The Edit : The comfort of friendship, a warming cake and a new cooking app
Editorial
The comfort of enduring friendships
The combination of getting older and doing healing work has made me more attuned to the quality of the relationships in my life. There’s been an interesting shift, which I think will be familiar to everyone who has embarked on deep self-work: I now take a lot more responsibility for this. There is less blame and more self-analysis. Less passivity and more of an effort to change. It’s painful at times, but also liberating.
It's liberating because you begin to feel less stuck. Certainly, you may have to face some unpleasant truths about yourself, but you also come to understand that you have more control over who and what you allow into your orbit.
We attract what we project, and if we feel less than worthy, then it follows we will draw in those who are also not able to truly value us, as we can’t do it for ourselves.
I’ve been mulling over this in the context of friendships recently. I am seeing an old friend this weekend (at the time of writing), someone who is truly dear to me. It’s also someone I’ve known for more than 25 years. There is history, there is trust, and there is emotional safety. It’s these last two features that have become my two non-negotiables in any relationship, whether intimate, familial, or professional. Without these two lodestars, relationships – in my experience at least – will flounder and leave in their wake pain and confusion.
I’m aware that it’s stating the obvious to declare trust and safety as two cornerstones of relationships, but it wasn’t always so obvious to me. I looked to relationships of all kinds for other reasons. What I didn’t do well was trust myself enough to listen to my intuition, nor was I sufficiently protective of myself to guard against unhealthy, unfulfilling, or misaligned connections.
Which brings me back to the friendships – like the one I referred to above – that I have now. The untrusting and unsafe relationships are largely in the past, but it’s the friendships that have endured, and for that I am so grateful. I have very few people I would call close friends, but something they all have in common is their longevity. Most I have known for twenty-plus years, if not significantly more. With all of them, I feel a deep sense of security.
It is something to have people in your life who have known you at your worst and your best, with whom you can share anything and know that it’s never a burden, and who is truly interested in you as a person, with all your flaws, strengths, dreams, worries and doubts.
There may be a lot more work to do to rebuild trust and safety in myself (an essential first step towards healthy relationships), but at least I know that I have the steadfastness of those decades-long friendships to support me along the way. They have been a constant amidst the chaos of our ever-changing lives, and more than that, they are an outlet. I’m looking forward to having a damn good time this weekend.
Eat
Leftover roasted pumpkin loaf
This is a very seasonal cake - roasted pumpkin, spice, golden syrup, dried fruit and nuts - I think of it as very autumnal, though we are officially in winter now. I say leftover roasted pumpkin, but of course you could just roast some for this recipe (or roast a whole pumpkin and reserve the rest for salads, adding to pasta and so forth). Just make sure that if you are using roasted pumpkin from a previous meal, that it hasn’t been cooked alongside a joint of meat, or is heavily spiced! A little salt and pepper though are ok. I originally made it with wholemeal wheat flour, but have also tried it with a mix of rye and plain flours; both are great. This cake was actually inspired by a pumpkin and sultana cake that’s sold at one of my favourite local cafes, which is really buttery and moist. Finding myself with some leftover cooked pumpkin one day, I thought I’d try my own version of it.This is a very different cake, but I pay due respect to the one that inspired it, a classic in its own right. It’s the combination of a high proportion of butter and the pumpkin that keeps this cake so moist.
INGREDIENTS
180g unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup (145g) brown sugar, lightly packed
1/4 (100ml) cup golden syrup
2 eggs
2 cups (250g) wholemeal flour (or 1 cup whole rye flour and 1 cup of plain)
1 1/2 t baking powder
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ground ginger
250g skin on roasted pumpkin, or butternut squash, cooled and chopped into a rough mash
1 cup (180g) mixed dried fruit, nuts and seeds (your own preference)
1/4 cup (60ml) of natural yoghurt (or buttermilk)
1/4 cup (60ml) milk
METHOD
Line a 20cm loaf pan with non-stock baking paper and preheat oven to 180ºC.
Beat together butter, brown sugar and golden syrup together until pale and creamy. Beat in eggs one at a time.
With a metal spoon, fold in half the flour/s, as well as the baking powder and spices, and the pumpkin.
Add the yoghurt and milk and stir to combine.
Fold in remaining flour and add the dried fruit and nuts, mixing until everything is fully incorporated.
Spoon into prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 50-60min until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
Cool on a wire rack. Cake can be stored in an airtight container for up to a week. Is also suitable to freeze.
Explore
App-off: Guardian Feast vs. NYT Cooking
I’ve been a subscriber to NYT Cooking for a while, and while I am yet to actually cook anything from their collection, I’m a big fan of their newsletters and app. Because I chose to receive three different newsletters when I signed up, I get at least one well-written and engaging email each day, sometimes two. The food always looks so tempting, and full of flavour, texture and colour. They are often things I’ve never heard of, or twists on things that I would never have come up with myself. It’s pleasureable reading for me (though I don’t read them all) and I have bookmarked a number of recipes that I do plan to cook…at some stage. The app is clearly a leader in its field, but it has a new competitor to contend with.
The new Guardian Feast app, only recently launched on the market, is undoubtedly aiming to gobble up some of NYT Cooking’s market share. The first point to address though is price. NYT Cooking will cost you around AUD$45 per year (USD$29.99), while Feast will set you back slightly less, at AUD$38.99 per year. I’ve signed up for a 14 day free trial, which is double what you get with NYT Cooking. The two apps share many similar features, like bookmarking, a notes field, and recommended recipes, but what is particularly distinct about Feast is its search capability.
On Feast, you can search within 68 cuisines and cross reference with meal type, dietary requirements, and even your favourite cook. It is not exhaustive; a search for Bake + Caribbean produced no results, similarly for Bake + Eastern European. I can only hope that they will continue to add recipes and grow the functionality of the app. For food nerds, being able to search by cook is a great feature. Australia’s own Alice Zaslavsky gets a high recipe count with 18, compared to Jamie Oliver who only gets 4 (not that he needs any more exposure), but I like that the app is not weighted towards only the most famous celebrity chefs.
Something Feast has that NYT Cooking strangely lacks is a dietary code on each recipe, for example, VG for vegan and DF for dairy free. While you can apply these filters in NYT Cooking, it is surprising that they don’t provide them upfront on each recipe. You can also save your dietary preferences in Feast, making it easier to search for meals that meet your particular needs. A really useful feature is the cups calculator, which enables you to get the equivalent cup measurement in grams of almost any ingredient (the list is extensive). Similarly, the clever inclusion of a UK to US food dictionary makes the app more appealing to the UK’s transatlantic audience. Not only does it include simple translations, like garbanzo beans for chickpeas, but goes into great detail about certain ingredients that are more complex, like the different fat content of UK and US creams, or advice on how to source the most sustainable seafood in your region.
By comparison, NYT Cooking provides nutritional information - lacking in Feast - and a useful ingredient substitution guide. Their filter options are fewer, but this has the advantage of being less daunting. Their selection of diets though is more comprehensive, and includes options like nut-free, high fibre, and Halal and Kosher, but as noted, this information is not marked on the recipes themselves. I do like the ‘Recently viewed’ tile on the NYT Cooking homepage, really handy if you want to return to something later.
I’m yet to receive my first newsletter from Feast, but if it’s as well-written as the ones from NYT Cooking, I have a definite contender on my hands. I won’t be paying for two cooking apps, and at this stage, it’s starting to look like Feast might have the upper hand. Its search capability is exciting, it’s simple to use and it looks sharper, too. Might be nice for a change anyway, though I should probably actually cook something from NYT Cooking before I end my subscription. That Hot Honey Chicken from the other day looked good…
P.S. Food Stories are currently on hold. They will return as soon as possible.
