Things I Loved Lately

this is to tide you over until the soups land

Hi pals!

I am writing to you because a) I want to and b) this soup project only continues to expand in scale, and I am making on average two soups a day. Why am I doing this? We don’t have space in the freezer for all this soup! My boyfriend won’t even eat soup! I am eating soup twice a day and the soups keep coming! This is because people keep sending astounding-sounding soups from all over the world and I really feel like all of them need a fair shake. Food is so expensive now that I only want to put out recipes that really work; and plus there are so many disappointing soups out there that they must be thoroughly tested. And boy am I testing them. It will, I think, be the greatest and most rigorous list of soups ever compiled. It will be twenty flawless soups that you can turn to again and again, and I will tell you why each one is so good.

Will it be worth it, in the end? Yes. At least to me, and I hope also to you. (Don’t ask about the economics here. Maybe tell a friend to subscribe to this newsletter to try and offset my rising soup costs? Soupflation: it’s real.) But in the meantime, I must write about something that isn’t soup: my other favourite thing in the world, which is buying things, and then talking about them.

First, some personal news: I have decided that I love cinnamon. After a lifetime of hating cinnamon, I am now a cinnamon girl to my core. Two key products:

1. These Cinnamon Knots from Waitrose are unbelievable. They have repackaged them as a Christmas treat but they are not just for Christmas, they are for life. I love them. With a coffee? A black little coffee? The dream. Hello, are we in Scandinavia? Is it snowing? Last night I dreamed it was snowing.

2. These Cinnamon Bun flavour Flipz! I found them in the cupboard the other day, my boyfriend presumably having bought them for himself, and I foraged them like a squirrel stealing a nut. This is the best link I can find that doesn’t immediately take me to the Just Eat or Deliveroo page for Cinnamon Flipz, which…look, I cannot be ordering Cinnamon Flipz delivered to my door at 10am. That would be a low point. Or a high? I don’t know.

This dress, which I have four of, two in oatmeal, and two in black, and listen: do not be surprised if the next time you see me in an outfit that isn’t this dress is next May. It is simply the most comfortable, the most flattering, the most go-anywhere thing I own. It can be dinner with a pair of enormous earrings. It can be a meeting with a little black jumper and chunky black boots. It can be working from home with an enormous cardigan and a very soft bra. It can be a gig with thick-soled boots and a leather jacket. It can be sitting on the floor to do bedtime stories with sticky hands and someone’s half-sucked yoghurt pouch.