The Best Things I Ate This Year

Part I of the ACBNnual revisits a year of varied culinary delights

Hello, friends.

It’s been another big year for The Action Cookbook Newsletter. As of this writing, I’ve published 139 newsletters this year. That’s something like 200,000 words beamed straight to your inboxes multiple times a week! Those newsletters have covered a broad range of topics—from humor to parenting to sports to experimental fiction and more.

Oh, and food. A lot of them have been about food.

I’m taking this entire week to run back through some of the biggest highlights of the year on the ACBN—an effort I’m calling the ACBNnual.

Today, I want to talk about the very best things that I ate this year.

Some of them were things I cooked. I share new recipes here every week, and it’s a big part of the culture of the place. I’m not limiting myself to that, though. I also want to talk about some of the best culinary experiences I had outside of my own kitchen.

Then, I’d like to hear about the best things you ate this year, too!

Let’s review.

(You may need to click through to the website to view this entire email. It’s a big one.)

Gochujang-Honey “Bear Claw” Chicken Sandwiches

Toward the end of this summer, I got a notion in my head that I couldn’t get out without going through it. I was going to make sandwiches for each of the five elements (earth, fire, wind, water and heart), an effort I termed “The Mysterious Voyage of Captain Sandwich”.

(It might not surprise you that this coincided with my wife going away for the weekend. I have a bit of a reputation with this.)

They all turned out pretty good, but best of those sandwiches by far was this sweet-and-spicy fried chicken sandwich, which took a unique approach to achieve maximum crunchiness and flavor:

Mussels, in Brussels

The biggest highlight of my year was taking my family on a long-awaited European vacation, a culinary journey I documented in detail, from the high-brow to the low-brow. One of our stops was in Brussels, Belgium, where my wife and I were excited to get some moules frites.

We implored our currently-picky-eater children to try a single mussel (they’d ordered other things off the kids’ menu) and in doing so discovered that my eight-year-old son—a child who would subsist entirely on cheese pizza, hot dogs and chips if permitted to do so—loves mussels. He asked that we get them again the next night and ate an entire pot, and now frequently requests them at home.

(I am grateful for Costco having affordable boil-in-bag mussels that are surprisingly good.)

Heretic’s Chili

I’ve made it an annual October tradition to roll out a new chili recipe here on the ACBN. I’ve done extra-meaty chili and entirely-vegan chili, and a few other iterations as well. This year, I decided to break every rule in the ‘this is what belongs in chili’ book, and ended up with a surprisingly-delicious dish as a result.

It’s absolute heresy, but it’s undeniably chili. It’s really darn good, too.

The Tasting Menu at Barn8 in Goshen, KY

As you may know, I live in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s a small city, at least compared to the places I’ve lived in the past, but one that punches far above its weight when it comes to restaurants.

Among my absolute favorites is Barn8 on Hermitage Farm, a farm-to-table restaurant in a converted horse barn a few miles east of town. We’ve gone a number of times, but my wife and I had the chef’s tasting menu for our anniversary this year, and it was a marvelous experience.

If you’re ever planning a trip to Louisville and want to get an experience that’s both thoroughly Kentucky and can rival any big-city restaurant, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Smashed-Potato Salade Niçoise

At the height of summer, there was nothing I wanted more on my plate than fresh tomatoes and tinned fish. Coming off my travels to France, I took a gussied-up stab at an old favorite of mine, the Niçoise Salad—adding in pan-fried smashed potatoes for a perfect salty crunch.

Thai Express at the University of Cincinnati

A trip back to your alma mater when you’re in your 40s can be a jarring experience. Old haunts have closed, familiar buildings have been torn down and unfamiliar ones erected in their place, and everyone is just so much younger than you remember being in college.

It’s comforting to know that some things don’t change. Proof of that for me exists in the form of Thai Express, a tiny family-owned takeout restaurant that hasn’t changed a bit since I finished grad school [mumbling] years ago.

It’s the first Thai food I ever had and it’s still the best I’ve ever had, and if you order a spice level above seven they will try to kill you (complimentary).

Assyrian Spaghetti

I love spice, and I love figuring dishes out as I go. This recipe—a family recipe for a one-pot chicken-and-pasta dish from my good friend Ramzy—gave me both. The original recipe, in true family recipe tradition, was a bit vague in quantities and proportions, but I think I did a good effort of capturing the spirit and intent of it—and got a really delicious dish out of it.

Combo over Rice at 1am

Just last weekend, my wife and I went back to New York City for a visit. We met there and lived there for a decade prior to moving to Kentucky, and there’s a lot that I miss there food-wise: pizza, bagels, bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, things of that nature.

There’s nothing I miss more than a huge tray of halal chicken and lamb over rice late at night, though, and I was thrilled to revisit that culinary delight for a late-night dinner after seeing a Broadway show.

I’ve tried to replicate it at home, and I’ve come up with some good food.

It still doesn’t hit the same way.

Sloppy Julias

Sometimes, a recipe starts as a joke in my head and then morphs into something both real and delicious. That was the case with this effort, wherein I got the idea to combine school-cafeteria Sloppy Joes with the flavors of Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon. The resulting dish—which I named “Sloppy Julias”—was an absolute banger, far better than its silly origins might’ve suggested.

A Bojangles Chicken Biscuit in a Parking Lot in the Rain at 8am

One of the great pleasures of my internet life has been making new friends and getting to go places with those friends that I might not have otherwise. I took once such trip in November, when my friend Hoke invited a group of us to attend Clemson’s home game against Georgia Tech.

It was a chilly, wet day and a less-than-ideal noon kickoff, but that didn’t stop us from setting up a card table, making some cocktails, and devouring the Bojangles chicken biscuits that Hoke wisely procured on the way to campus.

There are some pleasures so simple they don’t need explanation, and this is one of them. Damn, that biscuit was good.

Crawfish Étouffée

That Clemson trip followed a similar such trip in fall of 2022, when my friend Zach invited me to help cook at his long-running LSU tailgate. Shortly after coming back, I’d had a very-successful attempt at recreating the chicken-and-sausage gumbo he’d made—but a few months later (and now into 2023), I worked to make another dish Zach had served that day, Crawfish Étouffée.

Once I’d figured out where to buy frozen crawfish tails in Kentuckiana (Walmart, it turns out), the rest came together surprisingly easily—and made for one of my favorite home-kitchen efforts of the year.

Okay, that’s enough out of me for today. I want to hear from you.

What were your best culinary experiences of the year? I hope that in sharing “a fancy tasting menu” and “fast food in a parking lot” I have made it clear that there is no wrong answer here. Maybe it was something you cooked, maybe it was something someone cooked for you. (Heck, maybe it was even something you made from an ACBN recipe? I can wish, at least.)

Whatever it is, I want to hear about it.

I’ll be back tomorrow—that’s right, a Tuesday newsletter—with a run-down of some of the best things I drank in 2023.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)