Let's Make This Summer a Blockbuster
It's the longest Friday of the year, and the ACBN is ready to soak up some sun
Do you know the last time I let two whole Fridays pass without delivering a Friday Newsletter, my weekly weekend digest jam-packed with Seven Good Things certified to help you end the week right?
Well, I’ll tell you: it was summer 2019, before I ever started doing them.
You’ve all been very accommodating and understanding as I took an uncharacteristic break for a family vacation this month, but I’m back now, and I’m ready to dive headlong into summer. Sure, I might grouse about some aspects of the season—I’m certainly no fan of the humidity, and my kids tend to go a bit feral by late June—but it’s still a really special time of year. It’s a time of blockbuster movies and re-runs on television, of garden-fresh produce and refreshing daytime cocktails. It’s days by the pool, dock or beach, and nights by the fire pit. There are times where the days feel like they’ll never end, or at least times where you wish they wouldn’t.
It’s summertime, friends. Let’s make ours a blockbuster one.
Break time is over. The Friday Newsletter is back in full force this week.
On tap for you today, I’ve got:
The perfect summer salad!
The ideal summer cocktail!
Fresh new music, fun summer reading, reader pets, and much, much more!
Let’s lean this ladder up against the water tower. We’re gonna build something this summer.
7) The sublime pleasures of the perfect summer salad
We’re at a critical culinary juncture in the year.
Home-grown tomatoes are finally starting to ripen—I pulled my first red one off the vine just last night—and at the same time, it’s getting too hot to want to do much in the way of cooking, or to eat too heavy a meal.
These are the days of the summer salad, and I want to talk to you about my all-time favorite: Salade Niçoise.
The basics are unassailable: fresh tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, black olives and briny fish. Nothing not to love here. In many versions, green beans and potatoes also show up. Now, I’m not French, and I’ve never been terribly concerned with notions of authenticity or purity in food, but my version hews pretty closely to these lines—with one important deviation.