It's Peak Season
And I'm feelin' Farm Fancy, with something elegant for the grill, a fruity fall cocktail, chill music and more. It's Friday at the ACBN!
Almost there.
Just a little bit further.
A little bit furt—WAIT. RIGHT THERE. STOP RIGHT THERE.
Perfect.
Friends, we’ve made it. We have arrived at what is—in my learned and wise opinion—the very best time of the year.
We’re calling it fall, but it’s not quite fall yet, at least not until Sunday. Still, the leaves are starting to show signs of turning, and a pumpkin-spiced panoply has arrived on store shelves. It’s still warm out—indeed, in many places it’s still genuinely hot right now—but it’s starting to break. Dew points have slid from the mid-70s to the low 60s, and the occasional morning might even call for a light jacket. There’s still sun in the evenings, even if the shadows have grown a bit longer. Football is in full swing, with cupcake-tuneup games giving way to meaningful conference rivalries, and baseball’s pennant races are wrapping up.
I love this time of year. (Can you tell?)
Sure, I might blare the Hold Steady’s “Constructive Summer” every June 21st and scream along that we’re gonna build somethin’ this summer, but deep in my heart I know that summer is a frivolous time, a three-month fever dream of a season in which I rarely accomplish anything. Fall is when things really happen.
Fall is when the year bears fruit.
As I wrote here several years ago, this season fills me with particular urges:
The urge to walk around a farmer’s market clutching a pumpkin-spice latte in my hand. The urge to drink beers and play cornhole at a tailgate. The urge to festoon my porch with pumpkins and cornstalks and dried corn. The urge to overspend on elaborate animatronic Halloween decorations. The urge to do all of this while wearing a hooded sweatshirt and shorts, as is my Midwestern birthright.
More than all of that, though—I’ve got the urge to go to a farm.
Not a regular farm, mind you. Heavens, no.
I’m a resolute city boy; the most rural location I have ever lived in is my current residence in the suburbs of a city with a AAA baseball team and an international airport. I have no interest in actual farm work; no desire to deal with the practical realities of raising animals or tending crops or any of that real-world nonsense. (I don’t like getting up that early.)
No, I want to go to a fancy farm.
I want to go on a hayride while drinking a craft cocktail. I want to look at animals from a place where my shoes will not get dirty. I want to take a picture of my children standing in front of an artfully-arranged pyramid of pumpkins, and then I want to go inside the “farm” store and pay $12 for a jar of honey.
Yes, friends, it’s Fancy Farm Season1.
It’s also Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
Today, I’m doing my best rustic cosplay, and mentally transporting us to such a farm.
I’ve got a delicious and elegant recipe for the grill, a cocktail that utilizes those farm store delicacies, music that’d be right in place by the fire pit, a book you can curl up under a tree with, and more!
Let’s make hay.
The meal for a warm end-of-summer night
In constructing this week’s newsletter around this admittedly-loose theme, I realized that the recipe I’d prepared—a delightful glazed pork chop recipe for the grill—came very close to something I’d posted at this time several years ago.
I could reproach myself for the inadvertant repetition, but instead I’m taking it as a sign; I had the same desires then as now, and that means that the recipe belongs in this season. As much as I love grilling in the summer, it’s a greater delight in the warm part of early fall, when I can not only cook outside but will actually want to eat outside as well. These hearty pork chops come together with relative ease—a short dry-brining period, a quick glaze assembled on the stovetop, and then a few minutes over an open flame, and you’ve got something a Fancy Farm Restaurant would be proud to serve you.
Bourbon-Glazed Pork Chops
1” thick pork chops (the glaze will make enough for four)