Welcome to Nibbles

Launched just in time for party season. Although, let's face it, I'm late to the party...

I’ve arrived! The festive upstairs bar at new pub The Hart in Marylebone last week.

I know. I’m late to the Substack party. And as someone whose heart rate rises at the merest suggestion of lateness, I can tell you that I have agonised over whether to come along at all. Sometimes, after all, it’s better to just stay home and drink wine in a tracksuit.

But here I am. Partly because, even when I’m at home in a tracksuit (which, these days, I often am – wine or none), I’m still eating things, drinking things, cooking things, and reading things which I like to record – if only for myself. That said, I am often asked for recommendations and recipes, and I can’t think of a more efficient way to share those than in a newsletter.

Snacks – or nibbles

This is a newsletter about consumption; consumption on my terms, I being a 40 year old vegetarian food and drink journalist and mother of two living in south London, as economically as possible.

As its name – Nibbles – suggests, my intention is not to wang on here. I want this to bring morsels of delicious inspiration to your inbox – something to snack on, if you will: a weekly round up of where and what I’ve eaten, what I’ve cooked (including for my particular, but not impossible to please, small children), what I’ve sipped, smelled, read, heard, listened to – and sometimes bought.

A pound cake laced with candied citrus, made by pastry chef Stroma Sinclair, who I interviewed for TOAST a couple of weeks ago.

A bit about me

A little more about me: I was an editor on several food titles at The Guardian (Feast, Cook, OFM) for 12 years, but left in summer 2024 to write more. Now, I’m writing for The Observer, The Guardian, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and TOAST magazine, among lots of others. Oh, and I wrote a book, Lifeblood: A Mother in Search of Hope. I had become a mum in 2019 and, when my daughter was nearly three months old, she was admitted to hospital with a haemoglobin level deemed “incompatible with life”; she was diagnosed with a serious blood condition, and so began a painful process of understanding, accepting and getting her the best care we could. My book tells my story, and I’ve also written about it here and here.

Picture by Elena Heatherwick, taken for a feature in The Telegraph Magazine.

I always think that food and drink offer a unique lens on life. They are universal, and so writing about them is a way of talking about almost anything, from fashion to politics, culture to business, physical health to emotional wellbeing, inequality to innovation. Why should we all be eating more beans? And what actually is ‘natural wine’? And what can someone’s breakfast tell us about them? Seemingly simple questions, all with complex answers and rich stories. I love this about what I do.

The power of food

During my darkest times, I felt very alienated from food, magazines and restaurants – the world I’d made my professional home. Having uttered all the cliches about food as comfort, now it brought me none, nor did it any longer seem endowed with the healing power I’d once thought it to have. Nothing could cure my girl of her condition, nor me of my sadness.

But I wouldn’t be here now if I still felt those things. Over time, I found my way back to the pleasures of food, in no small part through the prism of seeing my children enjoy it. Being the curator of two small people’s first encounters with food has been a reminder of the big feelings it can evoke, and the role it plays in our social and emotional life.

Outside of my own kitchen, I see the immense power of food and drink to change lives for the better. In the last year, I’ve visited hospitals rethinking patient catering, eaten one of the best meals of my year in a London state school, and met people transforming prison food across the UK. I’m interested in food as a force for solidarity and community, from chef-led fundraisers to grassroots mutual aid, as well as some of the health trends, cultural shifts and innovations that are changing the landscape of what and how we eat today.

Jake Taylor, exec chef and head of food education at Woodmansterne School in Streatham, south London, where charity Chefs in Schools manages the catering, cooking food from scratch for hundreds of pupils each day. He’s dishing up Thai curry with tofu, rice, flatbread and winter salad.

What you’ll get here

I promised not to wang on – turns out introductions can be a bit of a mouthful.

Nibbles will be a digest in the truest sense: a repository for bite-sized deliciousness – accessible things to eat, drink, make, read and watch in the world of food and drink.

Here, I’ll be sharing my new work but also some of the things I’ve not been commissioned to write about: a behind the scenes of this food writer’s life. Stories, recommendations, recipes.

I firmly believe that it is possible to make good and nutritious food on a budget – and I do, for the most part. This comes from necessity – these days it is expensive to feed a young family – but I also enjoy cooking and the challenges that limitations impose, like an empty fridge or a dietary requirement. There are some lovely perks to my job, too, like restaurant meals, wine samples and piles of cookbooks. All of this, and more, will be here for you to nibble on.

For now, it’ll be free, and I will do my best to post weekly.

I’ll stop here, with a few little nibbles below to get us started, including some festive numbers.

Happy Christmas!

Mina X

• I’ve done lots for the Observer Magazine recently:

  • A profile of US chef and personality Alison Roman

  • Two restaurant reviews:

  • Wild – a farm-to-table restaurant in Berkhamsted

  • Luso – a modern Portuguese number in London’s Fitzrovia

  • A new drinks column! By me! Check out my take on a paloma, the Flushed Pigeon, the Olive Oyl vodkatini, my Suze-based spritz and the Jewelled Gimlet, with pomegranates – festive af!

  • A foodie travel feature about Georgia with the founders of soon-to-open restaurant, DakaDaka

Lunch at Archil Guniava’s winery in Imereti, Georgia. Picture by Elena Heatherwick

• When the Obs was sold to Tortoise Media, there was an exodus of culture journalists, some of whom went on to set up new indie title, The Nerve. I’ve interviewed three cooks/chefs for their Weekend Recipe column: Sabrina Ghayour, Helen Goh and Yasmin Khan.

• I wrote a very fun piece for The Guardian about how to elevate your home into a high-end restaurant experience with a few little (mostly affordable) touches.

• A couple of lovely Christmassy features for the editorial arm of clothing and homeware brand, TOAST: a profile of baker Stroma Sinclair (including a recipe for her candied citrus pound cake), and a festive gathering at Merlin Labron-Johnson’s Somerset restaurant, The Old Pharmacy, with a recipe for his quince pudding.

• Right now, my focus is home cooking (I’ll do a round-up of restaurants I’ve enjoyed recently after Christmas). Namely, how to clear out the fridge and cupboards to make way for incoming food orders in the next few days. Also, children’s meals that keep the metronome of good health ticking in between Christmas sugar injections.

• Tonight, I’ll be using up leftover sourdough – incidentally, a cranberry amd vegetarian stuffing-studded sourdough from my local bakery, Maya’s Bakehouse in Brixton – in a leek croustade. This was originally Anna Jones’ recipe in Guardian Feast, but I have now made and adapted so many times that it feels woven into my own culinary canon.

• We eat an awful lot of beanie soup/stews here; the ingredients change according to what we have knocking around, but you’ll always find bay leaf, parmesan rind and little pasta in there. I will share a recipe (only ever a guideline) in the new year.

  

  Bean there, done that: a variation on a family favourite in these parts

• I’m also trying to get them more on board with bean stews – vegetarian feijoada vibes, i.e. lightly-spiced Brazilian-style black beans; when I made one with Bold Bean Co’s black beans the other day, it was indisputably good, and they did end up eating it, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t met with resistance. Incidentally, for new things, I really lean on these stainless steel thali plates, which keep foods separate on plates – which has been reassuring for my kids.

  

  The stainless steel thali plates I swear by for kids catering

• I’m in my season of vermouth. I’ll be making my way through these bad boys over the break – all in the name of research, of course. Someone’s gotta do it!

  

  Mistletoe and (fortified) wine: my Christmas vermouth line-up

• I’m still working out what the Christmas drinking line-up looks like. It’s a question I’ve procrastinated over for weeks without any conclusions – yet. I’ll post a note on what I decide in due course, but I will say that I am always blown away by the value of Waitrose’s Blanc de Noirs NV Brut – all rounded, briochy goodness, and currently on offer at £25 a pop. I’m going to boldly declare that this is the best Champagne you’ll find at under £30.

• While we’re talking about fizz, I’m going to leave you with a nudge to watch Champagne Problems on Netflix: a wine industry romcom, featuring Paris at Christmas, two unreasonably fit protagonists and a lot of charged glassware. Cheers to that.