Thank you for reading The Middle. I hope you enjoy this selection of my thoughts, feelings, etc. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a single sentence. Sian x
Thoughts
Zendaya, the best dressed celebrity alive, is on another press tour for her new movie, Challengers, and her custom Loewe tennis ball pumps are burnt into my brain (in the best way).
How do people spell bougie? What is the consensus? What does the way we spell words say about us? Is it classist? What about zhuzh?? How the fuck do you communicate a sound?
Wonder how badly Kev* would want to mentally strangle me if I asked him to replace a single tile in my bathroom.
Can’t stop thinking the 9 month old baby girl from the attack in Bondi last week. How much she has lost before she even really knows it has gone. This sort of news hits you differently when you become a parent.
Eyes are rolling so hard reading that the Bridget Jones franchise is being renewed for a fourth movie. Colin Firth isn’t even going to be in it. Put Leo Woodall (cast as post-divorce Bridget’s new toy boy) in something new and original like he deserves. Haven’t we flogged this horse enough? I’m sure it’s dead.
Stanley have released a fucking HARNESS for their cups. Why do you need a harness to carry your water bottle? Will it hold my toddler too??
Spent my birthday money from my parents on new cookware for my unfinished kitchen. Past my peak with this admission.
Weekly hit of millennial nostalgia: Nelly and Ashanti are engaged and pregnant
Yesterday was the two year anniversary of the death of my friend, Stafford. He was such a big champion of me and my writing. While I’m tempted to make him the subject matter of my Feelings essay below, I can literally hear him shouting at me to stop fucking about and pick something else instead. But I couldn’t let this pass without a tiny mention here. Just enough to piss him off.
*My tradie. I really do love Kev. Not sure the feeling is mutual.
Feelings
Gone To Pot
March 2024
I’m staring into the pot, steam erupting towards my face as the liquid bubbles below me. I’m cooking soup in the middle of a heatwave because I feel myself coming down with whatever childcare plague my son has generously bequeathed me this week. I laugh to myself and acknowledge that yes, I am slightly insane for doing this. But when you’re Croatian, eating soup on a 40 degree day is par for the course.
My grandfather used to make this soup for Sunday lunch. It’s called lešo meso (pronounced lesh-oh mess-oh), a staple recipe in a Croatian household. It’s more of a broth, filled with meat and vegetables that we eat as a main course after the soup. Dide (my grandfather) always added noodles to the stock before serving, crushing the dry nests of pasta in his fist before opening his fingers to let the broken strands tumble into the broth below. He cooked this for us often, and especially if we were sick. My Mum does the same and now so do my brothers and I. It’s a recipe that feels as basic to us as eggs on toast. It’s simple in design, peasant in origin. But peasant food is always the best food, as my husband often says. This is one of his favourite dishes that I make.
There is a particular pot the soup was always cooked in. Nothing fancy, just a reliable stainless steel pot with black plastic handles and a matching round knob on the lid. It was used for a lot of things but always for lešo meso. I was lucky enough to inherit one of these pots when my grandparents moved into a nursing home and it has travelled with me house to house since, a favourite in my own kitchen. When my Dide passed away seven years ago, the pot took on a new significance. I became protective of it, even more careful than normal, when I probably could have thrown it off a cliff and it would have been fine. One day I noticed one of the handles falling off and asked my husband to fix it, despite not being able to find the right screws to properly reattach it. You know your family is from peasant stock when the cookware is treated as a precious heirloom.
I carried on using it, wobbly handle and all. Carrying al dente pasta to the sink to drain, despite knowing the handle could come off at any time and I’d be scalded by the boiling water. Cooking pasta sauces, risottos, soups, casseroles. Every time I used it, I felt a little closer to my Dide, a personal project of keeping his memory alive. My memories of food and family and happiness are inextricably linked to him and the pot was my access point. It was how I still said hello, a kiss pressed to his smiling, leathery cheek.
I even made lešo meso in it a few times but never got it quite right. The colour was off, I used the wrong cut of meat, the broth too bland. It’s one of those dishes there is no formal recipe for. I had to search through old text messages with my mum to find the fragmented conversation that contained it. This is how many of the traditional recipes are relayed: in stilted descriptions with vague quantities, allusions to ‘whatever you reckon’ and the Croatian equivalent of ‘she’ll be right!’. I remember questioning Dide on how he used to make his baked snapper, and the more I pressed him for specific quantities, the greater his frustration grew. The recipe lies not in the documentation of scientific method but in doing what you can with the ingredients in front of you. The legacy of immigrants, of not always knowing what food would be available for the meal.
Staring into the soup on this fucking sweltering day though, I think I’ve got it. I can see the colour is right, the fragrance reeking deliciously of garlic and onion. I continue to stir, my hope propelling the turn of the spoon. It’s putting me back in the pale apricot marble kitchen of my grandparents home. A steaming saucepan on the stove, the family chattering in the lounge, dishes and cutlery clattering as we set the table, my grandmother fussing over her floral tablecloth.
But as I ladle the soup, my husband grinning in anticipation, I feel like crying. The stab of grief is unexpected, a surprise attack. The realisation smacks into me that the best iteration of this soup I’ve managed wasn’t cooked in Dide’s pot, but in a different one. It’s been made in a different kitchen while waiting for the renovations for our new one to be completed. But the new kitchen, and therefore a new stove top, will render my pot incompatible to cook with.
The soup is served, noodles and all. It tastes good, not perfect, but good enough to feel like home. This makes me feel worse as I try to remember the last thing I cooked in Dide’s pot before we ripped the old kitchen out, my memory a blur of stuffing wrapped coffee cups and wine glasses into other cookware for safekeeping. I can’t remember and I feel the gaping void of a goodbye stolen from me before I was ready to let go.
The emotion compounds over the next week as I wonder who will cook with the pots next. Which family member will I pass these onto like the illness my toddler lovingly tries to gift to me. Nobody in my immediate family, everyone has their induction stoves and modern cooking. I know I should but I don’t want to let the pot go, wondering how I will commune with my grandfather now. I never asked him for the recipe for lešo meso when he was alive and I wish I had, even if I had forgotten and needed to go back to Mum to remind me anyway. I wish I knew everything he knew about cooking, every trick he used.
I need to say goodbye to my faithful pot and keep cooking the soup instead. Maybe the more I do, the better it’ll taste and the closer I’ll be to him again.
Etc
It was on my Lust List in the last letter (God, I’m good), but Who Trolled Amber? is consuming me. This podcast is making me rethink everything about the internet and how every opinion, piece of content, news headline, you name it - can be bought and manipulated. Like, I already knew this but how the podcast research team trace and explain how bot accounts on social media work is mind-blowing. The question isn’t whether Amber Heard was innocent or guilty but whether or not she received a fair trial in the US due to the barrage of online hate and discourse surrounding her (spoiler: she didn’t). I’m reconsidering how I consume news and content forever more. Wow.
Speaking of the most reviled drinking receptacle known to humankind, the Stanley cup, the Culture Study Podcast covered them in a recent episode.
and her guest dive into the history and evolution of drink bottles and how and why Stanley Cups have become the frenzy-inducing water holder addiction of today. Sadly, they did not comment on the harness as I think it has only just been released but this is so entertaining nonetheless.When I’m not buying saucepans for the new kitchen, I’m watching home organisation reels on Instagram. One peep and your entire algorithm rearranges itself to fuel your pantry organisation ASMR fantasies. I’m constantly mentally arranging my new spice drawer. So I was very intrigued when I came across this article from The Cut about ‘cleanfluencers’ and truly, the internet could not be a more wild place to be sometimes. It discusses the huge rise in organisation and decluttering content and how what, in essence, we aim for in an effort to have less shit in our spaces, is often doing the opposite for the content creators themselves. It’s almost giving a fast fashion vibe, where influencers are showing their followers their shopping ‘hauls’, filming themselves rearrange their fridge with the new products and then repeating this the following week. Where do all the replaced receptacles go? Amazon must be fucking loving it.
You know how as the weather gets colder, you start to crave food that warms you from the inside? And how eating a dish from a specific country or region is also a way to alleviate your sadness about being unable to travel there because you’re an adult and a parent with real world responsibilities? Okay, intersect all of that and you get moussaka. Are you following? I want: comfort food + a summer holiday in Greece - my life = moussaka. Told you I was good. Anyway, this dish made me so happy. I fiddled with the quantities (basically halved it because 500g of mince is too convenient a portion to fuck with) and had to substitute a few things with whatever I had in the pantry. Most notably, the only plain flour I had was wholemeal spelt flour and I have to say, it gave the béchamel an earthiness that held the richness of the sauce so well. I’ll be repeating in the future. Biggest win is the leftover wine that needs consuming afterwards.
Speaking of, it’s red wine season and I’ve got two for you to stick a straw into. First is the Sidewood Mappinga Shiraz and my god, it’s good. Surprisingly light and fruity for a shiraz and very easy drinking - it would make a perfect gift for a grape fiend. Next is the Home of Plenty Sangiovese, which I tried this weekend at their very new cellar door where they serve it slightly chilled. With just enough acid not to make me wince, this one goes perfectly with a cool but sunny Autumn day and shitloads of prosciutto and cheese. And if you’re looking for somewhere new to go or impress your out-of-town mates, go to Home of Plenty in Currency Creek and soak up their Palm Springs vibe.
Chat soon,
Your local Stanley cup dissenter
Your Dide was one of my favourite gentleman- I could picture and almost hear him making that soup - not so secret ingredient loads of love.
❤️