Two types of tomato recipes

Hi and welcome back to our normally scheduled programming! You may have seen my newsletter about Supper Club this week, but this free newsletter is going nowhere.

So let’s get into the week, with the most interesting info probably being why I chose to stop my paid tier on Substack. Let us begin:

Well, obviously the launch of Supper Club! Which you can learn more about here.

I’ve been open about my desire to keep my recipes free for as long as possible, but as tech changes more rapidly than we can fathom, it’s inevitable that we change, too. There were many reasons for my decision to start this new paid tier, and these are just a few:

1. My biggest reason? People have asked for ad-free content, and it’s just a better user experience this way. You might have seen me trying to build out an ad-free recipe index on Substack for my paid subscribers, or launch livestreams or chats, but nothing really felt of monetary value on here unless I paywalled a recipe, which then turned indexing, searching and finding a recipe into a nightmare.

   
   The garden grows where you water it, and my blog has always been my biggest priority, so having an ad-free, benefits tier on my blog made the most sense. And it’s organized which sings to my Type-A brain.

2. AI has changed…everything. I hate to say it, but I think in 10-15 years time, being able to get a credible recipe for free on the internet will be a thing of the past. AND I’M SORRY. Search engine traffic is down, AI food blogs are popping up left and right, and if you look at the bottom of food TikToks you’ll see an AI generator attempting to mimic the recipe. It’s a minefield out there.

   
   I’m not worried about AI stealing my content (I have code that blocks any crawlers), I’m worried about how generative AI takes away the sustainability of an ad-revenue driven business model. And if you choose to support my paid recipes, there’s also the level of trust that a human made them, not a bot.

3. Third, Substack is launching a paid partnerships portal, moving them closer towards a social platform. There is nothing wrong with this, it’s just not the home I envisioned for a paid platform. I joined Substack when their ethos was to foster audience-supported journalists, making it so the writers weren’t reliant on promos or ads. While I love Substack, their new Creator Portal puts them as the middleman between creators and advertisers, meaning they will benefit from writers adding sponsored content.

   While I don’t take issue with writers getting paid, my goal is to have all of my paid elements be ad-free.

4. I have a lot more flexibility to add value. By hosting Supper Club on my own domain, I’m able to make a membership tier feel worth! it!!! I think Collections is a good example of this: you can save recipes to your personalized folders and then auto-generate grocery lists, something I wouldn’t have been able to do here.

5. There’s something to be said for community. I personally love to support a Patreon, you can catch me as a paid member of Diabolical Lies, Mammoth Club (shockingly not about mammoths), the St. Louis Zoo, and a pile of other podcasts and creators.

   I love how those spaces connect like-minded people, and I’m very excited to see if our first cooking livestream (which we are planning right now!!) could do the same.

At $3.50/month, I aim to keep Supper Club as accessible and fair as possible. If you can’t afford a subscription at this time, scroll to the bottom of the FAQs to get in touch, we’d love to help you out.

AND THANK YOU to everyone who has already signed up. We have a big community on there and I think that is so freaking cool!! See you at the first cooking class!

Selfishly? The Audrey Hobert x FishWife Collab Tin (use code JUSTINESNACKS if you, too, have a FishWife problem).

Realistically? The book How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America by Dr. Priya Fielding-Singh. I’ve been interested in the food divide in American for years, mostly because I’m fascinated by how we can live across such extremes. We are the wealthiest country in the world, yet we have food deserts. We have industrialized farming so we could feed the world ten times over, yet we have children who are hungry. We have Americans who eat exclusively foods wrapped in plastic (AKA my family when I was growing up), and we have Americans who wouldn’t dare to get produce outside of their local farmer’s market.

I’m sure you’ve seen the whole Catherine Ebs grocery store debacle, which further spurred on my interest. How we view what’s fit to eat is a fascinating paradigm to dissect.

Did I already tell you I finally ate at L’industrie for the first time? It’s embarrassing to have waited this long.

It absolutely lives up to everything you’ve heard. I have to apologize for thinking a slice of Prince Street could compare. Get the burrata and the white slice.

Two tomato dishes this week, one simple and raw, the other simple and cooked:

Golden Heirloom Pan con Tomate - I’m sure my Spanish friends would crucify me for adding basil and not rubbing down the bread with garlic, but when it’s hot and I’m tired, this quick pan con tomate feels like the most streamlined, simplified, delicious version to me. Also it’s summer!!? You’re telling me when don’t have basil to use??

And this week on Supper Club, Basil Tomato Salmon!

I was almost kicking myself for making our debut recipe something so simple, but as I was making it for the third time in the past two weeks (using various forms of tomatoes: sungolds, vine, cherry, etc.), I was reminded of the value of a really good, simple, healthy-ish, weeknight meal.

It’s not like this recipe doesn’t have skills or secrets. The salmon starts in a cold pan, skin down, letting the fat render from the salmon as it comes up to temp in the skillet. The tomatoes and aromatics deglaze the pan, then you gently poach the salmon in the tomatoes until it’s nice and flaky.

And I am so over people saying cheese doesn’t go with fish. This basil parm sauce on top of salmon is wonderful.

THE WORLD CUP! I love how the Knicks didn’t do it for me, but soccer did.

Oh sorry, football.

Until next week, xoxo,

Justine