Newsletter

Chasing Summer

It's the first Friday of summer, and I'm looking back on five years of the ACBN.

Scott Hines

21 Jun 2024 — 13 min read

I want to believe in summer.

Like many people, I harbor a fuzzily-idealized nostalgic vision of the season. I can picture walking out of the last day of school with an empty backpack, furrows of dry cut grass piled up on the lawn as we departed for three whole months—three months that felt impossibly vast only a hundred-and-change months into our lives. Those months would fill with ice cream trucks and swimming pools, lightning bugs and fireworks, comic books and re-runs, and not a hint of responsibility or consequence.

As an adult, the reality of summer hits a bit different.

Springtime here in the Ohio Valley oscillates between savage storms and days of incomparable pleasantry, but there’s enough of the latter to make you forgive the former. Summer, on the other hand, comes on like a migraine. The air is hot, heavy and still, the blue-gray skies smeared with brown. The digital displays on the highway warning of an air quality alert seem wholly unnecessary, considering that one has to be outside to see them and surely already knows.

No doubt, the carefree summers of my youth were enabled and abetted by the daily efforts of my parents, and I’ve felt that karmic check coming due as I’ve shuttled my kids to and from various camps the past few weeks. I’ve been busier than ever in my non-writing job lately, juggling deliverables and deadlines that seem determined not to play nice with each other. “You’re always working,” my son observes one night, and I balance the awful pang of my child saying that with my desperate need for him to go back to bed so I can finish my work.

Despite being busier than ever, I’ve felt stalled. I’ve had a few big creative projects—you know, the side-hustles to my side-hustle—shuffling between burners all year, but they’ve been cooling on the back for more than a month now. It’s frustrating. I’m ready for a breather. I’m ready for a reset. I’m ready for a summer vacation of my own.

My dear friend Lexa Hillyer publishes a monthly letter on creativity, and her latest hit my inbox yesterday morning. This passage struck me hard, and right when I needed it:

It is not talent that breeds success, but its intersection with tenacity. One comes with training, practice and innate gravitational orientation; the other comes from… I don't know. Willful stubbornness? Semi-tragic delusion? Radical faith—which, might, after all, involve a cocktail of all of the above?

In the meantime, we do other things. In the meantime, we live.

I’m not giving in, and I’m not giving up.

In the midst of summer, I’ll find an invincible September. (Or something like that.)

Friends, it’s Friday.

Normally, I play from a set list on Fridays, offering up recipes, drinks, music and entertainment options for your weekend ahead. I’ve done that for, by my count, 249 Fridays over the past five years. That format’s not going away any time soon, but I’m breaking from it today.

I’m taking my family on vacation next week, and that’s where my summer will really begin; time with the people who matter most to me. That will roll right into a short week for the Fourth of July, a time when few people can or should be bothered to keep up on their emails. As such, I’ll be taking the next two weeks off from writing.

It’ll be a necessary creative re-charge for me, and I hope you’ll understand the brief absence from your inboxes; I plan to come back full-strength on July 8th.

Before I go, though, I’d like to take a little victory lap.

That first newsletter went out to a couple dozen people; this one will go out to many thousands. In between, I’ve written and published 734 others; that’s a million words and change, and somehow people are still listening.

Some of you have been there from the very start, while some of you may have shown up just yesterday. I’m grateful for all of you—for the time you spend reading my work, for the financial support you’ve given my writing career, and for the many things you’ve shared with me here. It hasn’t always been easy to put out multiple newsletters each week, but you keep me coming back, and I hope you’ll stick around a good while longer.

Let’s look back at the first five years of the ACBN.

(You may need to open this email in a browser to see the whole thing. I encourage you to do so, because there are some very funny dog pictures at the end.)

The first good thing I wrote here

If you’ve been around from the start, you know that this was originally launched to support a sports-focused podcast that lasted about eighteen episodes. It was good—really, it was!—but it turns out that recording a podcast far more difficult work for me than writing is.

In the midst of that transition, I wrote a little essay about taking my kids to a minor-league baseball game on Labor Day, and people really liked it.

Consider it a book-end to today’s start-of-summer grousing.

The time I got way in over my head and made terrible dumplings

Back in January 2020, I decided to make soup dumplings at home. It was going to be newsletter content. They were an unmitigated disaster. Just an absolute mess. As big a kitchen fail as I’ve ever had.

Then, I decided to write about them, and it turned out better than if they’d actually been good; I now had a culinary ethos.

I’ve cooked a lot of great things since, but I think I’ll leave dumplings to the professionals.

The silliest thing I’ve cooked here

In recent years, I’ve tried to re-orient my culinary content to “things you might actually want to make”, but for a while, I had a real fondness for stunt food. (I assure you that urge has not fully gone away; now, it just strikes without warning.)

In May 2020—right after turning on paid subscriptions here—I delivered perhaps my most diabolical recipe, a Great British Bake-Off-inspired piece of Americana: a Loaded Bacon Cheeseburger Picnic Pie.

Through much of those early days of the pandemic, I thought I was handling things really well. Then, I look back on the things I cooked and realize I absolutely was not.

My thesis

My actual graduate thesis was an architectural design for a library.

My spiritual thesis came when I put to words my non-ironic love of quirky regional foods, most notably in my full-throated embrace of the oft-maligned Cincinnati Chili.

It might seem like I’m trolling when I tell people that I love Skyline, and it almost certainly is trolling when I post pictures of my plate at Skyline, but my appreciation for foods that betrays real history amidst this country’s increasingly culinary homogeneity is sincere.

Since writing this, I have also gone out of my way to eat Scrambled Dogs in Columbus, Georgia, and Altoona-style pizza in Pennsylvania. I walk the walk, folks.

I got on one and wrote a new holiday classic

Sure, it’s 95 degrees outside today, and a few days short of being as far away from Christmas as you can get on the calendar.

But why not cool off mentally by reading my New Yorker-style longform investigation into the true story behind Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer and what really happened “one foggy Christmas Eve”?

Like any writer, I am deeply critical of my own work, but when I go back and read this one, I genuinely think “dang, how did I pull that off?”

I served my food to actual people at a real restaurant

Two summers ago, my friends Michael and Charlotte—the shuckers behind Lou Oyster Cult, Louisville’s “wayfarin’ raw bar”—invited me to join them for one of their events, serving a full house of patrons at The MerryWeather. I absolutely bit off more than I could chew recipe-wise, and by the end of the day I was more physically tired than I’d been outside of the times I’ve run marathons.

It was also a freakin’ blast, and I even got to meet a few of you in the process.

10/10 experience.

I got recognized next to actual food writers

I have no culinary pedigree. I am an architect who learned to cook in part by watching Rachael Ray. I’m not a restaurateur or chef or cookbook author—I’m a suburban dad who likes to goof around and have fun in the kitchen.

Needless to say, then, I was surprised, humbled and delighted when I got recognized along with ten actual food-and-drink writers in Substack’s Food Writers Fellowship:

We participated in a three-month intensive program that saw us talk to some major food-world personalities, and I also got the spiffy logo that now adorns many of your drink koozies out of the process.

(I still have a bunch of these koozies, but I’m not going to get into the business of distributing them right before I go on vacation. Let’s talk in July about that.)

I committed numerous acts of emotional terrorism

I have two grade-school-aged children, and while I think I’ve been careful to protect their identities and their privacy, I’ve written often over the years about my experiences as a parent. Raising these kids is a big part of who I am, and it’s been great to share the ups and downs and in-betweens of parenthood with others.

Of course, as the title suggests here, I don’t always get it right.

I said goodbye to my best friend

Long before there was an Action Cookbook Newsletter, people knew me online because of my dog. Holly, a preternaturally-photogenic Pembroke Welsh Corgi, was my avatar online for many years, and I even occasionally wrote in character as her.

Holly passed away last summer at the age of 12, and saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Being able to share her memory with people who’d come to love her even if they’d never met her was of great comfort to me.

(If you read this at work, that’s on you.)

The best thing I’ve cooked here?

There’s a lot of options in five years of weekly recipes. My biggest calling card has long been the Kentuckiana Hot Loin, and my Salmon Burgers have been a consistent crowd pleaser. I’m going to go more recent here, though, and tout the culmination of last summer’s “Captain Sandwich” exploration: my Gochujang-Honey Bear Claw Chicken Sandwich:

It’s so good.

[Angelica Schulyer at the end of Hamilton voice] Can I show you what I’m proudest of?

Most of the newsletters I put out are short essays, or they’re the Friday lifestyle digests. Periodically, though, I like to surprise you (or take advantage of your attention) by sharing longer-form pieces of creative fiction that I’ve written.

I’ve collected each of these under the “Stories” heading on the main-page; these are the things I’m most proud of here, and that’s a direction I plan to keep heading in.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, try out “The Special”:

They’re each something different, but I’ve had a lot of fun writing them.

It’s long been tradition here to close out my Friday newsletters with a selection of reader-submitted pet photos, and I’ve still got a few in my queue, but I’m going to hold those for after vacation.

Today, I’m sharing my handsome lad, Olaf, a lovably-clumsy husky-mix oaf who’s sleeping at my feet as I write this. Last year, my son received a small drone/quadcopter as a birthday gift, and he’s been putting on nightly “drone shows” for the family in the backyard.

In the process of doing this, we discovered that Olaf loves trying to chomp the drone out of the air, and it’s turned into our version of fetch. He 100% understands that it is a game—he’ll trot out happily as soon as he sees my son grab the drone, and he’ll pull back as soon as he knocks it out of the air. It’s a great way to wear him out, and it’s also made for some terrifically funny photos.

Here are a few of those.