Oompa Loompa Doopity Hugh

+ Shit You Should Cook About, & we need your feedback! 🍝

London Laura

and

shit you should care about

Apr 26, 2023

one direction harry styles gif | WiffleGif

Angels!!! Currently writing this under the fluorescent lights of an airport foodcourt, polishing off an incredibly expensive cream cheese bagel and oat flat white combo (had to be done) en route to fly to Sydney to 1) see my RUBY!!! AND 2) to speak at Instagram’s upcoming ‘Creator Academy’ event. I know I say it all the time, but it’s crazy and wild and insane that this is my job (because of all of you) and just… I love you so goddamn much in moments like this it HURTS!

Anyway, if you’re over on our Close Friends list you’re going to see it ALL (including what goes on behind the scenes when I do speaking events like this) and also potentially some Hayden content (he lives there remember) OR some drunk Rubes and Luce content… who knows!

Oh and ALSO I’m gonna be giving our gorg Close Friends a peek at our upcoming new website over on the insta story…. huge weekend to be a bestie!

Shit You Should Care About: YOUR DAMN HEALTH & WELLBEING
Shit You Should Cook About: 🍝 House Party Pasta 🍝
Why We Can’t Leave Celebrities Alone
New episode of Culture Vulture: All About Therapy Speak
Hugh Grant is an Oompa Loompa now?
Some stray headlines for ya

Shit You Should Care About: YOUR DAMN HEALTH & WELLBEING

This section was brought to you by Manatū Hauora - The Ministry of Health - who want feedback from Kiwis like YOU to help to do better by us all!!

Ok - this is super a super important partnership for us, because it’s all about making things BETTER for you - so we’re really relying on your feedback here (please email me all your thoughts and feelings!!) Manatū Hauora - The Ministry of Health - want to make sure that the health reforms we are going through in New Zealand will help us all live longer and healthier lives. To do that, we need to be reflecting real Kiwis’ experiences, so we thought, what better way to help than to ask some REAL people what they thought?? That’s where you come in!!

Have you ever gone to the doctor and felt like you weren’t quite being heard, or understood? Have you had incredibly positive experiences within the healthcare system (or in other areas of life) that you want to see more of when it comes to healthcare? I want you to tell me about ALL of it.

Here are some thought starters for you (no need to answer them all, just wanted to help ya get the cogs turning!)

Making sure that your identity is respected:

When you seek healthcare do you feel like your identity or your culture is valued? Tell me about your experience.
What does respecting your identities, culture and values look or feel like to you?
When is a time - within, or out of the healthcare system when your identity or culture has felt respected?

Making sure you’re being treated, and not just your illness:

Do you feel like your healthcare provider considers broader concepts of well-being?
What would the difference be to your experience if they did? How does or might that make a difference to your experience of healthcare?
When treating you, does your healthcare provider investigate outside barriers you might have for managing your health or health conditions?

I’d love it if your feedback could be as detailed as poss (it will be TOTALLY anonymous and we won’t be using it here at SYSCA, we’ll just be passing it on to help make Aotearoa’s healthcare system as good as it can be.) We wanna help improve the services that are supposed to serve us, so having you all here to help us do that means everything to me, thank u so much in advance my besties xx

Shit You Should Cook About: 🍝 House Party Pasta 🍝

Shit You Should Cook About is written by London Laura - our resident ray of sunshine and co-host of Culture Vulture (our weekly pop culture podcast!) She’s a new London dweller, chief of romanticising literally everything, and will definitely ask you all what your love language is at some stage. You can find more Shit She Should Cook About over here!

Hello darlings!! Absolutely thriving from seeing you cook eggs (with butter NOT oil), dimple focaccia, and serve up shakshuka to your soul friends!! I’m having a wee dinner at my flat this weekend to celebrate spring / the long weekend / because it’s my fave thing in the world to do so stay tuned for that menu (maybe I’ll send Luce some sneak peeks for her close friends on IG!). Today on the pod Luce and I discussed therapy speak, which was both chaotic and ENTIRELY on-brand given these weekly pods have started to feel like therapy sessions where we dissect the latest lingo (are you an anxiously attached enneagram 2 with an unbearable feeling of loneliness?) 🙃

Today’s recipe is one close to my heart because to know me is to eat this dish. From 2016-2020 I made this almost weekly, my ‘never fails to feed a crowd’ meal, it is adaptable, a crowd-pleaser and at a push can be made with just 4 ingredients!! Inspired by my all-time fave restaurant Coco’s Cantina, whose happy hour pasta saw me and my best friends near religiously congregate at 6pm weekly for every breakup / work drama / birthday / summer fling debrief for years, sipping happy hour wine in the sun and drowning our sorrows in a mountain of parmesan. When we weren’t there, we were hosting Married At First Sight watch parties at my flat, where I would tell everyone to bring a bottle of red (which turned into a bit of a wine cellar situation) and always had an industrial size pot of pasta alla norma (aka tomato & eggplant spaghetti) simmering away in the background for self-service when anyone got hungry.

I’ve written about my ✨nostalgia✨ for this time before, but looking back these are some of my absolute favourite memories, a cobbled-together group of people crammed into my flat, legs sardined on the living room floor and balancing bowls of saucy pasta on knees, drinking clearskin wine out of coffee mugs because we ran out of glasses. Now every time I make this I am whisked back to hurricaning around the kitchen after work, a tote bag full of tinned tomatoes and a comically large stock pot on the stove. The dish itself is a classic (the best are) - a beautifully seasoned tangy yet sweet tomato-ey sauce, texture and meatiness from the aubergine and a choose-your-own-path toppings situation because pasta should be personal.

It’s low-lift, carby and casual enough that once the ingredients are in the pan it will take care of itself while you chat / watch Love Island. However, the best thing about this recipe is that while the below is gold standard, as long as you have 1) tinned tomatoes, 2) an allium (garlic, red / white onion, leeks), 3) an acid (red wine vinegar, balsamic, fish sauce at a push) and 4) a vege (zucchini, eggplant, mushroom) just sub things in or out dependent on what you’ve got in your pantry and you are good to go!

I can’t wait to see you feed your crush / self / chosen family and make your own memories (my DMS are always open!!!) And London whanau let me know if you fancy popping round for a bowl…. All my love, London Laura xxx

🍝 House Party Pasta 🍝

Feeds 4

1 large eggplant, diced 🍆
2x tins chopped tomatoes🥫
1x onion, diced 🧅
3x cloves of garlic, chopped 🧄
balsamic vinegar (1/2 tblsp)🥄
brown sugar (1 / 2tblsp)🍯
red wine (½ a cup)🍷
dried oregano & basil (1sp each) 🌿
chilli flakes (½ a tsp) 🌶️
olive oil (2 tblsp)🫒
500g packet of pasta (spaghetti works well!) 🍝
toppings: grated parm, fresh basil, more chilli flakes!🧀

Heat up the oil in a large saucepan on medium, and brown off your garlic and onions. Add the diced eggplant (you may need to do this in batches if your pan isn’t big enough!), until it starts to go a golden-y brown, and sprinkle on your chilli flakes and dried herbs until they coat the eggplant. Add the tinned tomatoes, vinegar and brown sugar, let this simmer for about 10 minutes stirring occasionally, and then add the red wine plus some salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for another 20 minutes or so, once the sauce is nice and rich, bring some salted water to the boil in another pot and cook your pasta. Add a ladle full of the starchy pasta water to the sauce, and spoon it ontop of the spaghetti into your bowls. Serve alongside some fresh basil, parmesan and chili flakes to sprinkle on top 🍝

[Luce note: while this recipe looks so fucking delish, I am here today, simply begging Laura to write a recipe that won’t send this 25-year-old heartburn-prone woman into the depths of my Gaviscon packet.]

Why We Can’t Leave Celebrities Alone

Every now and again (ok - a lot) I read something so good that I don't even know what to do with it. I don't need to add my own commentary, I don't need to pull it apart and say what's wrong/right with it, I just want you all to read it in the way it was intended. That's exactly how I feel about this piece by Haley Nahman in Maybe Baby titled Why We Can’t Leave Celebrities Alone. I'm gonna put an excerpt here to bait you into reading it, but fr, please go and read the whole thing.

"It doesn’t feel good to defend the public’s vulturous appetite for unpacking the intimate details of strangers’ lives, obviously. One of the more detestable but popular ways to do this is to claim that endless prying is the “price of admission” for being famous, as if anyone would knowingly sign on to never live in peace again (okay maybe some would…).
I think a better, less cruel argument is that the partnership between fame and gossip is not causal, but fundamental. Hardness is not “the price of admission” for being a rock; it is intrinsic to it. Fame is literally the state of being known and talked about. So while the clarion calls to “leave celebrities alone” make an obvious moral sense, they present a paradox: A celebrity left alone is no longer a celebrity."

Maybe Baby

#144: Why we can’t leave celebrities alone

Good morning! In my week away I engaged in the time-honored tradition of going online, and found that once again we as a culture were debating how to talk about celebrities. To me this conversation has always felt unsatisfying, so today I’d like to weigh in…

2 years ago · 137 likes · Haley Nahman

New episode of Culture Vulture: All About Therapy Speak

Wrote about it last week, talked about it this week! Listen below!

Oompa Loompa Doopity Hugh

I truly was just going to link this as a stray headline but I thought of this title and really wanted it to shine so I thought I’d better write a lil something about it. Basically, Hugh Grant has been revealed as an Oompa Loompa in the new Timothée Chalamet Willy Wonka movie.

Here’s what we know (via EW):

“Chalamet's Wonka discovers the orange-skinned lad in a glass case, in which Grant performs a little jig for the audience's amusement. The Oompa Loompa shouts to be let out when Wonka arrives on the scene. "You're the funny little man who's been following me," Wonka says.
"How dare you!" the Oompa Loompa fires back. "I will have you know that I am a perfectly respectable size for an Oompa Loompa." When Wonka responds incredulously, Grant's character proceeds to refresh his memory of what an Oompa Loompa is with "a song so ludicrously catchy that it may never leave your mind." Cue the Oompa Loompa dance.”

That is all ☻