food friends : rosie kellett
and pan con tomate for dad!
food friends—a new segment to my substack and something i have been thinking about incorporating for a little while now. i am so lucky to have so many wonderful food friends and want to be able to share a little bit of what makes them all so wonderful with you guys.
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i am admittedly a little behind on this weeks substack, as i am technically on vacation visiting family and friends back home in the UK. however, it has been raining nonstop (classic british summer) and been very hectic, to say the least, so it hasn’t yet felt like a real vacation. it’s been lovely, don’t get me wrong—just very busy! we leave for mallorca today, and i know that we will both (my husband and i) be able to slow down and truly get in some good r&r whilst we are there.
i will of course cover my entire trip soon, including where we have stayed and all the lovely things we have eaten along the way, but here are a few highlights from the london part, so far.
food friends : rosie kellett
what a special food friend i have for you today, darling rosie!
rosie and i first connected a while back when i discovered her on tiktok. her video was specifically about how she inhabits a communal living set up in london and cooks for her housemates on a regular basis. it was such a sweet video, and struck a chord with me immediately. not only rosie’s enchanting voice and calm demeanor when talking about her ritual of cooking for others, but because i too used to live with housemates (when i lived in bristol)—not on quite on rosie’s scale, i think she has 6 housemates total, but in the fact that they all cook for one another on a regular basis—just like me and my housemates used to do.
i sent her a message immediately and it turns out, rosie had followed me for a while! she had been following my supper clubs and cooking for quite some time and was so complimentary to everything that i had been up to, and it was so wonderful to be connected.
rosie is a incredible chef, recipe developer and brilliant writer based in london—currently working on many exciting things.
without further a do, let’s get to know rosie!
— how are you feeling currently? are you well?
I’m feeling good, thanks! A bit all over the place with lots of projects at different stages and lots of moving parts to manage, but all for exciting and invigorating things, so life is good. I thank my lucky stars I get to do what I do every day and feel so fortunate and grateful.
— tell me a little bit about your childhood. did you love food from a young age? and were your parents good cooks?
100% - I was incredibly curious around food from as early on as I can remember. My family is one obsessed by food, the running joke is that we’re always talking about dinner while we’re eating lunch. My parents did a brilliant job of educating us about good food from an early age. They did a very clever thing of always cooking something interesting, but we weren’t forced to eat it if we didn’t like it, we just had to try a bit. If we didn’t like the meal then we were offered bread and butter and that was it. So we quickly learned that bread and butter gets boring, and that maybe whatever they were eating was perhaps more interesting. So we fostered a curiosity and interest around food from an early age, that for me just grew and grew.
— what was your absolute favorite food as a child?
Without a doubt, macaroni cheese. My mum made a brilliant Nigella Lawson recipe and it was a staple in the winter. Coming home from a bitterly cold day at school to macaroni cheese bubbling away in the oven was the dream.
— we had a house in spain growing up, so i have many early memories of spanish food, and eating things like rabbit paella and prawns drenched in sizzling garlic butter with my family. i am so grateful to have been introduced to this kind of food from a young age—and loving it! what is your earliest memory of food combined with travel. is there any food that sticks in your mind as a vivid food memory? *this can be any kind of travel. camping in the uk, holidays abroad, down the road! anything!
We went on holiday to Italy quite a bit as children and I still remember a specific bowl of pesto pasta that I had in a tiny trattoria somewhere near Florence. It will stay with me till the day I die. Everything I tried in Italy on holiday as a child was a revelation, the tomatoes tasted like no tomato I had ever eaten in the UK, the stone fruit, the rosemary, the basil! It was all so fresh and heightened and mind blowing to me as a kid from deepest darkest Derbyshire.
— tell me a little bit about your career in food. where it began right up to where you are now.
Wowee it’s been a journey. I was an actor and a writer in London for 10 years, for the whole of my twenties, but my day job that actually paid my rent was always in food. I started as a baker at Meringue Girls, and went on to work for them on and off for eight years, always coming back from my acting jobs with a place as a baker there. Then I started to work at other bakeries part time, starting with Violet Bakery where I project managed the royal wedding cake for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Later I got a job in the kitchen at e5 Bakehouse as a chef, making the breakfast, brunch and lunch menus. It was at e5 that I really honed my skills in savoury food. Around a similar time I was brewing on the idea of starting a supper club. I had hosted a massive dinner for 36 of my friends and family for my 29th birthday and that had planted a seed which turned into the supper club I now run with my housemate and friend, Virginia Malavasi. I guess it’s also worth mentioning that I live communally, which means my housemates and I share all our food and each night of the week one person cooks for everyone. I definitely was cooking the most in the warehouse, always inviting a few friends for dinner so that on a random Wednesday it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to be cooking for 12. Just before my 30th birthday I realised that actually the only thing that really sets my heart on fire is cooking, talking about and eating great food. I am at my happiest serving out ten plates of glossy pasta for my friends with a cake cooling in the background for pudding. Food really is the thing I go to bed thinking about and get out of bed in the morning for. I made a decision last April to really dedicate myself to a career in food and everything has sort of flowed from there.
— do you have a career trajectory in mind, or are you more of a go-with-the-flow kinda gal?
I feel like I came to my career late, I’m really only a year into being a full time chef and food writer, so I have been going with the flow. Although, when I made the decision to change careers, I wrote a vision, which was just a list of things I wanted to do. It included starting a supper club, a substack, posting recipes on social media and writing a cookbook. So far it’s been going to plan and I’m excited to see what the future holds.
— what prompted you to start a supper club—apart from your love of food, of course.
As I said, I had hosted this big dinner for my birthday. This meant hiring tables, gathering enough crockery, cutlery and glassware, sourcing fabric for the tables etc - it was the full shebang. I just knew after that night that I had to do it again and I wanted to create a community where good food flowed, interesting people met and that I would do it with Virginia. So we hatched the plan, we invested in a bunch of old German trestle tables off Gumtree, and we came up with the idea of a seasonal supper club that would take place four times a year, for Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. We wanted to bring together both our heritages using the very best of the British season’s harvest in the most delicious Italian recipes. Virginia is from Emilia Romagna in Northern Italy and so a lot of the recipes we serve at the supper club are inspired by her home.
— where is your favorite place to travel to eat. and where is top of your list to travel and eat next?
I mean I would be lying if I said it was anywhere other than Italy. I have travelled quite widely in Italy but there are still so many places I want to explore. Liguria is high on the list, as is Puglia, I did a job there a long time ago but didn't have much time to explore so I definitely need to go back. And ditto to Sardinia!
— i know that you have spent some time in the US/LA. tell me a little more about that. do you have any favorite food memories/restaurants from that time?
Oooo great question. So I lived there when I was 18 and did a year as a PA to an actor, I was living with her and her family so I did a lot of cooking as well. I was so overwhelmed by the level of delicious seasonal produce available all year round. Absolutely loved the farmers markets, not something I was used to in the UK, and Trader Joes & Gelson’s will always hold a special place in my heart. We stayed in Los Feliz for a while and were super close to Little Dom’s which I remember loving. I was obsessed with the BLT wrap from Real Food Daily for a while and so much amazing Mexican food that also was really new for me, a million miles away from what I was used to in the UK. I would say the lasting memory and highlight for me was the sushi, I had never been introduced to sushi beyond the fast food type you can get in England at Itsu and Yo Sushi. So the first omakase dinner I had blew my mind. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the restaurant, it was a tiny place in a little strip mall in DTLA that had maybe 10 seats and I still think about the smoked eel to this day.
— i miss london, and the ever evolving, extremely diverse food scene. where are some of your favorite places to eat, and why?
Excellent question. It truly is evolving every day and there are new places popping up all over town. I think my favourite places are those that keep it the most simple: I like good, honest, delicious food that isn’t too fussy. So I would say top of my list are places like Campania & Jones, Brawn, Cafe Cecilia and my all time favourite, a relatively new place that feels completely timeless, Sessions Art Club, they just get it right on every level from the decor to the drinks to the food to the service.
— lastly, you have been such a big supporter of my career in food, but also as a friend too. i am so grateful. and i just know that when we meet in person we are going to get on like a house on fire! if we were going out for the day (or night) in london. where would you take me, specifically.
Ok, well first off, this has to happen !
Secondly, let’s say we are spending the day together, we would start with coffee and a pastry at Pophams, they do the best pastries in London and their cheese, marmite & scallion scroll is what dreams are made of. Then we would wander down the canal to Cafe Cecilia for a glass of wine and a light lunch. We’d carry on our crawl through east london, work up an appetite all the way to Farringdon and end with dinner and drinks on the terrace at Sessions Art Club. We would go home tipsy, full and happy.
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you can follow rosie for more food adventures here—
pan con tomato for dad
it was my dads wedding anniversary last friday, and we just so happened to be in town for the celebrations. as much as he wanted to keep to his friday night traditions and go to the local curry house, i convinced him to let me cook for them at his home in worcestershire (not the home i grew up in) and we had a jolly old time.
i made some pan con tomate as an appetizer whilst we all danced around the kitchen to some northern soul music, and it was just fabulous! here is my recipe for my version of the spanish classic.
serves 4-6
1 loaf of sourdough, sliced and toasted
4 large, heirloom tomatoes
1/4 olive oil
two large pinches of flaky salt & more for serving
1-2 garlic cloves, peeled
black pepper for serving
begin by cutting the tomatoes in half, and then flesh side down—begin grating the tomato on either a box grater, or medium-sized microplane. you want a fairly fine grate on these. i usually grate over a prep bowl, as to catch all of the tomato pulp.
now is a good time to slice and toast your sourdough, however you see fit—but I usually like my slices around 1/2 an inch thick.
to the tomato pulp, add in the olive oil and two large pinches of flaky salt and stir to combine.
once the bread is toasted and slightly cooled, take one of the garlic cloves and rub it generously into the bread. repeat with each slice until everything has been rubbed with the garlic.
carefully pile the tomato mixture onto each slice of bread. serve with a little more olive oil and a few cracks of fresh black pepper.
this is truly one of the greatest snacks ever to exist. enjoy!
talk soon
xo
This was so great baby
this was such a gorgeous read !