[crashes through skylight] Happy New Year.
The ACBN is back for another year, and kicking things off with a full Friday slate of Good Things for your weekend ahead.
Hello, friends. Welcome back to another year of The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
I hope that you had a nice holiday break, whether you were able to take time off from work like I did, or simply had fewer people barraging you with emails like I do.
It’s a new year, and it’s time for one of my most controversial annual admissions: I love January. It’s quietly in the top half of months in my book, despite the cold and gray of it all1. After the clutter and stress and indulgence of the holiday season, January feels like walking out of a crowded bar and taking that first breath of fresh, cold night air. It’s rejuvenating.
Also, I’m a sucker for a resolution.
I know that many people find it silly to pin one’s hopes of self-improvement on the turning of a calendar page, and I understand as well as anyone that I am the same less-than-perfect person I was four days ago. I don’t care. I view making resolutions like making a wish on a birthday candle or a shooting star—it can’t hurt to try, right?
Now, am I great at keeping resolutions? Of course not. I’m batting around .125 lifetime on them, but every once in a while I sneak once over the fence. This year, I’m hoping to slowly work my way back into a running routine, and finally finish the book I’ve been working on for ages, along with a few other hopes I’ll keep to myself. I understand that there are a lot of very valid reasons to be trepidatious heading into 2025, but I also sincerely believe that the only way to face a new year is with the blind conviction that you’re going to kick its ass.
Oh, and one more thing—I firmly believe that New Year’s resolutions do not officially start until the first Monday of the new year. It’s great if you start earlier, but those are preseason reps. (I have started them as late as April before.)
One thing that isn’t changing this year? Fridays at the ACBN.
It’s my solemn duty to you to start each Friday morning with a loaded slate of ACBN-Certified Good Things for your weekend ahead. Today, that includes an easy slow-cooker soup, an overly complicated cocktail, some new music, a good book, an absolutely hilarious show, and more!
Let’s drink a cup of kindness yet. It’s Friday.
You can just say foods are lucky and no one can stop you
In the run-up to New Year’s, I found my social media feeds flooded with all sorts of traditions that one should engage in for good luck in the coming year, many of them centered on food—eating twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight, making black-eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Day, and so forth. My mother-in-law eats kippered herring at midnight, a tradition my wife has politely but firmly barred me from experimenting with myself. In some years past, I’ve often revisited the German tradition of pork and sauerkraut, something my parents have long been fond of doing.
Many of these traditions bear specious claims of why they’re supposedly good luck—collard greens are green, like money!—and after reading a bunch of these, I realized:
I can just make whatever I want, and then post-rationalize reasons why it is lucky.
(Plus, I got a new slow cooker at Christmas, and I wanted to make soup in it.)