"Summer used to be longer, right?"
An unusual summer pasta salad, a handsome cocktail, punk rock, highly-relevant books and more. It's Friday! Come on in.
“Summer was longer when we were kids, wasn’t it?”
I’ve heard some version of this refrain a good bit recently, despite the fact that summer doesn’t technically even start until 10:42pm ET tonight. It usually comes up in a work context, as we plan project timelines and travel schedules for the next few months, but it’s happened in casual conversations with friends and neighbors, too.
Admittedly, my kids’ school schedule these days is unusual, at least relative to my own youth. The last day of class for our local public schools was May 23rd, and they go back to school on August 7th. That second date sounds impossibly early to me, as I was accustomed to going back a few days before Labor Day—but then, I also didn’t get out until early June.
Is that actually a shorter overall summer? I don’t know. I’m not going to do the math, because if there’s one thing I can retain from my own youth, it’s an outright refusal to do math during the summer1. We are going to trade strictly in vibes, and on a vibes basis, yeah: it feels shorter.
But here’s the thing:
Of course it’s going to feel shorter! We are old!
My daughter is eight years old. To her, a 12-week-long summer is roughly 3% of her entire life. At 43, an equivalent portion of my life would be fifteen and a half months. Do you remember what was going on in March 2024? I don’t! That’s as distant to me now as the fall of Rome!
(I just looked it up, and that was when the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed. Remember that? That feels like a long time ago!2)
As an adult, I usually view summer as a bit of a hassle. I always end up with a bunch of projects coming to a head at the same time (it’s prime construction season), but there’s invariably some key person missing at a critical moment, a permit official or client stakeholder who is on vacation at the exact moment I need them and yes I am taking a vacation next month too but that just means weeks of having to rush to get stuff done beforehand and constantly reminding everyone hey I’m going to be out these dates and it’s frustrating that we don’t have the good sense to not pretend like this season should matter, why can’t we just be like Europeans and leave our work unattended for a couple months like a dog tied up outside a coffee shop, it’ll be fine, we’ll just be a few months— [starts hyperventilating]
Where was I?
Right. Summer’s a hassle.
(It’s also too humid. I don’t like humidity.)
So, yeah. The summers were longer when we were kids—if not by actual calendar span then at least by feel. It wasn’t a glut of deadlines and deliverables, it was a wide-open sea of possibility set to the chirping of cicadas. We could disappear from our lives for a few months and come back a different person, taller or cooler or maybe with a new haircut or a fledgling mustache. Maybe we can’t get that back.
But maybe we can look past all the hassles of being a grown-up and find a shred of that promise. In the depths of Adult Summer, find within ourselves an Invincible Kid Summer, y’know?
Friends, it’s Friday again at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
It’s also the longest day of the year, so let’s make the most of it.
Today, I’ve got an unusual-but-delicious summer pasta salad, a handsome summer cocktail, punk rock, a book that is highly relevant to my interests, a short list of reasons why I would not die in an experimental submarine, pets, and more!
Lean your ladder up against the water tower—we’re gonna build something this summer.
Hear me out
This time of year, my dinners start to drift into two camps: elaborate meals on the grill, and absolutely uninspired weeknight punts. (I had tuna melts multiple nights this week.)
I needed to break out of this rut; I needed to experiment.
Last month, I read a post on Andrew Zimmern’s excellent Spilled Milk newsletter that introduced me to fregola, a rustic Sardinian pasta made from tiny balls of oven-toasted semolina. It’s a bit like a nuttier, more flavorful version of pearl couscous, and an ideal canvas for Trying Some Things.
I kicked around some summer-friendly flavor combinations that I could use with it, and recalled how much I enjoy the interplay of green olives and raisins in picadillo. Now, I realize up front that this may not immediately sound appetizing, but I assure you that it is, and the end product of this experiment was excellent.
