Hello from the gooey place!
Where time has no meaning
Highly Enthused is a newsletter, once a podcast, concerning all the best things to consume in life. It’s written twice per month by Sophie McComas-Williams and Sophie Roberts, and today’s dispatch is written by SoRo! The majority of each newsletter is free, but there are five extra recs in each for paid subscribers. That’s often where the gold nuggets lie. Thanks for being here!
Hello from the laziest, haziest, gooey-ist time of year. I’m just barely scraping this newsletter in under the wire here, but can you blame me? Time has loosed from its moorings, and left me bobbing around without a single coherent thought in my brain. The only reason I know what the date is today is because it’s New Years Eve. Unclear whether it’s Tuesday or Wednesday though (please don’t tell me, I don’t care).
In the last week I have started and completed a 1000 piece puzzle in the space of two days, stayed up til 1:00am finishing a book (Demon Copperhead - I’m late to the party!), rediscovered the perfection that is the Mango Weiss bar, swum four times, given myself a tarot reading (signs for 2025 looking..mixed), perfected my spaghetti pomodoro recipe, read a minimum five different horoscopes for 2025 (sun AND rising just to cover my bases), eaten gelato for lunch twice and tried to calculate how long we could afford to live in Greece off our savings if we sold our house and quit our jobs. You know, all the essential stuff.
So here we are, brains melted into a puddle, another year coming to an end. I hope you all have a wonderful night, wherever you’re celebrating, whoever you’re with, and that 2025 brings you all the joy you can handle. Thanks for being with us! We love each and every one of you.
A few Sundays ago I cooked what turned out to be one of my top ten meals of the year. Facing down a gardens worth of tomatoes, some just-about-to-turn doughnut peaches, and a dozen or so prawns we needed to cook TODAY, I riffed my way to high-summer heaven. The prawns we threw on the barbecue, along with some sliced zuchinni and a sad looking corn cob, while I whipped up a pan sauce based on this instagram recipe. A thinly sliced shallot got the quick pickle treatment with lemon juice and salt, the tomatoes and peaches roughly chopped into large chunks and gently tossed with olive oil, sea salt, a handful of roughly torn basil and a drizzle of my favourite bonito vinegar. The zucchini and corn were tossed with sliced green onion, pickled chilli and a showering of coriander. The prawns charred and glistening in their buttery sauce. It was 10 outta 10, absolutely no notes.
On Sunday night, my friend Matt invited a few people over to his house for dinner and a communal viewing of one of his favourite movies - the deranged and prophetic 1976 film Network (Prime, Apple). It stars Faye Dunaway in all her feline beauty, as a work obsessed, sociopathic, television producer/genius working at a struggling, fictional cable TV network. After a long time news anchor is fired due to poor ratings, he announces on television that he plans to kill himself on air in the following week - which spikes his ratings. The movie essentially goes on to predict the kind of firebrand, highly emotive “news” coverage we so take for granted today. It’s deeply cynical and shockingly funny. Somehow completely modern and so entirely of its time (everyone is dressed entirely in shades of brown, mustard and beige; they’re always throwing around words like “impugn”, “oraculate” and “irascible”). Whatever you do, do NOT google the plot. Best to go in knowing as little as you possibly can!
The last few months I realised my wardrobe had become almost completely devoid of “going out” clothes. Instead I have a vast selection of plain tank tops, oversized workout t-shirts, a couple of “fancy” tees for work and about 138 button downs. But date nights? Fancy dinners out? Going out dancing?! I had one “sexy” button down with some cut outs, an ancient knit strapless number and nothing else. I attempted that “just tie a scarf around you and call it a top” concept that’s reared it’s early 00s head again, but I just didn’t feel good in it.
Enter this slinky, silk, off the shoulder number from Venroy. A friend and I wandered in there after a swim the other day and I brought it into the change room despite my sandy feet and wet hair. On the rack it didn’t look like much, but on the body it fit like a dream. The bodice is snug but not restrictive, the off the shoulder cut easy to adjust up or down to suit. It reaffirmed my believe that 2025 is the year of shopping in person instead of mindless scrolling/buying/returning! I’ll be wearing this number tonight to a party. I might pick it up in lemongrass too!
A quick-fire rundown of the miscellaneous finds we’ve loved this month. In this edition: A new favourite anchovy, committing to a classic read, a parrot! green! cap!, another excellent non-alc spritz, and a tool for reflecting on your year to come.