Legends of the Fall
The Friday Newsletter wakes you up when September ends, and has a special offer to share with you.
Put away the kiddie pool, drag the sweaters out of storage, and wake up the guy from Green Day. It’s October 1st.
Allow me to strain a sports analogy to its breaking point, won’t you?
You see, we’re entering the fourth quarter of 2021, and unlike 2020—a blowout loss on the level of Rutgers-Michigan 2016—the outcome of this game is still very much in doubt. The first quarter of the year? Well, it didn’t go so great. We gave up a touchdown on the opening kickoff, and quickly fell behind 14-0. Things came together in the second quarter, and we went into halftime with a narrow lead and all the momentum. The wheels came back off in the third quarter, though, and now we’re facing a four-point deficit. It hasn’t been our finest showing, that’s for sure, but we can still leave town with a win, and that’s no small thing when you’re facing the long odds we came in with.
We may not have a Peyton Manning, John Elway or Tom Brady to rally us to victory, but—here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least—we’ve got the bounties of the season at our disposal. I’m talking hoodie weather. Hot toddies. Crunching leaves. Bubbling stews. Meaningful football. Playoff baseball. Hay rides. Harvest festivals. Halloween.
The first three quarters are in the books, and the fourth quarter?
That’s where legends are made.
Let’s pump up the fall-ume, friends.
7) It’s Functional Gourd Season
Even pointing it out has become a bit of a tired trope, but there’s no denying it: we’re deep in the heart of pumpkin spice season right now. Starting sometime in August, store shelves and restaurant menus start filling with all things pumpkin spice. Of course, there’s the much-maligned but delicious Pumpkin Spice Lattes (they’re delicious, sue me) and a wealth of pumpkin beers both good and bad, but there’s also pumpkin pastries, pumpkin Pop Tarts, tortilla chips, mac and cheese—heck, you can find pumpkin spice pretty much anything these days.
Well, I’m a sucker both for seasonality and for the cartoonish embrace of it, so naturally I love it. Yes, there are a lot of dumb food things that come from it, but what’s wrong with that? If you don’t like them, you don’t have to eat them. More for people like me, who can happily walk the aisles of Trader Joe’s and think, “ooh, pumpkin spice spaghetti sauce!”, I say.
A few weeks ago, I realized I needed to make my own contribution to this illustrious culinary genre. It had to be something mildly outlandish, but still delicious; it had to be something worthy of inclusion in The Action Cookbook Friday Newsletter.
I decided to make pumpkin spice pork butt.
At first, I wasn’t even quite sure what this might entail, to be honest. There are, in fact, recipes out there for such a thing, ranging from subtle and restrained to utterly ridiculous. I briefly considered cooking meat inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, a folly I thankfully abandoned after doing a little research and realizing 1) it has, in fact, been done before and 2) I couldn’t find the right size pumpkin for the task.
That’s too stunt food, anyways. Despite my obvious and well-known appreciation of culinary whimsy—and my occasional wandering into utter excess—I feel like I’ve done my job the best when I make something that’s a bit strange, but that’s also something people will actually want to eat, and even make themselves.
After a good bit of brainstorming, tinkering, and mental editing, I landed on it.
And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t really freaking good.
[RECORD SCRATCH]
Hey, friend!
I see you’re a free signup to the Action Cookbook Newsletter. First of all: thank you! I’m glad you’ve let me into your inbox, and I hope you’ll continue to do so.
But I’d also like to make you a special offer today.
To continue reading the whole marvelous slate of things in this festive fall Friday email, consider becoming a full subscriber to the Action Cookbook Newsletter. It’s only $5/month or $50/year, something that works out to mere pocket change per newsletter when you consider that I offer three full dispatches a week, every week, including these massive Friday emails. There’s great stuff guaranteed in each.
In fact, if you sign up right now, I’m offering 20% off annual subscriptions—that gives you a full year’s worth of access to three things a week, every week, for only $40.
What kinds of things have you been missing? Well, I’m glad you asked.
Today’s full slate features the surprisingly-nuanced and delicious Pumpkin Spice Pork Butt, and a Caramel Apple cocktail perfect for a tailgate, bonfire or hayride.
Let’s Have a Bye Week Brunch (9/24)
Last week, I took on Cincinnati’s other signature food, the delightful sausage known as goetta, and strove to make the very best Caesar Cocktail I could. (I succeeded.)
Who wants to join a wellness movement? (9/17)
First of all, I did not start a cult under the thin pretense of a wellness movement.
Okay, maybe a little cult. But I also made a turkey burger that didn’t suck, and a CBD-infused cocktail perfect for recuperating in your very own at-home sanitarium.
The road to hell is paved with flavor. (9/10)
I set out to do something ridiculous, and instead made something delicious. An intensely-fiery, fruit-filled pasta sauce turned out to be spectacular, and a mango-ginger smoothie the perfect way to cool off with or without added alcohol.
I kicked off September, football season, and Labor Day weekend all at once with a groundbreaking achievement in fried snacks: the Flamin’ Hot Cheese Curd. And for those 12pm tailgates, I’ve got just what you need in the Noon Kickoff Cocktail.
Of course, it’s not just food and drink—each of those Friday digests has great recommendations for music, books, television, podcasts and more—plus a weekly selection of reader-submitted pet photos that are honestly the best part of the whole deal.
But there’s also the writing!
Here’s a few other paying-subscriber only posts from the last month:
A short list of things I am not better than (9/29)
The strength of the ACBN’s wonderful comments section on full display, as we reject the idea of guilty pleasures by refusing to feel guilty about any of them. To wit:
Cargo Shorts
Shorts are awesome, no matter what some New York-based fashion writer tries to tell men every summer. I wear shorts outside any time it’s above 40 degrees. I know it’s not fashionable, that’s not the point. It’s comfortable. And if I’m already going to face the scorn of the sartorialists for it, well, I might as well wear shorts that I can store a trade paperback, a Nintendo Switch, six cans of Miller Lite and a burrito in.
Welcome to the Repair Shop (9/22)
A reflection on my unwitting role as the household restoration expert:
You see, I’m not an expert artisan by any means. Sure, I have some power tools lying around, and I can fumble my way through basic carpentry if needed, but I’m not exactly reviving the inner mechanisms of an 18th-century grandfather clock. Nonetheless, I have a small but fervently dedicated base of clients; they routinely visit my shop for urgently-needed repairs in an unpredictable range of trades and speci—
DAAAAAAAAAADDY
What is it honey I’m talking to the newsletter right now
MY ELSA CASTLE BROKE
How did that happen?
I DON’T KNOW
Did you stand on it?
YES
You know I told you not to stand on it.
[sniffling] can you fix it
[deep sigh] yeah let me take a look at it
A rumination on my other life as an architect, on writing, and on invisible walls in our mind:
One of the most unexpected things about being an architect, at least for me, is discovering the intimate relationships that one can and necessarily does develop with buildings that don’t exist. Designing a building is a long and complicated process, much more than simply sketching an idea on a page. From concept to construction, a building’s design can go through dozens of iterations. First, a broad idea is proposed, and a program of spaces is outlined to help define its size, shape and layout. Details are added in progressive layers, necessary relationships between spaces are identified and strengthened, elements push and pull and swap and squeeze and jitter and dance around on the page or screen and slowly, gradually, eventually, a building takes shape.
A reflection on the 20th anniversary of September 11th, 2001, and how a whole generation has learned about the day, but will never know the world before it:
This generation—the oldest of whom, I stress, are now entering adulthood, if not there already—don’t know what it was like to not take your shoes off at the airport, or to submit to full-body explosives scans before boarding a commuter flight to Charlotte. They don’t know what it was like to not find heavily-armed police outside every mass gathering, nor to have fighter jets fly over a 100-yard flag once they were inside. They don’t remember a political discourse that was not poisoned by competitive war-mongering. They don’t know what it was like to be surprised by school shootings or violent uprisings or anything else people my age or older insist must be surprising. They don’t remember what it was like to not be at war, either technically or spiritually, what it was like to have optimism for democracy or any reasonable expectation that their basic needs would be met, that they would be protected, that we were in this together and that there was something we shared that was worth sacrificing for.
They don’t remember all the good things that this was supposedly an attack on.
So how can we ask them to remember a world they never lived in?
Okay. If you’ve made it this far—thank you! I’ve taken enough of your time today. I hope you’ll consider becoming a full subscriber to the Action Cookbook Newsletter. This place doesn’t happen without the generosity of readers just like you who’ve believed enough in what I’m doing here and been kind enough to lend their support.
I hope you’ll keep reading, and I appreciate your readership either way.
Have a great Friday; I’ll see you soon.
Here’s that button again. Who doesn’t love pushing a big red button?
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)