Highly Enthused

Highly Enthused

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Highly Enthused
Winter Jewels, Porridge and Pasta

Winter Jewels, Porridge and Pasta

Plus ideas to make bedtime 10 x more cosy this season.

Highly Enthused
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Sophie McComas-Williams
Jul 12, 2025
∙ Paid
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Highly Enthused
Highly Enthused
Winter Jewels, Porridge and Pasta
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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 SoMo! 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.

Hello! How are you? Lovely to be in your inbox today. I come with yummy rings found at the coolest shop I’ve been to in Sydney in ages, a delish Roman classic, my favourite sustainable olive oil and moreeeeeee winter heroes. Love you.

Amatriciana at Roscioli, Rome

We’ve mentally left Greece and are travelling to Rome this month via pasta (if you’re in Italy this Euro summer, get to Roscioli to try the dish in the image above). I picked up a hunk of beautifully cured pork cheek, guanciale, at The Meat Emporium (if you haven’t discovered this giant meat cool room in Alexandria, do yourself a favour and stock up). Typically I utilise guanciale in carbonara, my first true love, but on a cold windy night I felt the tug of red sauce, and so amatriciana it was. Amatriciana is more than the sum of its three parts, but the three parts are good; chunky nubbins of fatty guanciale - cut into cubes or lardons large enough to retain some juiciness under a golden crust - are fried off in a tiny drop of olive oil until blisteringly crisp. A can of peeled tomatoes you’ve crushed in a bowl with your hands and seasoned with good salt and pepper is stirred through the pork and its hot rendered fat, along with a pinch of red chilli flakes. The whole thing emulsifies into a savoury, shining, deeply rich sauce. It’s tossed through a long pasta - spaghetti or bucatini work well - and finished with parmigiano. God it’s good. Here’s a NYT gift link to the recipe I used.

Bath. Photo by Rachel Kara for Fridah.

Allow me to get a little woo-woo, or maybe it’s not woo-woo at all. Over the last three months I’ve been paying close attention to my energy and mood and how it fluctuates over the month of my cycle. I’ve tried to lean in to creative work, strategy, planning and big-picture thinking when it feels good - typically the 10 days after my period ends - and leaning inward, treading lightly, aiming to do more small-time admin, less socialisation and infinite chill when I feel the pull to - typically the week after that. I’m learning to enjoy the positives of both of these ebbs and flows, trying less to fight it or fix the fluctuations in favour of surrendering and working with them. Doing this has radically changed my mindset towards work, relationships, parenting, exercise and how I relate to and communicate with myself. To say it’s been a radical shift would be grossly underestimating it. Some people call this “cyclical living” which sounds extreme, to me it’s just paying more attention and roughly planning for, or at least being aware of, the changes and when they’re happening. There’s a great article about how exercise comes into this on The File (glad to see this site relaunch!) and another on how the trend of ice bathing could actually be adding to your anxiety, not helping it. Anyway I’m on the journey, is anyone else?

Treats from Near & Far

I visited the most incredible gift and stationary store in Sydney this week. And lucky for anyone not living here, their online store is great too. Near & Far is located upstairs in an old-world feeling legal building on Oxford Street, and feels a world away from the road below. It stocks a mix of lifestyle-skewed items such as tableware, towels, cards, lamps and the cutest textile coasters, but also a large yet curated selection of international stationary - chic notebooks by Netherlands-based designer Marjolein Delhaas, pens, key-rings, Portuguese scented pencils (I bought the fig scented ones for my husband!) and the most wonderful set of chunky resin rings by Danish designer Alma Ipsen (you can’t find these online unfortunately, only in store. I love them so much I bought one for me and one for a colleague. Obsessed.) I could have bought everything. It was full of people shooting it on their phones (for TikTok no doubt). There’s a great TikTok showing it off here.

This week: An olive oil refill to stock the pantry with, the Spezials on rotation, a dessert-like porridge, a bedtime cozy purchase and the new Brisbane bakery-deli combo that’s high on the list.

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