Q&A with Stephanie Wood
What writer Stephanie Wood is reading and eating at the moment. And an excellent carbonara recipe.
Stephanie Wood is a Sydney-based journalist and author with an impressive and excellent collection of work and bylines in an impressive and excellent collection of publications. She also writes one of our favourite weekly newsletters, which, if you don’t already subscribe to, you definitely should. In her words, it’s “a weekly mini-magazine of this and that, life, lovely things, news, thoughts, joy, creativity, beauty, curiosity, contentment.”
We are big fans. And so we were thrilled when Stephanie agreed to take our Q&A.
Germaine and Sophie x
The next episode of our pod will be here in two weeks, in the meantime, our archive of episodes is always there for a catch up!
What’s the last book you read and LOVED and why?
Books? What are they!? To keep up to date for work and my newsletter, I subscribe to way too many other newsletters, hang around Twitter too much and have a long bookmarked list of long-form articles to catch up on. I skim-read, jump around and consume stuff in grabs so much that my concentration to get beyond a page or two of an actual book is shot (it breaks my heart). That said, I did adore Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, a mighty imagining of the death of Shakespeare’s son. The conceit of O’Farrell’s wonderful novel is that, in the wake of his terrible grief for his lost son, the playwright conceived and wrote a great tragedy, Hamlet, a story of a dead father, of rage and revenge. Recently, I also devoured (in audio form) the short story Thursday by George Saunders. Wicked that one man should have so much talent.
What was the last meal you had in a restaurant and LOVED? And why?
Oh that’s easy! Last week: the most divine meal at Amuro, a chic little Japanese sake-and-snack spot in Darlinghurst with a lovely friend. We put ourselves in the hands of owner Kei Tokiwa who delivered up an omakase-style procession of little dishes and sake styles for us. My pick: the citrussy-sauced mackerel and the oysters but the chicken kara-age was great too. (It doesn’t take bookings; my advice is to go early, like 6ish or even earlier, or later, after 8 or 8.30pm.)
What was the last meal you had at home and LOVED? And why?
Well it certainly wasn’t the lamb curry I was about to cook for dinner tonight: I was almost ready to go … fresh ginger, turmeric, garlic and chilli on the counter set to start prepping, then I dropped a bowl and cut my finger rather badly on the shards! No chopping tonight, certainly not chilli chopping. Lamb curry will have to wait! Um, so, let me see … I live alone and cook for myself properly frequently (and love to do so!) so I’d say it was the fabulous cauliflower and lentil salad I made a couple of weeks ago (between then and now, some rather undistinguished cheese-on-toast nights!). Great salad, simple to prepare, great flavours – roasted cauliflower, toasted nuts, parsley from my garden, cumin dressing.
What’s your go-to comfort food?
Pasta… I’m terribly fond of spaghetti Aglio e olio (I usually throw in some greens from my garden as Jamie Oliver does here) but also have made a study of spaghetti carbonara. Should you be interested, I wrote a story about the “rights” and “wrongs” of carbonara for The Guardian.
What’s your go-to comfort read?
Totally weird, I know, but the poems of Philip Larkin, the late English poet. I know nothing about poetry, often struggle to understand what poets are trying to say, but in Larkin’s poetry I find so much pathos, so much emotion, just so much full stop. I especially love his poem, “Mr Bleaney”. A warning though, Larkin’s work is mostly bleak. So, a “comfort read”, perhaps not. Oh, here’s a proper comfort read: Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. Hilarious, wonderful, joyful.
A cookbook you love cooking out of at the moment?
Oh, not fair! My apartment overflows with recipes I’ve clipped from magazines and newspapers, and my computer overflows with files where I stash links to recipes I’ve come upon. Sadly, my cookbooks are much neglected. Can I say instead the writers whose recipes are almost always brilliant? … Neil Perry, Adam Liaw, Jill Dupleix, Nigel Slater and, of course, Yotam Ottolenghi. And I did take to bed with me the other night the late English food writer Jane Grigson’s book, Jane Grigson’s Vegetables. I’m determined to start working through the recipes in there.
You get to invite four of your favourite writers over for dinner; who are they, and what will you cook?
Oh wow, what a great question: can they be long in their graves? If so, Dorothy Parker, the brilliant American writer; George Saunders (see above); George Eliot (the English novelist, and writer of Middlemarch); and my late grandmother, Alice Hadorn, who was a wonderful writer but never had the opportunity to write professionally. (Grandma’s letters to me and a small segment of a diary that we found after she died are just wonderful.)