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Introducing Eat This, Drink That
Many of you will have already discovered my new subscription newsletter Eat This, Drink That and might be wondering where the idea came from and how it fits in with Matching Food & Wine.
As you no doubt know Matching Food & Wine is free to read but as I hope you’re also aware a lot of work goes into it and it costs money to run in terms of web hosting, design, marketing and the small but brilliant behind the scenes team who keep it on the road. (Thankyou David, Monica, Helen and Chantal!)
Many of you have generously made a donation towards its running costs over the years but that only just covers the costs let alone creating enough income to develop and improve the site - or pay its author a living wage 😉 Newsletters, in particular, had become really expensive because of the significant size of our subscriber base.
Then I heard about Substack which is a platform designed to give readers the opportunity to fund writers whose work they enjoy and it really appealed to me. It also gave me the opportunity to write more than I currently do about food which is where I started my career in journalism and for my readers to get the benefit of the 30 plus years I’ve spent writing about food and drink.
So I decided to do one myself and Eat This, Drink That was born.
The basic offering is a weekly newsletter called The Friday 5 which goes out, as the name suggests, on a Friday and includes five different types of recommendation which change from week to week.
Most weeks there will be something to cook, a bottle and some ingredient or ready-made product you can buy but it will also include cookbooks, the odd cocktail, restaurants and hotels I’ve been grabbed by - in short, the kind of places and things on which I’d be prepared to spend my own money and encourage my friends to spend theirs.
There are other monthly posts including:
- Raise your Game (how to cook, eat and drink better. Here’s one on perfecting your gin and tonic for example and another on how to cook perfect fluffy rice.
- The ETDT recipe edit, (sifting through the hundreds of recipes out there so you don’t have to. I did one for Easter here and there's one coming shortly on recipes you might want to make for the Jubilee weekend,
- So you think you don’t like …a feature on food dislikes and how to overcome them. So far I've tackled mushrooms and chardonnay.
There will also be the occasional feature as the mood takes me such as this one on what to eat if you lose your sense of taste (from first-hand experience of having Covid recently).
Meanwhile Matching Food & Wine will continue to focus on its main aim of being the most comprehensive food and wine pairing site out there - at least I like to think so! And there will still be a monthly newsletter updating you on what’s recently been published on the site. And all for free but you can support it by subscribing to Eat This Drink That.
By the way there's a 25% discount on an annual membership until the end of May 2022, bringing it down to £27 a year or just £2.25 a month, less than the cost of a flat white . . . Or sign up to a monthly subscription at £4 a month - still only £1 a week!
If you’d like to get a clearer idea of what you'd be signing up for you can see some of the free posts I published in April here. (You may have to scroll down to find them!)
Hope you’ll come on board!
If you’d like be able to check out all the food and wine pairings on the site you can buy a bundle of credits here to access my premium content.
And/or for regular updates on what and where I’ve been eating, drinking and travelling sign up for my weekly newsletter Eat This, Drink That, Live Well.