What do you cook and read when feeling all the feels? This special episode is a recording of a panel discussion on cooking and reading with our emotions at a special lunch last month at Logan Wines as part of the 2024 Mudgee Readers Festival. Our chat ran the gamut from love to nostalgia, stress to turbulence and what we cook and eat when experiencing each one. We (your regular hosts!) Sophie Hansen and Germaine Leece, were joined on the panel by Tamara Howorth, chef and owner of Mudgee’s...

On comfort food, the power of a wooden spoon, the only diet, rituals, crunch and the things we cook to anchor and soothe. Our book guest this week is The Secret of Cooking by Bee Wilson. Show notes, links and more will be sent to our paid subscribers shortly. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode. And Bee, if you’re listening/reading - thank you for this book. Germaine and Sophie x Thank you to our wonderful producer, Kristy Reading, for putting this and every episode together so...

Our book this episode is Butter, by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton). And it sparked a very ‘alive’ conversation on appetites, cake boundaries and whether a bowl of rice, butter and soy sauce can truly awaken an appetite for life. As always, you don’t have to have read the book to follow along. Although, we both did love it and would recommend you do! It’s a very layered, clever and thought provoking read. Here’s the publisher’s synopsis; Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo...

For a little light relief in a heavy time, in this episode, we are talking about Jilly Cooper’s Rivals and the many Shepherd’s pies, Dover soles, and bottles of Sancerre that keep its glamourous (enormous) cast of characters fuelled for all that romping around in stables and meadows. Links and recipes from this chat will be sent to our wonderful subscribers shortly. Happy listening! Germaine and Sophie x Thank you to our wonderful producer Kristy Reading for putting this, and every episode...

This episode is mostly about psychological thrillers, and how food and scenes around food can build words, develop characters, turn our stomachs and sometimes if we’re lucky, give us a moment to catch our breath. We love table scenes in books - the table provides a reason and a place for everyone to be together and is a great canvas for a showdown or perhaps to introduce the characters, to flesh them out. This episode’s book, None of This is True, by Lisa Jewell provides us with a few...

We hope you enjoy this episode of Something to Eat and Something to Read, a podcast for people who love to eat and read, and to think and talk about both! In this episode, we chat about eight very different books and the ‘shape’ of summer reading. Then we read and answer a beautiful letter asking for nourishing things to read and eat in difficult times. Thank you so much to our subscribers for their support of this pod, your show notes are incoming via the newsletter. Thank you also to our...

Merry Christmas from us both! We hope you enjoy this episode where we talk about our doorways into Christmas this year, thanks to our patron saint Jeanette Winterson and her book Christmas Days. She helps us in more ways than just festive ones. Her understanding of the importance of creativity and imagination leads us into a conversation about the ways art and culture offer us bridges back to our humanity. We need this to fuel our imaginations and inner worlds as much as we need food to fuel...

Our book for this episode is Karina May’s Duck à l'Orange for Breakfast, and the conversation it sparks floats around how romantic comedies feed us, how this genre, especially in good hands (hey Karina) is so soothing because it is inherently optimistic. You just know love will triumph in the end. And in a world where nothing much makes sense at the moment, that is a welcome comfort. We really enjoyed this book, talking about and around it. Hope you do too! Other things we cover in this...

Welcome to Something to Eat and Something to Read, a podcast for people who love reading and cooking and reading about cooking. In this episode, we’re talking about Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, the shape it left on us, and the comfort and joy it brought us. This book, this episode is all about celebrating the small happinesses; “The things that are important in life, are the things that are so easy to overlook: family and kindness and homework and lunch and conversation.” Ann Patchett in...

Hello! And welcome to our episode dedicated to the joys or otherwise of cooking and/or eating on our own. This one is rich in books celebrating, observing and offering advice for the art of feeding ourselves and ourselves alone. It’s full of stories about how people eat, what they cook for themselves, how they feel about eating alone - how some relish in it, some avoid it, some do it beautifully and some gleefully have marmalade on toast for dinner when she’s home alone (that’d be...

This episode is in honour of dinner parties - with all their stress, drama, and magic, all for that perfect moment, when you’re all at the table, the candles are flickering and good food is smoothing the edges of life. We cover small miracles, kitchen disasters, dinner party scenes in books we love and the wonder of a good repertoire. We hope you enjoy this mini-episode. Shownotes with recipes, links and all the books we cover will be sent to our subscribers. Join today if you’d like to...

This month we are discussing a book of essays that could be described as a “literary potluck”. My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings was edited by actor and writer Zosia Mamet (fellow fans of the series Girls will remember her as the character Shoshanna). We both loved this collection of short stories about food and all the feelings we attach to and around how we cook and share meals. And it sparked a conversation covering sad food vs solitary food, cooking your way back to...

So much goes on at the breakfast table, especially in books. Don’t you think? We do. So much so that we dedicated a whole (mini) episode to our favourite breakfast scenes in some favourite books; from Helen Garner to Maggie O’Farrell, there are some great scenes in this episode. Show notes with all the books, links and a breakfast recipe Sophie is particularly fond of will be emailed to our subscribers on Friday afternoon, May 5. Please click below if you’d like to become a paid subscriber...

Our book this episode is the book Milkfed by Melissa Broder. And it sparks a big conversation covering appetite, disordered eating, faith, sex, frozen yogurt, and a bit of mysticism for good measure. It’s a fascinating, well-written, but ultimately (for us at least), sad book that gave us A LOT to talk and think about.  We also share some book and cocktail recommendations for puzzle nights (they’re a thing, we’re on board). Please note - In this episode, we discuss the disordered eating...

Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow is one of our most requested books, and now we get it. In this episode, we chat about the important role that food, cooking and shared tables all play in this charming book. We meander from how a good meal can be like time travel to thoughts on mixing the perfect aperitif - “A cocktail is not meant to be a melange. It is not a potpourri or an Easter parade. At its best, a cocktail should be crisp, elegant, sincere- and limited to two ingredients” - and the...

Hello, and welcome back to Something to Eat and Something to Read for another year! We have a lot of cooking and reading-related things to talk about so we thought we’d start with an episode full to bursting with the books we have been loving this summer, plus a few recipes to help nourish and soothe as we hurtle into the new year. We talk about the idea of guilty pleasures (boo), what actually is ‘summer reading’, what we have been reading this summer and what to cook when you need to...

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...

This episode takes us from contemplating the ways the kitchen can be the “endeavour of serious thought”, the good meals that heal, to the bad meals that haunt us (we’ve all got them!), into an examination of the possibly problematic word lovely (a bit of a problem for Sophie), cooking to make yourself appetising to others, cooking to say what you can’t say, the sensuality of aprons, the golden beauty of baked rice pudding and A LOT more. It’s a juicy one, full of juicy threads pulled from...

This one is all about recipes with story arcs, the wonderful writing of Ella Risbridger (her latest book, The Year of Miracles, is our episode's book), finding comfort and consolation in poetry and recipes and reading and eating recommendations to buoy the tired and uninspired. Recipes, links, books and more will be sent to our beloved supporters very soon. Thank you to the growing community who have already signed up to this subscription level (the cost is $5/month). Your support means we...

Welcome to Episode 3, Season 2! This might be my favourite episode so far (Sophie talking here!); a really gentle and hopefully comforting chat about breaking out of boxes we or society put us in, about taking cooking seriously and treating yourself with infinite courtesy (thank you MFK Fisher for that wonderful turn of phrase, as always). Also, is listening to a book ‘as good as’ reading it? We discuss. Our book this episode is Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry, and our letter is, as...

Welcome back! We’re so happy to share this episode with you, a conversation between two book and food lovers, for our fellow book and food lovers! In this episode, we come back to the idea of “faction” and, when it can be problematic, the fantasy of elaborate dinner parties that take days to prepare and the reality of “Life Among the Savages”, aka everyday chaos. Sophie waxes on about the pleasure of cooking for “one stomach”, and we both agree with our beloved MFK Fisher when she writes...

Hello and welcome to episode 1/season 2 of Something to Eat and Something to Read - a podcast all about food and reading and reading about food. Our book for this episode is Annabel Abbs’s ‘The Language of Food’, and it sparks a big chat about how good food writing can be its own form of poetry, how reading and cooking can give us a sense of order and calm, historical ‘faction’ and how it gives centre stage to those that history has ignored, small happinesses in difficult seasons and loads...

Welcome back! It’s been a longer than expected break between episodes but we’re back and we have A LOT to talk about. Mostly, of course, to do with food, food in books and caring for each other through food. Our book this episode is the extraordinary Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam. And we answer a letter about how to “gracefully navigate” a new and challenging chapter of life with the good books and food on your side. All the show notes, recommendations and recipes can be found on...

Hello and welcome back to Something to Eat and Something to Read, and happy new year! We got together last week - in person! - to record episode seven and had such a lovely time covering everything from comfort and discomfort foods, writing about and cooking through grief, and how food connects us to our identity and memories. The book responsible for bringing up all these ideas and themes is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. We so hope you enjoy our chat about it. All the show notes...