Thank God It’s Food, or TGIFood, has been publishing food fare and recipes since December 2018, both in our weekly newsletter and online on the Daily Maverick website. With growing interest in our output, it’s a good time to paint a picture of who we are, what we’re all about, and where and how to find us.

My philosophy from the outset as Editor of TGIFood has been that TGIFood should be about writing well-researched, informative and entertaining food stories, rather than merely churn out recipes. When the pandemic struck, we began to issue daily recipes as well, but recipes have a story too. The story is everything, and that has always been at the core of my own writing and attitude in my four decades+ in journalism. It’s always about the story, and for this reason you don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool “foodie” to appreciate our output. You just have to enjoy life and the living of it, because that is the essence of good food writing. Food + life = living.

TGIFood isn’t only a weekly newsletter, although that is an important part of our output. Yet, some people have the impression that that is the entire thing; that the only way to access our food stories is by subscribing to the newsletter and clicking on the stories. But the newsletter is the portal, the front door. TGIFood is archived, in toto, on the Daily Maverick website, and you can find everything we’ve ever written by going there directly. You can find our fare via the newsletter too, of course, and we want you to. Newsletters are a conversation between us and our readers. It’s like meeting for coffee and saying, hey, look, this is what we have for you this week; cheers, mate.

To find the TGIFood online archive, which updates every time we publish a story, simply visit this link and you’ll find every one of the stories and recipes we have published since TGIFood was launched in December 2018. To date, we have published well beyond 1,000 stories, and the tally rises every day.

Or you can go in via the Daily Maverick home page. At the top of that are the various DM broad areas of interest: Investigations, News & Analysis, Features, Newsletters, and Newspaper. Hover over “Features” and scroll down to TGIFood. There, you’ll find every one of our stories and recipes going all the way back to December 2018, with the newest one at the top. If you hover over “Newsletters”, you will find a page of information about what to do if you’re not receiving your newsletters from us. Also, at the top you’ll see “Subscribe to our newsletters” and, below that, “Please manage your newsletter subscriptions on your profile”. Click on “profile” and you’ll be taken to your DM membership page. Scroll down and click on TGIFood to be sure our newsletter lands in your inbox every Friday afternoon. Whether or not you read it right away is your prerogative: it will be there to read at leisure at the weekend or even the next week.

We recently tested the idea of changing the time and day when we send out the TGIFood newsletter. The result was most interesting. Since inception, Fridays at 6pm have always been the send time for the campaign. But for two weeks in a row we sent it on Saturday mornings, 9am the first time, and 8am the second. We asked you to send us your thoughts on when you would rather receive it, and the responses were varied. Some prefer a Saturday morning, some prefer to read it on a Friday night. Many prefer to read our stuff on leisurely Sundays, others keep it for the new week.

What became clear is that to send it on a Saturday morning isn’t going to please those who’d rather read it on Friday evening. And a fair few people said that they felt 6pm was a tad late in the day, and they’d rather receive it before they leave work and head into the traffic, or go shopping en route home, or whatever their routine might be.

So, from this Friday we’re sending it at 1pm, smack bang in the middle of a Friday, so you’ll have the chance to read it at lunch time, perhaps plan shopping related to a recipe, and so on, or keep it for whichever part of the weekend it suits you to read it.

But, even if you don’t get our TGIFood newsletter, all of our stories, new and old, are there anyway. And every day there’s something new. 

Every weekday we give you our “What’s cooking today” recipe, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Thursdays we give you our weekly Throwback Thursday feature with its recipe, highlighting a veteran dish which we revisit, going into its lore and history and serving up a story as rich and fascinating as we can make it. And there are always stories worth telling and anecdotes worth relating in food.

All through the week our writers in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, the Karoo and elsewhere, even as far afield as Chicago and Provence, are busy writing the features we love to write, and here’s the point of TGIFood: it’s not just about recipes, as anyone who knows our product is aware by now. Food is life, and the living of it, and it is rife and ripe with stories. Every dish, every ingredient, every cuisine, has a story. And that’s what we’re all about at TGIFood.

Each edition (and an edition contains that week’s new output of fresh food stories) features a weekly columnist: Chris Pretorius with his witty, chatty Chicago Blues column, Marita van der Vyver’s delectable French Letter, Anna Trapido’s earthy Scoff column, Lin Sampson’s irreverent Jaw, and Diane Cassere’s The Foodie’s Wife with her long-suffering take on living with yours truly and all my foodie stuff.

There’s always my own Main Ingredient column (first published earlier in the DM168 print edition) and often my GastroTurf or Karoo Dreaming columns, and three or four current stories in the world of food by regular writers Bianca Coleman (Cape Town), Wanda Hennig (Durban), Marie-Lais Emond (Joburg), and other regular contributors including Louzel Lombard Steyn, Lin Sampson, Tracy Gielink and Melanie Farrell, who is also responsible for subediting every piece we publish. 

These will feature in a given Friday’s TGIFood newsletter, along with a reminder of the daily recipes and Throwback Thursday feature we’ve run that week, so if you missed them during the week you can click through to find them.

All of which, again, you can find on the TGIFood platform at any time of any day of any year.

If you’re still unsure how to find our stuff, let Oom Google help you: type in TGIFood recipe and the name of the recipe you want, such as “TGIFood recipe lasagne”, and it will take you to, for example, our Lasagne al forno.​​ Buon appetito. DM/TGIFood

Let us know what you think of our new campaign send time of 1pm on a Friday.