easily miss every day and what it means to actually pay attention to your own life. Show notes are coming soon, featuring lists of all the books and topics we discuss. In the meantime, thank you for listening, and thank you to our wonderful producer, Kristy Reading, for putting this and every episode together so beautifully. Germaine and Sophie x We acknowledge that the land on which we work and live is the traditional land of the Wiradjuri Nation (Sophie) and the Gadigal of the Eora Nation (Germaine). We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Something to Eat and Something to Read, where we think about pleasure and reading and throw away the idea of “challenging” reads. We discuss the ways that being more conscious of what we are reading and the journey this takes us on will lead to a depth of experience that is much more pleasurable than staying on the surface of a story. Most importantly, we can get this depth of experience from ANY novel we read, including Sophie’s beloved Jilly Cooper and Germaine’s beloved Patricia Cornwell. The book we’re reading for our next episode is Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life. Show notes are coming soon, featuring lists of all the books and topics we discuss. We will also follow this up with a letter to our subscribers that further explores the richness of reading what we love. In the meantime, thank you for listening, and thank you to our wonderful producer, Kristy Reading, for putting this and every episode together so beautifully. Germaine and Sophie x We acknowledge that the land on which we work and live is the traditional land of the Wiradjuri Nation (Sophie) and the Gadigal of the Eora Nation (Germaine). We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people.