Welcome to the Action Cookbook Newsletter!
You may know me from Twitter (@actioncookbook), or have read my writing with outlets such as Every Day Should Be Saturday, SBNation, and Decider.
Oh, and I entered “florps” into the internet lexicon.
This newsletter is the most personal distillation of what I do: sometimes silly and absurd, sometimes heartfelt and sentimental, and almost always thinking about food.
You can expect emails to arrive between 7:30am and 8:30am Eastern Time every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I’m very punctual like that. The Monday/Wednesday newsletters are essays on a range of topics from food to parenting to sports, architecture, culture and more, where Friday is your essential lifestyle guide, a massive digest featuring original recipes and cocktails, recommendations for books, music, movies and more. (And also readers’ pets.)
It’s fun!
Here are some of the pieces I’m proudest of:
In Defense of Weird Regional Foods — my thesis statement on embracing the quirks and oddities in our shared cuisine
Friday Night They’ll Be Dressed To Kill — In which I channel the Friday lifestyle format through a fully-realized fictional bar and grill
The Perfect Age — learning to adapt as my children grow from babies into people
All of the Other Reindeer — my new Christmas classic, in which I reimagine the story of Rudolph through a New Yorker-style longform profile
The Big World — on taking my kids to their first football game
The Simple Joy of F**king Up In The Kitchen — on a mangled batch of soup dumplings and appreciating a place where failure is low-stakes.
Life Goes On In Flavortown — ruminations watching on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives during a pandemic and the pining beautiful world that still exists on one show
Greetings From Michigan! — In which I steal a concept from Sufjan Stevens and make an incredible regional delicacy
The Kentuckiana Hot Loin — my culinary magnus opus, the intersection between Indiana’s Breaded Pork Tenderloin and Nashville Hot Chicken
Or you could just ask these satisfied readers:
