Oatmeal Cookie Redux + ¡¡A REQUEST!!

walnuts and raisins and rye

Listen, friends, it’s time for oatmeal cookies again.

I, myself, am not such an oatmeal cookie as I was last winter— I’m wearing, if you can believe it, a new black jumper (I’m trying black this year: unclear how successful so far)— but my yearning for oatmeal cookies is as strong as ever. I love to feel wholesome! I love to eat a cookie at 8am and feel like it’s technically allowed! And it is because I am 32 and can’t be stopped. Sometimes I think about how bad it is that nobody can stop me for doing stupid things like eating cookies instead of breakfast and then I eat another cookie. Maybe it’s good, actually? Anyway, I don’t make a habit of cookie breakfasts, but these are so nice and so small I can’t stop myself. We’re talking rye. We’re talking walnuts. We’re talking just a little bit of dark dark chocolate. We’re talking delicious little mound-y rounds of sweet earthy goodness, just barely holding together with salted brown butter, but also somehow not crumbling directly down your bra when you bite one in half? We’re talking Welcome To October. We’re talking hot water bottles. We’re talking candles all damn day.

Thank you, by the way, for all your candle support. It’s ten in the morning, and I am burning six candles. Six! One squat little scented one (rosemary, ginger, mandarin, would you believe?), one extremely pretty yellow one in my swingy lantern thing, and four completely standard bulk-bought white dinner candles. Buying a box of sixty of the latter has been a real game changer vis-a-vis my willingness to be profligate with the light, which is so good because to be parsimonious with light at this time of year is to invite the ol’ S-A-D in with both hands. How is everyone’s seasonal depression coming along? How are we all cooking? Metaphorically as well as literally, although as ever I am on the hunt for your best and most nourishing soups. This is actually a small call to action, while I remember.

I have had an excellent idea for a Substack post and I think you are going to love it, but I need your help. It is, of course, Soup Season. Everyone yearns for soup, but ideally, a new soup, that is exciting and full of flavour. This is the time of year people start asking me for soup recipes. This is the time of year I start asking for soup recipes. And who am I to deny the people (and me) what we want?

So I am making a Soup Special: a matrix of soups, a list of perfect recipes, old favourites and new friends. I am so excited for this as I believe it will both be incredibly useful and incredibly delicious for me, personally, to make a lot of soup at this time.

This Soup Special, I hope, will include and link to THE VERY BEST soup recipes … so I would love to know your favourites. If you have a favourite soup that the people should know about: a scribbled secret family recipe card, a beloved bookmark on an ancient Geocities page, a much-stained church cookbook with a folded-down corner on the greatest soup of 1973, just a thing you make all the time…..please, I would love to hear it. You can reply directly to this email with a link! Then I will spend the next three weeks testing all of the soups. Then I will link to all the best ones in one helpful place, so that we can have it to refer back to over the dark dark months to come. This is my plan! Please send me your best soups by return of post! My definition of soup is very lassez-faire, so if it’s in a big bowl and you eat it with a spoon I’m probably interested.

I am also excited about this plan because it is something you could really only do on Substack. It would be hard to make a crowd-sourced soup actual cookbook; it would be hard to make it feel solid and beautiful on, like, social media. It’s like blogs, except that nobody has a blog any more: everyone in the world has a Substack. I keep getting these messages from people (bots?) who want to ask me how to have a successful Substack so they can write a Substack about how other people have a successful Substack, and presumably become successful Substackers themselves, and what I will say is: I think this platform works for me mainly because I really love it here and writing this newsletter is the best part of my writing week by a long chalk.