Stone fruit and cicadas
When the summer mood is murky
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!
November is a bit of a funny month for me. The anniversary of Alex’s death falls at the end of it, and I never know quite how I’ll feel. This year it felt heavy, and murky. All the feelings mixed in with the first of the pre-Christmas socialising, the first flush of cherries and the first perfect beach weather. Sometimes the two things are hard to live with.
As I emerge from the November fug, I’m self soothing with summer activities. We’ve booked a few nights up the coast for early January, I’ve eaten mangos and nectarines dripping over the sink, thunderstorms keep rolling in from the south and the cicadas have been chirping in full force. It helps, every bit helps.
Do you ever have those days where you really want to spend hours and hours in the kitchen distracting yourself from your life? When I get this feeling in winter the answer is always slow cooking something - lamb shanks, short rib ragu, my favourite bolognese - anything with lots of chopping, searing and simmering. But once summer hits it’s harder to find something similarly time consuming that doesn’t feel suffocatingly cozy. Enter mahshi selek aka Lebanese stuffed silverbeet rolls. After treating myself to a Sift produce box - the most interesting (if intermittent) produce box in Sydney - I had an overflowing crisper and a large bunch of chard to use up. The rolls were the perfect mix of easy and time consuming. Mixing up the filling took no time at all, but prepping the leaves had a few steps (blanching them, de-veining, cutting into vaguely equal pieces), and then I got to stand in the kitchen, zone out and roll roll roll. I cut the quantity of the recipe in thirds, and made mine smaller but otherwise followed the recipe exactly. They were so delicious, so easy to pop one, two, three in your mouth without thinking. The left over rice filling got stuffed into some capsicums, drizzled with some more water and baked in the oven til slumped and the rice was cooked. The only problem was we devoured them too quickly - next time I won’t cut the recipe in thirds.
Ok stay with me guys, I know the title is a slightly hard sell, but this film is surprisingly charming. Following 18 year old Elliott in her last summer at home before college, she and her friends take a hero’s dose of magic mushrooms while camping and Elliott hallucinates - or summons? - her 39 year old self from the future. The premise may seem as silly as the title, but what follows is a surprisingly touching meditation on what it means to grow up and whether or not it’s possible to live without regret. It’s streaming on Prime video, or if you’re in Sydney you can check it out at Westpac Open Air in January.
As we’re heading into the most hectic time of year, where every day feels like it’s crammed with invites to coffee or dinner or drinks or a bbq or another event or party. Where you feel like you’re seeing people every day but never actually properly catching up. I’d like to propose to you a different way to spend time together - embracing the “errand hang”. Inspired by my overpacked social life, and this old article by Anne Helen Petersen, I’d like to encourage you to combine your to do list with your social life. Need to do a grocery shop? Why not meet halfway between your house and your friends house and do a Harris Farm speed run together? Got a bunch of bad Black Friday purchases you need to return? Convince a friend to get hers organised too and you can wait in line at the post office together. Wander through a bookstore together and do some Christmas shopping, head to the library with your friend and her 5 year old and pick up your holds at the same time, hang out at swimming lessons, lend your friend your dryer and fold laundry together. The other weekend some friends came over to help my boyfriend install a new TV mount, andtheir kids ended up on our spare bed watching a show on their mum’s iPhone while I cooked. It’s the fastest way to make your friends feel like family.
A quick-fire rundown of the miscellaneous finds we’ve loved this month. In this edition: A bracelet that should have been in the gift guide, a middle aged habit, another excellent odd little book, a delicious non-alc soda, and the perfect, barely there blush .