I was made redundant this week.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. However while I would love to say the redundancy was a joke, it is not. God really saw me talk about how writing a newsletter was a form of work, and said “haha, well you better work b**ch.”
I mention however, not to elicit awkward laughter or pity, but because I was made redundant from my writing job, in part, due to AI. Businesses looking to save money have now decided that AI can do my job for me. But are they wrong?
This is something I had been thinking about a lot for the last month or so. There is certainly a lot of corporate writing which sounds incredible similar - AI is certainly effective at producing drafts of this. This, coupled with the usual office job ennui and my partner mentioning David Graeber’s Bullsh*t Jobs at any inappropriate moment, made me question certainly why I bother.
So when is writing from a human important?
I can’t speak for all the other people in marketing and communications roles. In terms of my real-world experience, AI is a useful tool that still needs a human person to make a perfect final product (I wonder if we will see more of a shift into selling ourselves as editors more than writers).
But for me, when I read books or newsletters or blog posts, the only way writing has a real impact is if it does come from a real person. When we read a really good piece of writing, we do it the entire time with the knowledge that there is a real person in the world outside of our own head, with a life perhaps completely different to our own, who is able to create an emotion or a setting or situation that connects to us. It connects us to each other. This is none more evident than with non-fiction. At its best, whether you grew up poor or queer or deeply religious or whatever, good non-fiction writing is a feat of mind reading - you write with the hope that the words jump off the trapeze and find a partner.
I am still struggling with describing myself as a food writer - like all good female writers I feel unqualified - I am not a professional chef or cook or nutritionist or gastronomical scientist bla bla bla. My only qualification is that I like to eat (and also I have a creative writing masters but that’s besides the point). But the thing I love most about food writing that that everyone has to eat, and that good food writing can find a kernel of universality even in the most distant of meals, regardless of your background. You can be reviewing a KitKat and be able to use it to talk about your mental health, or your love life, or your childhood. I always think of the M.K. Fisher quote on why she writes about food:
“The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one”
What does an AI know about love? and hunger? To read something by another person that resonates with you on such a core level is a visceral sensation, a tremor that erupts through your entire body so much that you have to turn around to see if anyone else felt it.
But importantly it doesn’t even have to be the most exposing or emotional or traumatic writing to do so.
Which brings me to the subject of today’s review.
The Joy of Snacks by Laura Goodman was a book I have had my eye on for a long time, finally purchased after I got a book voucher in my Secret Santa at work. It has taken me well over six months to get around to reading it, but I’m so glad I did.
Reading this book felt like conspiring over an aperitif and crisps with a friend you’ve just met but you’re sure it’s going to last. It’s light and funny and relatable, even when her life as a travel journalist is very far away from our own. It is dotted with all these fun and beautiful vignettes and lists and ideas, and to be honest, I would happily just read a travelogue book from Goodman, even without the recipes. There is no pretension, just an unadulterated love for snacks and a fizzing creativity.
But I’m not just going to spend the newsletter just describing how much I liked it. One of the things AI cannot do is actually try to cook any of Laura’s recipes, so here I am, as a newly unemployed person, to give my honest and very real dispatches into a couple of the recipes.
Honey and mustard cheeseballs
The first recipe I tried was the honey and mustard cheeseballs, which comes after a really good section that examines the role of the cheeseball in episode two of Schitts Creek and the concept of a cheeseball in general. We had a flatwarming to throw and I decided to put on my hostess hat on and made some fancy little nibbles for our guests and these cheeseballs seemed like a good place to start.
Ed regularly likes to joke that if there is fried cheese on the menu I will eat it and to be honest, he’s not often wrong. However, this cheese is not fried. It is just raw cream cheese with cheddar mixed in as well as mustard, honey and Worcestershire sauce.
I’m not going to lie, I was very trepidacious about this recipe. It also contained raw shallots and I hate raw onions, so I only put a small amount in. Also, I had to buy Worcestershire sauce for the first time in my life and had absolutely no memory of what it tastes of. However, after I read the actual ingredients, it consists almost entirely of ingredients I love and one whiff reminded me that actually, Worcestershire sauce is great, if potent. (Please send me any veggie-friendly recipes that involve Worcestershire sauce though, I have no idea how to use it).
The next stage was mixing it together - because of the cream cheese you have quite a wet mixture which you have to pat into balls, but despite how wet it is, Goodman assures you that it is not actually that difficult, and she is correct. You leave them in the fridge for a couple of hours before adding a coating of crushed salted pretzels. This required me to use a hammer and a freezer bag, which I highly recommend to get any pre-house party jitters out.
Two to three hours later, when people were mingling, I decided to try one of the balls before I attempted to serve. However, they were so delicious I immediately threw my hostess hat away and decided to wait until all our guests got home and ate the entire plate by myself while quite drunk still. I never said I was a good hostess.
The two things I would take forward are:
make two batches, one for guests and one for myself
if I am going to save them until the end all for myself, I will leave the coating off until I plan to eat, so the coating still has crunch by the time of consumption. Turns out pretzels get soggy after 6+ hours of being out in the fridge. However, they also make for a good hangover lunch, even with the soggier coating.
Also because I could not buy a single shallot, I had to use it up in a surprisingly excellent improvised pasta.
post party pasta
some white wine that has been half drunk by one of your guests
two shallots (also garlic if you have it)
single cream
pasta
cheese - I used parmesan but cheddar will do
butter
method
fry the shallots in butter until soft. Add garlic in for a min or two. once cooked, add white wine and simmer until reduced into a thicker, cloudier liquid. Add cream, some cheese and seasoning to taste and reduce. If you remember to salt the pasta water unlike hungover me, you can add a splash of that in too. bowl up with a generous serving of cheese.
burrata with orange and pistachio
I have loved burrata from the first time I sampled one in Padella, back when Padella was still cheap enough for a student budget. Back then I had it with just salt, pepper and olive oil, but at this point in my life, I have tried it with most things. Peach and basil oil, sundried tomato and rocket, on top of a pizza., eating it out of my hand like an apple (This one is not true. Or is it?)
Anyway, the day after the day after the party, we had yet to do any shopping thanks to the recovery period and another party the day after (it’s hard being glamorous socialites). However, the one thing we did have in the fridge was the lone burrata I had bought for this experiment and we were both hungry, so there we were, weakly zesting orange into a glass because everything else was in the dishwasher.
The beauty of a burrata is how easy it is to assemble - for this recipe, you mix together a dressing of oil, balsamic vinegar, orange juice, orange zest, some salt flakes and a grind of pepper.
This, of course, was delicious. A perfect blend of creamy and acidic with just a little satisfying crunch from the salt flakes and felt far healthier than my usual drunk/hungover snack of an entire takeaway pizza and a fanta.
Roast garlic and goats cheese on toast
On Sunday, I found I had the flat to myself after my evening plans were cut short. This was a delight. Of course, while there are many perks to living with a loved one, there is a restorative power to having a little alone time that is necessary for anyone cohabiting. You don’t have to go through the debate of finding something you both want to watch, you can have a bubble bath for as long as you want, and most importantly, you can eat your most half-arsed meal without eliciting a raised eyebrow. So I decided I was going to have toast for dinner. But not just any toast.
Goodman preaches the virtues of roast garlic. which is something I’ve always wanted to make so I popped the oven on and left it to roast in a puddle of olive oil, salt, and pepper for an hour while I watched some very silly YouTube videos.
After an hour I lifted from the pan - the tops of the clove where I sliced were quite dark brown and I also remembered I have no toaster in the new flat. So the last two pieces of bread went under the grill - it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to use a grill safely so while the bread was nicely golden brown, they were thin enough slices that the bread is very crispy - it’s more like melba toast at this point. I spread quite a thick layer of soft goat’s cheese on because I know I like goat’s cheese, before squeezing out the garlic (turns out its all fine beyond the almost burn marks). Then I drizzled some honey and flakey salt.
The final result? Nice, but not super garlicky. Goodman says she could have just the garlic on the toast by itself and I could see the appeal - it has such a lovely gentle flavour that was slightly drowned out by my combo of a bread crisp and lots of goat’s cheese. But if I ever get a toaster or thicker bread, I may give it another go.
cake for coffee
The most annoying part of this recipe was explaining to everyone that this cake does not have any coffee in it.
Instead, it is just a plain sponge with a cinnamon crumble topping, designed to be paired with a nice cup of coffee. I don’t drink coffee, but it seemed apt to end this experiment on dessert so I decided to give it a go. The topping was so delicious and so easy to make, which I should have known was a sign for the struggles ahead. I made the cake mix as usual, but it contained cream cheese and 4 eggs, which meant it was slightly looser than normal sponge mix, although only ever so slightly. The recipe also says to put the cake to bake at 160 degrees, which felt low but I followed it anyway. I had to use a slightly smaller cake tin than I originally planned and therefore it felt like the crumble was quite densely packed on top. Also, the sponge took forever to cook and it was hard to tell if it was actually done as the skewer had to go through the topping as well. It wasn’t boding well. But eventually, it was done (or at least I decided it was) and I placed it optimistically in my cake tin to my friend’s flat where we were watching The Meg 2.
It wasn’t until we were a little way through the film that we decided to cut into the cake. However, when we did it looked suspiciously dense and no one wanted to risk eating an uncooked cake so we put it back in the oven as a form of Hail Mary. After a prolonged extra stay in the oven, at the end of the evening, we tried again. It was still a dense sponge, although it did seem cooked so we took a bite. It did taste nice if very moist; we reasoned it was similar to a yogurt-based sponge, or perhaps either the weight or the butter in the crumble kept it dense. It didn’t seem like my most successful baking venture. Until.
Over the next few days, we had to make our way through this cake whether we liked it or not. i wasn’t going to waste ingredients and it has a nice flavour so why not? However, the weirdest thing happened. Over the next few days, the texture just improved? By itself? By the time we finished it, it had a perfect cake sponge texture? It was actually really good and moreish thanks to the crumble topping. If any food science people can explain this, that would be greatly appreciated. Either way, a surprise hit which I will definitely try again in future. Or an actual fruit crumble may be easier, we’ll have to see. Either way, a success!
final thoughts
That’s it for my recipe reviews as I do not have the time or money to do all the recipes and I’m not going to give all the books goodies away, but I hope this was a useful little insight of things to expect.
In general, I loved this book, pure and simple. I have spent the last six months or so overwhelmed by the idea of cooking, because it felt like I was a bad food writer if I wasn’t daring to cook the most ambitious and original of meals. So many months I have resorted to a sandwich or crisps or something instant to tide me over when either nerves, fatigue or both in a spine-tinglingly numb cocktail stop me from even going near the oven. If this has ever been you, this book is what you need! I will be keeping this on my shelves as long as I can and will recommend to anyone, whether you like cooking or not. It’s great for just dipping in and out, whether you’re hosting a party or a casual hang or a sleepover or just in your shared flat by yourself for once. It gives you the sense of achievement and feeling like a fancy accomplished adult, but with so much less of the work. A kitchen essential to any budding foodie, and more importantly to anyone who thinks they might not be a foodie.
Also if Laura Goodman happens to read this, please make some sort of merch, like a pink and yellow baby tee that says ‘snack’ on it? Or perhaps booty shorts? An AI will never experience the visceral pleasure of booty shorts. Either way, I will happily pay good money for it.
Thanks for reading - as always if you have any requests for books, products, recipes, etc you want me to try, do get in touch, otherwise I’ll see you all again in the next few weeks for my next roundup!
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Love that you hid the snacks until your guests went ❤️ I would absolutely do the same thing and will be trying the pretzel cheese balls next time I do not have guests! Listened to the sentimental garbage episode on the snack book and really enjoyed it so may put it on my birthday list. Sorry to hear about your redundancy, hope you find something soon.