"the lovechild of a career-driven Sydney based food stylist and family devoted mum, who both go by the name of Lucy Tweed."
The website Every Night of the Week, in this particular post is not one that I have found myself and noted down to look at some time. Nor did it appear in 'top ten' lists. It did however appear in the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival newsletter. What intrigued me about it was the reference to her social media hit resulting in a book, which is imminently to be published. Now I am not a participator in social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or whatever is the latest thing - Tik-Tok? because I probably already waste far too much time on the computer. So obviously I am not aware of particular social media sensations, but I am very intrigued by the phenomenon. I have even occasionally pondered on joining Instagram which seems to be the one that is foodie central. Instagram has, indeed, long been a potential subject on my list. I consider joining for various reasons, one of which is that sometimes when researching a post an Instagram account is involved - as today. I find the Instagram page, but of course can go no further because I have no account. Below is the Instagram account in question which, as you can see, has almost 23,000 followers. Now, for all I know this is not actually huge - maybe there are others in the millions, but nevertheless it seems to have been sufficient to cause her to start the website.
Lucy Tweed is not a trained chef, or even cook. Her profession actually seems to be as a food stylist - with Gourmet Traveller being one of her clients, so not just any old workaday stylist. And you can see this in the very professionally styled and photographed pictures on both her Instagram account and on her website. And she obviously loves doing it:
"The idea that you can create an image that drags the viewer's eyes around the page in what seems a mad fashion but is ultimately a perfectly choreographed dance by the art director, photographer, me… it’s cool."
Cooking is, it seems, her happy place, and so she started an Instagram account to share her simple solutions to the daily grind of turning out a meal for the family. Instagram success followed (how does that happen?), then the website and a book - I'm not sure that she has time for the food styling any more, or maybe the website has been turned over to others. Or maybe she has given up the food styling. Who knows.
A quick look at a couple of pages from the book give you some idea of her writing style and philosophy:
And here are a couple of recipes from her website - beginning with the one that was featured in that Melbourne Food and Wine Festival newsletter - a Chocolate thing which she introduces as:
"The blueprint for a dessert of this category is essentially chocolate, then words like warm, gooey, melty, sugary, crisp and chewy, and finally a random ‘ooooh yeah let’s put this in there!’ element. In this case, marshmallows."
Interesting though that she doesn't mention the rhubarb which is also a feature.
And here are two more: Yoghurt flatty dough which can either be a flatbread or a pizza base, and Heavenly Fridge Hacks which is actually a few little things like breadcrumbs, and dressings.
"every salad has to have three toppings… A dressing, a crunch factor (pangrattato or seeds) and a seriously committed herb."
So there you go - it's a really nicely designed website. Not like the standard Wordpress format that seems to dominate the world of foodie websites/blogs. The design here is different, calculated in a very trendily styled way. The text of the recipes is capitalised - which I'm not sure I like, but it is indeed different.
The website also sells stuff from 'partners' which, I guess is how she makes money from it. You can sign up to a newsletter, which gives you: "a recipe, a story and a few extra things. (ir)regular letters from Lucy."
I think she also has a YouTube channel now - anyway I did find this video of her promoting her book whilst cooking a noodle and dumpling soup. It's rather nice.
And very today. In the flesh as it were, she is rather more homely than the website and Instagram account would imply. There are some interesting little tips/hacks in there.
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