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Novel and Nosh
Novel & Nosh is where cozy living, good books, and delicious bites come together. Host Courtney McManus invites you to slow down and savor life through the four pillars — Novel, Nosh, Nest, and Navigate — blending seasonal reading, food inspiration, home comfort, and mindful living.
Each episode pairs inspiring stories and flavors with reflections on how to feel more grounded, creative, and connected in every season. From autumn book recommendations and comforting recipes to simple ways to reset your space and navigate life with ease, Novel & Nosh helps you create moments that nourish body, mind, and spirit.
Perfect for book lovers, foodies, and women seeking intentional, cozy, seasonal living.
Novel and Nosh
Origin Story: Books Meet Bites
We share the origin of Novel & Nosh, from a college book club and a symbolic crème brûlée to a podcast built on pairing stories with food. We invite you to join a growing community across platforms and help shape where this passion goes next.
• the Lovely Bones scene inspiring a dessert metaphor
• early book club experiments pairing reads with dishes
• growing up in a bookstore and loving Food Network
• comfort reads like Bread Alone and Little Beach Street Bakery
• Instagram era of flat lays and themed cocktails
• learning through imperfect photography and persistence
• discovering podcasting through a fitness business
• choosing to lean in at fifty and build community
• plans for menus, simple pairings, and reader input
• where to connect: website, socials, and a Facebook group
Subscribe to follow along. Find me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and visit novelinosh.com. Join the Facebook group so we can talk about books, maybe start a book club—anything. I’d love to find a community who also loves this.
Join my community over on Skool: Novel and Nosh Community
or head to my website www.novelandnosh.com
Welcome to Novel and Notch, where books and food come together. Today I want to share quickly with you where Novel and Notch came from and kind of how I got started on this and maybe a little bit of where I'm hoping this will all go. So basically, Novel and Notch was a concept that came to me 25 years ago. I was in my college years and I had started a book club with a bunch of friends, and we were getting ready. We actually read The Lovely Bones by Alice Siebel. And if you haven't read that book, it is about a little girl who was killed. And the book is through her point of view. So she is telling the story, and she is talking about the community, her family, and the killer. And she's basically watching them from above, kind of explaining, you know, how they're going about trying to find out what happened to her. And I was going to have um the book club dinner at my house, and I thought it would be fun to create food based on the book. Well, the book, I don't remember if it really spoke about food at all within the story. Um, but there was a descriptive part of the book that I still remember to this day, where this man, and I can't remember who it was that did this, but they were digging into hard, possibly frozen ground. And that stuck with me. And for whatever reason, I decided to make, well, for that reason, the descriptive reason, I decided to make a creme brulee for dessert, thinking that as you take your spoon and put it into that hard, sugary crust, it would be the same imagery as someone digging into a frozen ground. So that was where I first started kind of playing with the idea of food and books together. I always loved reading. Um, I grew up in a bookstore because my mom worked at a bookstore. And I loved food. Prior to I would say early college years, I would watch Food Network all the time. So that was kind of like two passions that I had that I was kind of bringing together through this book club. And we would, we continued to meet, and I don't remember if I continued to try to match the book with a certain type of food. Um, but that was kind of like my first experience with bringing books and food together. Then I would say a lot of the books that I read had a lot to do with food. So two specifically that I love is um Bread Alone, which I can't remember who the author is, but that was a great book. I loved it. Um, and then also uh The Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan. Love that little series. So those were kind of the cozy books that I would always come back to when I, you know, was dealing with a lot of stress or when I wanted to just kind of sink into a book or needed a palate cleanser, that type of thing. Those are the cozy books that I will always come back to, like some people read mysteries for. So that was kind of like the second thing that kind of made me feel like books and food come together. And then um, about the time when Instagram started to become popular, I, for whatever reason, can't remember why, I had my business page through Instagram and then I created another Instagram page where I wanted to bring books and food together. And I called it Novel and Nosh. The name just kind of came to me out of nowhere. And I almost feel like this has been like this little niggling, like this is where you need to go. This is, you know, this is what you need to do. And it kept tapping me on the shoulder and I just continued to ignore it. And um, but during that time, what I started to do, and if you were to go scroll all the way back through my Instagram um pictures on Novel and Nosh, you will see some of the things that I did in the beginning. I did like a flat lay where I would post a picture of the book that I was reading and then a food to go along with it. And um, one of the books that I had read during that time was Bird Box. And I made um, it was either a shop in the dark or dark and snormy from a cookbook that I had of different alcoholic drinks that, you know, like a cocktail book that I had. Um and that was kind of where I also, yet again, was bringing books and food together. The problem was I was terrible at photography. So nothing ever happened with that. Still not great at photography. But um over the years, it has continued to kind of niggle at my mind, like figuring out what can I do with books and food, because it those two things are truly a passion of mine. And um, my other job is in the fitness aspect, and I started podcasting for that and truly loved it. Love podcasting. So I um that was one aspect that I really loved about my job, my business. It was my own business, but that was one thing I really loved was the podcasting. So, yet again, a little tap on my shoulder. And here I am creating a podcast for Novel and Nosh. I'm not sure what will happen with this, but I am leaning in. I'm almost 50 years old now, and I feel like I should kind of follow my passions, and I'm going to lean into this and see what happens. So if you're interested, I'd love for you to subscribe. Um, my goal is to provide lots of, you know, bringing books and food together in some way or another. I'm not sure where everything will go, um, but I'm here for it and I'm excited to see how this kind of changes along the way. Um, if you are interested, like I said, you might want to uh subscribe to this. That would let me know that people other than myself are interested in bringing books and food together or listening to someone talk about books and food. And then I do have Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. I have all those things. So feel free to find me. I do have a website, novelinosh.com, which is where everything will kind of be housed. And um, feel free to join the Facebook group where we can kind of talk about books, maybe start a book club, anything. I am open to anything and everything in regards to bringing books and food together, and would love to find a community who also loves this as well. So feel free to join me. And I hope you all have a wonderful day. Go grab a good book and a good snack and enjoy.