More like Action Lookback, amiright

It's The Action Cookbook Newsletter's self-indulgent year-end awards show

Friends, it’s Friday.

By now, you surely know the drill—every Friday here on The Action Cookbook Newsletter, I share a slate of Good Things that I think will make your weekend a little bit better—food, drink, entertainment, pets, and so on. In between those Fridays, I share newsletters on a wide range of topics, from food to parenting to sports to… well, whatever goofy stuff is rattling around in my brain.

As we come to the end of another year, though, I can’t resist the urge to turn self-indulgent and reflective. I’ve published more than a hundred newsletters this year, and there’s a lot of stuff you may have missed or forgotten about along the way.

Today, I’m looking back, and choosing the very best of the year that was.

If you’ve got some of your own to share, please, chime in!

(Today’s newsletter is almost certainly too long for email; you should view it on the website. Besides, once you’re there you can click the little heart to tell me I’m doing a good job.)

Let’s dive in.

The Best Thing I Wrote This Year

I find it inherently difficult to assess my own work, and I assure you that’s not due to some kind of modesty. Truthfully, I forget about a lot of the things I write soon after I write them! Some of them stick with me, though, and my favorite thing that I wrote all year was “The Greatest”—a short story, originally published in four installments, that explored what it would be like if a 42-year-old man like me suddenly became The Greatest Baseball Player in the World:

The Greatest

It’s a fun, funny read, and I really think you’ll enjoy it. I enjoyed writing it.

Honorable Mentions:

• “Pictures of You”, a reflection on the occasion of my youngest’s 8th birthday

• “A Live Look in as a I Watch a Beloved Family Movie From the ‘80s or ‘90s With My Kids” oh wow boy this did not age as well as I thought it did there are a lot of things we now rightly understand to be crimes happening here

• “In Which I Propose a New Olympic Event”, namely, the Modern Parentathlon

• “A College Football Preview For People Who Don’t Watch College Football” —

  I don’t write about sports nearly as much as I once did, but I took the start of a new season as cause to tell you some things about the sport I love in ways that I think anyone can appreciate

(I’ve dropped the paywall from each of these, so if you’re a free subscriber, please—check them out! It might even convince you to upgrade to a full subscription.)

The Best Thing I Saw This Year

I saw some pretty good things this year, but nothing could compare to witnessing a total solar eclipse first-hand.

I am not a good enough writer nor a capable enough photographer to convey just how cool it was to see this happen in real life. I cried.

I hope you went to see it this year, too.

Honorable Mentions:

• My son attending his first rock concert

• The majestic redwoods at Bear Mountain, CA

• Sunset from Dobbins Lookout in Phoenix

• Jose Ramirez hitting a home run to lead the noble and beloved Cleveland Guardians to an Opening Day victory against the vile and detestable White Sox, a moment that surely broke their spirits on the way to losing a record 121 games

  

  

The Best Thing I Ate This Year

I love eating. I think this newsletter’s body of work makes that pretty clear. I was fortunate to get to travel a good bit around the United States this year, and I had some pretty great food along the way.

Context makes the meal, though, and despite having fancier and pricier meals, nothing really topped having some street tacos and a draft light beer at a lightly-attended Guardians Spring Training game in Goodyear, Arizona.

Honorable Mentions:

• French Pastries and Pâté en croûte at Maison Nico in San Francisco

• Steak Frites at Nepenthe in Big Sur

• The Mother Nature Sandwich at High Street Deli in San Luis Obispo

• The Tom Cruise Cake (White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake from Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, CA)

The Best Thing(s) I Cooked This Year

Okay, I’m going to cheat a little bit on this one—I can’t name just one.

As you know, I share a recipe in this newsletter every Friday. Back in May and June, I took a six-week stretch to stick to a single theme—side dishes for summer cookouts.

It was a fun way to focus my efforts, and I came up with six really good sides, including Hawaiian Pizza Pasta Salad, Watermelon Salad with Tomato Confit and Grilled Halloumi, Cowboy Corn Salad, Spanish-Style Potato Salad, Gigantes Plaki and Brussels Sprouts with ‘Nduja, Lemon, Pistachios and Parmesan.

Honorable Mentions:

• The Hot Mess, or what happens when I’m left to my own devices and make a Big Dumb Sandwich

• Mexican Green Spaghetti, a simple and slightly-spicy sauce that’s sure to satisfy

• Seoul Skyline, one of those times where me Doing a Bit resulted in an awesome dish

• Berbere Runza, in which I addressed the question “what if we took Midwestern food and seasoned it?”

Of course, all of my recipes can be found in the deep and easily-browsable ACBN Recipe Archive.

The Best Drink I Mixed This Year

Mixology’s also a big part of what I do here, but sometimes a little extra inspiration is needed. This autumn, such inspiration came when reader @319e17th posted about Nixta Licor de Elote, a Mexican corn liqueur. I expressed interest in the spirit, and he happened to be passing through Louisville shortly thereafter and was gracious enough to gift me a bottle.

I employed said bottle in making a cocktail I called Fields of Gold. It took a multigrain approach, pairing the corn liqueur with wheated bourbon and dry rice (along with lemon juice, Demerara syrup and hot sauce) for a sweet, smooth and slightly-spicy result.

COCKTAIL: Fields of Gold

Honorable Mentions:

• The Firing Squad, in which tequila and grenadine team up for a magnificent warm-weather drink

• The Pool Boy, a cocktail specifically engineered for consumption from an insulated travel mug at poolside

• The Dirty Malnati, a Chicago-inspired martini that uses giardiniera-infused vodka for a pizza-like finish

• The Dark Forest, the full-send cold-weather cocktail

As with the recipes, all of my cocktails have their own well-tended archive.

The Best Thing I Read This Year

This is where “this year” gets a little dicey. I’m not basing this on when the book in question came out, but rather when I read it.

(I am the Protagonist of Reality, of course.)

I read some great books this year, but the one that stayed with me the most was North Woods, Daniel Mason’s wildly-ambitious 2023 novel.

Spanning centuries, it tells a series of interwoven stories featuring the inhabitants of a small patch of forest in western Massachusetts—stories that include Puritan lovers, an apple-orchard enthusiast, a pair of cursed sisters, a charlatan mystic, a crime novelist, a frustrated academic and more. It’s the kind of thing that takes immense talent to pull off without being an absolute mess, and Mason stuck the landing.

I loved this book.

Honorable Mentions:

• Hell is a World Without You by Jason Kirk, a book that helped me understand the world the evangelical kids I went to high school with were living in

• There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib, a masterful, lyric rumination of life structured around basketball in Ohio

• Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, an incredulous-yet-sympathetic look at the weirdness and wonder of the high-end art world

• The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, the kind of wild, funny caper of a book I wish there were more of

All of my Friday book recommendations can be found at my Bookshop page.

The Best Thing I Watched This Year

I couldn’t have been happier this year to see the return of HBO’s Hacks, in my opinion the funniest show on television. The show, if you’re not familiar, pairs Jean Smart’s aging Vegas comedian Deborah Vance with Hannah Einbender’s caustic millennial comedy writer Ava Daniels, a mismatched working relationship that turns into an unexpected friendship.

In Season 3, Deborah’s experiencing a long-awaited career resurgence, and Ava’s feeling pushed to the side.

I won’t say more, but it’s not since Mad Men that I’ve hung on the weekly successes and failures of fictional characters like this.

Also, this show is why I procured the Tom Cruise Cake I mentioned above.

Honorable Mentions:

• Somebody Somewhere — also returning for its third (and sadly, final?) season, this is the most real-feeling show on television—I believe every character wholeheartedly, and it’s got a huge heart

• Godzilla Minus One — might be the best monster movie ever made?

• Dicks: The Musical — an absolutely filthy musical spin on The Parent Trap that I loved and saw in a theater with four people in it (counting my wife and I)

• The Beekeeper/Rebel Ridge — joint recognition of two deeply stupid (complimentary) action movies that were exactly the things I needed to watch on airplanes this year

The Nicest Thing Anyone Did For Me This Year

If you’ve been here a while, you likely know that Holly, my beloved Corgi, passed away last summer at the age of 12. It was a very hard thing to go through, as any animal lover knows, but it was also a measure of relief to know she wasn’t suffering any more.

I was floored and honored in February when reader Judith C. reached out to tell me that she’d painted a tribute to Holly—a gorgeous painting that now has a place of honor on our bedroom wall.

I’m still stunned by this, and I can’t thank you enough, Judith. This really meant the world to me.

The Best Things I Listened To This Year

There was no surprise in my Spotify Wrapped this year, as my #1 artist and #1 album were Sturgill Simpson / Johnny Blue Skies’ incredible album Passage du Desir, which featured the soaring, heartbreaking “Jupiter’s Faerie”:

Honorable Mentions:

• Maggie Rogers, “In the Living Room”

• Charly Bliss, “How Do You Do It”

• Medium Build, “Can’t Be Cool Forever”

• Wolves of Glendale, “33” (this is the funniest album I have listened to all year)

ALSO: a few months ago, I compiled five years’ worth of Friday music recommendations into a Spotify playlist I call “ACBN Radio”.

It’s the best indie station that never got an over-the-air license you’ve ever heard:

ACBN Pets of the Year

They’re all good, each and every one of them. It’s an every-way tie. Accepting the award for them, though, will be my very good boy Olaf, who watched me cook all the things I shared above with a mixed of bafflement and devotion.

(He always gets a little something, don’t worry.)

Thank you for making The Action Cookbook Newsletter possible this year.

You’ve supported me through more than five years and nearly eight hundred editions of The Action Cookbook Newsletter, newsletters featuring hundreds of recipes and drinks and stories and dogs and cats and anything else I can think of to make the internet—and our lives—a little bit more fun. I am deeply grateful for your readership and support. It’s trite to say that I couldn’t do it without you, but I couldn’t.

I will be taking a short break for the holidays, returning the first week of 2025.

I don’t know what the new year will bring for this newsletter, but I hope it’s good, and I hope you’ll be there to share it with me.

May have a lovely, restful and fun holiday season.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

P.S. Here’s some music for the end credits of the year.