We all scream for soup!
my sick day suggestions, your sick day suggestions
Some preliminary housekeeping!
If you are in London or in Rome, I want to share some exciting IRL soup happenings (both of which feel totally surreal!)
At Toklas Bakery, you can order a soup from my book for lunch for the next 4 weeks! Every week will be a different soup - this week it’s a carrot cumin soup with za’atar chickpeas on top. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there’s no better lunch combo than soup and bread, and Toklas have nailed it.
At RŪMA Bottega & Cucina Agricola in Rome, they’ll be serving up a soup of mine combined with a cheese from their buffalo farm through February. They’re taking a break right now, but from January 24th, it’ll be my beetroot and blood orange soup, topped with their buffalo stracciatella!!! Run don’t walk and stock up on cheese while you’re there, it’s unparalleled in taste and qulity. If you can’t make it for the soup, they do ship their cheeses Europewide.
On to regularly scheduled programming…
I don’t know about you, but to me this January has started very very slowly, due in part to a severe cold and a cough that at its worst kept me - and anyone under the same roof as me - up for days.
In a dream world, sick days entail bowls of freshly made chicken soup lovingly delivered to ones bedside along with cups of ginger and lemon tea. Oddly enough, the foods I crave when I’m sick (toast, crackers, plain pasta) have little to do with the foods I know I should be eating when I’m actually sick (leafy greens, steamed veg, ginger). My palate morphs into that of a picky toddler (apparently I’m not the alone: when we’re sick, our body need simple carbs as energy to fight infection!)
In today’s newsletter you’ll find two recipes that made me feel better (physically and mentally) in the last weeks, followed by a list of suggestions from all of you. I recently asked all of you on Instagram for your go-to sick day meals, and then asked ChatGPT to analyse and categorise your responses (it was lazy to use AI but hey, I’m sick). As you’ll see below, a similar pattern emerged: most of your entries were warm and carby (list below!!)
So, while I’ve been recovering from this cough (at a glacial place, I might add), I’ve been trying to achieve the delicate balance of eating in a way that supports my immune system while also my soul. I’m behaving like a parent that sneaks vegetables into their child’s meals (but I’m the parent and the child).