It's a Brand New Season
Something's changed this week.
The morning shadows have grown a little bit longer, and the barest hint of a chill has settled into the air, enough for me to don a jacket on the way to the school bus. Summer may not have struck its final blow yet–I know all too well the risks of turning my back on that monster before it's dead–but a new season is upon us nonetheless.
[that disembodied voice from Field of Dreams voice] It's football season.
This is among my favorite times of the year, the moment when all the idle thoughts, messy threads and go-nowhere plotlines of the summertime are gathered back up and woven into a season with a real narrative arc. We will be winners or we will be losers, but darnit, we're going to be something this fall. My favorite football team probably isn't going to be very good this year, but foolish hope still abounds for now. This is a time of return, more than anything: back to blind, uncomplicated passions. Back to naïve, unguarded optimism. Back home.
Soon, I'll make the annual pilgrimage back to the fields of my fickle youth and pay tribute the only way how–by convincing myself that maybe this will be our year.
Friends, it's Friday again at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
It's also a new season of sorts here.
As you may have already noticed, the ACBN has left Substack for Ghost, a move that I hope will allow this newsletter to thrive and grow for a long time to come.
To celebrate this first-day-at-a-new-school moment, today's newsletter is going out to all subscribers.
That's not usually the case!
My Friday newsletters are the true core of the ACBN, providing you not just with my writing but with a carefully-curated selection of ACBN-Certified Good Things for your weekend ahead. This typically includes a recipe, a cocktail, music, a book, a topic for discussion, pets, and more. They take a lot of work to put together, and that's why I normally keep them behind the paywall–but they're also a lot of fun, and you won't regret upgrading your subscription.
Today's schedule is packed, too!
I'm celebrating the first real week of the college football calendar with everything you need to start the season strong, including a delicious gameday appetizer, an eye-opening cocktail, some great music, a terrific new football book, reader pets, and more!
Wake up the echoes and pass the pretzels. It's about to kick off.
Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together
Football season calls for football food–but while I'm eagerly anticipating bubbling pots of chili, gumbo and the like this fall, it's still too warm for that. The Dutch oven stays away until conference play starts; today, I'm looking at something much easier, but still satisfying: Beer Cheese.
Those are two beautiful words together, aren't they? Chances are, though, you're thinking of something different–unless you're from Kentucky, that is. In most places, "beer cheese" means a creamy, warm, roux-based dip, the kind of thing you'd find at Applebee's or a chain "Irish" pub. Here in Kentucky, though, it's a cold spread, found in refrigerated cases at grocery stores and liquor stores across the Commonwealth. Those are usually highly-processed versions, but it's easy enough to make your own, and there are countless ways you can tweak the cheeses, spices and consistency.
I went with a mix of smoked and sharp cheddar, with the slightly-untraditional but not-unheard-of inclusion of caramelized onions, the making of which was the only time-consuming part of the whole venture. (You could swap in onion jam, or simply omit them, but they were a nice touch.) For the beer, I used a red Scottish ale, but this is a mid-century dish–a boring American beer is fine, too.
AC's Kentucky Beer Cheese
- 4 ounces smoked cheddar, grated from a block
- 4 ounces sharp cheddar, grated from a block
- 3 ounces cream cheese
- 2 tablespoons caramelized onions
- 1 clove garlic, grated
- 2 teaspoons Colman's dry mustard, reconstituted with water
- 1-1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
- 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 1 teaspoon white pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
- 5-6 ounces beer, left to go flat overnight
Blend the cream cheese, onion, garlic, and spices together with a food processor. Fold in the cheese. Pour in beer and process until mostly-smooth and at the consistency you desire.
This turned out really nice, even though I don't have a great food processor. The color's a bit paler than the stuff you might see in the store, owing to the smoked cheddar, but the flavor was worth the trade. Over the week since I made it, I've put it on turkey burgers, egg sandwiches and grilled cheese.
Its purest and best use, though, is with soft pretzels or crackers.
That's a Bluegrass charcuterie board right there.
Them Noon Kickoffs Come Early, Don't They?
The beginning of the football season is a time for big promises. Coaches will look a press corps straight in the eye and tell them that things are going to be different this year.
We're going to attack on every down.
We're going to be more physical.
We're going to focus on winning the day.
We're going to have a decided schematic advantage.
I'm embracing this spirit in my mixological efforts today–that is, I'm going all confidence, no doubt, and today's cocktail is making a lot of promises itself.
A frozen Negroni? Yes. An espresso martini? It's in the neighborhood. A rum drink? Sure, why not. I'm sending everything I've got downfield, and if I get fired, well, that's why I negotiated a buyout. It's early, and we need an eye-opener.
The Air Raid
- 1 ounce Kraken black spiced rum (see note)
- 1 ounce espresso liqueur, such as Borghetti
- 1 ounce Campari
- 1/2 ounce maple syrup
- 2 cups ice
- orange slice, for garnish
Add everything to a blender; blend well. Garnish with an orange slice.
There's nothing subtle about this drink, but there's nothing subtle about football, either. It's a noon kickoff, it's already 90 degrees, and your opponent has a fire in their eyes. You'd better wake up quick.
(A note on rums: avid readers will know I've spent much of the summer falling down a tiki-drink rabbit hole, something that's seen me invest in a wide variety of new rums. I tested a few different versions of this drink, and none of the "good" rums performed as well as the Kraken with the other ingredients.)
This Will Suffice in Lieu of Attending My High School Reunions
In my angry-young-man teenage years, I was a sucker for all manner of hard rock and (as was the style at the time) nu-metal, and spent my fair share of time in mosh pits for bands like Limp Bizkit, Korn, Incubus and the Deftones.
I'm mostly past those days now, even if I've got the tinnitus to remember them by, but I was delighted to find that the Deftones–always a bit of an intellectual outlier within that butt-rock cohort–have a brand-new album out.
It's called private music, and it's terrific.
I'd practically burned out my copies of 1997's Around the Fur and 2000's White Pony, but in revisiting some of their more recent catalog, I'll confess some mild surprise that they never went away and never stopped making great music. It's like I moved off to the big city, only to come back decades later and find that my high school love never stopped being who they'd always been and I was wrong for changing. Y'know, basically a Hallmark Christmas movie, but with heavier guitars.
Hey, I've got a second musical selection today!
Back in June, I featured "Passenger", a new single from Portland-based indie band Glitterfox, and it's a song that's remained in heavy rotation (and often stuck in my head) all summer. Well, last week they released their latest full album, Decoder, and it's terrific, with more of the shimmering, dreamlike guitar-rock and vague Fleetwood Mac vibes the lead single promised.
Here's the video for "Richie's Party":
Iron helps us play!
I grew up in Big Ten country, where no rivalry is bigger than Ohio State-Michigan. I've spent the past 11 years living in Louisville, Kentucky, where "Cards or Cats?" is a defining schism. Even from afar, though, I know how much the Iron Bowl matters. The annual clash between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Auburn Tigers is routinely one of the college football season's biggest games, and it's produced no small amount of memorable moments in recent years.
Still, I didn't know all of the history, and for that reason, I was very excited to dig into Iron in the Blood: How the Alabama vs. Auburn Rivalry Shaped the Soul of the South, a brand-new book by Yahoo Sports writer (and friend of the newsletter) Jay Busbee that came out just this week.
This supremely-readable, highly-entertaining history takes us as far back as the founding of each university in the years after the Civil War, and as far forward as Nick Saban's retirement after an unparalleled run as Alabama head coach (one that still featured some painful losses to Auburn.)
We learn about the region's struggle to define itself after the war, the schools' shaky paths through integration, and the way that a single, annual game has become an anchor of culture and regional pride. We get to know larger-than-life coaches like Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan, interspersed with recaps of some of the most indelible moments in the game, like "Punt, Bama, Punt" or "4th and 31".
It's terrific porch reading a cool false-fall morning, and I enjoyed the heck out of it.
A History of Violence
While we're on the subject of Alabama, I've been engrossed by American Shrapnel, a new podcast produced by Alabama Media Group.
The podcast centers on the manhunt for serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph, who detonated explosives at a series of sites across the South from 1996-98, including the Atlanta Olympics, multiple abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar.
The search for Rudolph–who hid out in remote sections of the Nantahala National Forest in Western North Carolina until his capture in 2003–is the primary narrative, but this isn't just a crime story. The hosts (Pulitzer winner John Archibald and award-winning journalist Becca Andrews) frame Rudolph's run within a larger narrative of American extremism and political violence. They show the roots of a hardening of our political culture, one that began on the fringes in the 1990s but that predominates today.
It's a gripping story, thoroughly researched and well-told, and frankly one I'd much rather hear from journalists from the places where it happened than ones parachuting in from the coasts.
Here's to the Haters
I think I've made my feelings about AI known pretty well already (it stinks!) but I came across a worthwhile screed from writer Anthony Moser this week that I couldn't help but share for how cleanly and clearly he strikes at the point:
I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money.
When did you first fall in love?
I've spent a lot of today's newsletter talking about college football, a sport that I know many readers here are at least as passionate about as I am (if not more).
Perhaps more than any other North American sport, college football is woven deeply into our culture–it's the game we watched with our grandparents, the rivalries that define who we are. It's also a maddening, frustrating sport that's forever beset by self-inflicted wounds. It's not always easy to love.
Today, I want to focus on when it felt simple, even if it never was, and I want to know: what was the moment when you first fell in love with the game?
For me, it was the 1997 Rose Bowl.
This is a confession of sorts, because I've been an avowed Cincinnati Bearcats fan since the moment I landed on campus in the fall of 2000, but my first real introduction to the game came from their annoying neighbors to the north, the Ohio State Buckeyes. My family was in the midst of a move from Cleveland to Columbus at the end of the 1996 season, and paying attention to OSU football was necessarily for assimilation at a new school.
Then as now, the Buckeyes were in a rivalry slump against Michigan; another undefeated season had just been derailed by That Team Up North. Still, they had an invite to The Granddaddy of Them All, and I was sucked in by the pageantry. Their thrilling, back-and-forth, come-from-behind, last-minute win against Jake "The Snake" Plummer and his Arizona State Sun Devils was all I needed to be hooked by the sport.
What was yours?
Last but never least... it's the ACBN Pets of the Week!
First up this week, it's dogs AND horses from Friend of the Letter Tracy G:
Okay first: some 3 week old thoroughbreds at Hermitage Farm in June. They do equine tours! Second: Morgan sticking her tongue out at daycare in an impressive photographic feat. Third: Morgan doing her usual “prefer to have my back touching something”.
I would be offended at some people sticking their tongue out at me, but I've met Morgan. She's smarter than me, and she's earned the right.
Finally, another menagerie, this one courtesy of Rhys D.:
I was recently talked into upgrading into a three cat household because “it’s basically like having two cats” from a mess perspective. Not sure if I still agree but regardless, meet Buckwheat the three legged kitten. Toffee the three legged dog is unsure of how to feel about his tripod compatriot (and vice versa) but the other cats (Waffles and Roast Beef) seem pretty into the feline gerrymandering of the house.
I'm intrigued by this Cat Math, which works in an entirely different way than Dog Math, which is exponential. Two dogs is four dogs, while three dogs is nine dogs. Four dogs is an unquantifiable number know as "a whole mess of dogs", but I digress. Either way, it seems to be working for you.
(Great pets, all of them.)
As a reminder, you can submit pet pictures by responding directly to this email, and I encourage you to do so! Getting your furry friends in my inbox is one of the best parts of writing this newsletter.
That's it for this week at The Action Cookbook Newsletter, friends.
I hope that your weekend is safe, happy and restful, and that all of your teams win, unless they're playing mine.
Thank you for making the ACBN a part of your week.
–Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
