The Best Things I Wrote This Year
Part IV of the ACBNnual turns inward, to revisit some of my best blogs of 2023
Hello, friends.
For the past three days, I’ve been revisiting some of the very best things to come across the pages of The Action Cookbook Newsletter in 2023. This has included the best things I ate this year, the best things I drank, and the best things I read, watched and listened to. (I’ve also solicited your answers to these questions, which is the best part for me.) It’s been fun, but so far we’ve only touched on a portion of what the ACBN has to offer.
We haven’t talked about the writing yet. Now, it’s time to turn inward.
Today, I want to revisit some of the best things I wrote this year.
This part is a lot harder for me to compile than the food/drink/entertainment retrospectives, and it’s not necessarily because I can’t choose my favorites or accurate self-assess my work.
It’s that I can’t remember most of what I do.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famouly described a rhythem that creative people (and others) can achieve called “flow”—a state of being wherein one becomes so immersed in the joy of their work or activity that nothing else seems to matter.
That sounds nice! For me, though, it’s more of a disassociative fugue state. I just black out, write something, then wake up confused like Will Ferrell’s character at the end of Old School, with no recollection of what I’ve done. It makes it hard to compile a retrospective! Nevertheless, I’ve spent the last few weeks thumbing back through everything I did this year, and I’ve pulled out some of the ones that you all liked the best. They’re writings on a range of topics, a diverse lot that I think accurately represents the ACBN’s varied offerings.
Let’s review.
“I have a question…”
I often write about my experiences as a parent, but this one isn’t descriptive or reflective—it’s just a slice of life, a window into the day-to-day reality of it all.
— Daddy?
Yes?
— I have a question.
Sure. What is it?
— Why is the sky blue?
Well, you see… uh… I think it has something to do to with how light refracts through the atmosphere, and how different wavelengths of light—
— Why do leaves change color in the fall?
Because of chlorophyll.
— What’s chlorophyll?
I don’t know.
— How do planes stay in the sky?
Ah, that’s a good question. It’s due to the aerodynamic principle of lift, which is an upward force generated on the airplane, when air passes underneath the wings—
— How do stop signs stay on their poles?
Bolts. Confident in that one.
“Scenes From a Bourbon Tasting”
Ever thought it was ridiculous when someone told you they could taste honeysuckle and leather in a glass of bourbon? Me too. That led to this mini-script.
KEITH: I’m getting some roasted marshmallow here on the front end, with a back-bite of seared steak.
DEREK: Definitely. Definitely.
JASON: Some real peppery notes here. Cracked black peppercorn, but with a buttery slide. Almost popcorn-like.
DEREK: Brilliant. Brilliant.
MEREDITH: [loudly swishes it like mouthwash, then gulps down] Alright, so, you know how when you toast one Pop-Tart on the normal setting, it comes out just right? But then, like, you decide the package is already open, so you might as well just make the other Pop-Tart, too, so you pop it in, but the toaster’s already got residual warmth from the first cycle, and so the second one kinda burns a little on the edges? That’s what I’m getting here.
JASON: Meredith, come on, don’t—
MEREDITH: [burps] The brown sugar kind.
“Bread Knows If You're Full of Sh*t”
I’m a confident cook—confident enough to share my cooking with thousands of readers in weekly emails, even. I’ve always been afraid of baking bread, though. There’s no place to hide in a ball of dough.
My favorite dishes to cook have always been one-pot meals—chilis, soups, stews, pastas, paellas, jambalayas—anything big and busy and with a whole lot of different things going on. If I see 32 ingredients in a recipe? Buddy, count me the hell in. I love spending a Sunday afternoon standing over a simmering pot, tinkering and tweaking and tossing in seasoning to taste, knowing I can always cover up errors as I go along.
This is a microcosm of my personality at large—I’ve always been someone who favors an essay test over a math problem, a jury-rigged solution over a precise answer, a feeling over a fact. I’m a bullshitter, to put it another way. I’m happy to talk my way in and out of situations without concerning myself too much with nagging exactitudes.
Making bread is the absolute antithesis of this.
Bread either works, or it doesn’t. If you get one thing wrong? It’s probably going to ruin the whole thing. When you’re dealing with just flour, water, salt and yeast, there’s nowhere to hide your mistakes.
Bread knows if you’re full of shit, no matter how smooth a talker you are.
“Confessions of a Pinewood Derby Dad”
This past winter, my son—a newly-minted Cub Scout—needed help building a car for his first Pinewood Derby race. I tried not to go too overboard.
(I failed.)
Next, it’s important to reduce friction on the wheels. This can be done with powdered graphite lube, but also by polishing the nails that would serve as the car’s axles—this could add important percentage points to the car’s speed.
I was taking extensive notes by now; my son’s eyes were glazing over.
A few more fractions of a second could be shaved off by canting the tires, so that the car would only be riding on the very edge of each wheel. The best way to do this, the YouTuber demonstrated, was to bend each of the nails exactly 2.5 degrees. Also, one of the nails should be raised even further, because studies have shown that the cars ride faster on three wheels than they do on four, and—
“What is it about a sandwich?”
What, you don’t remember important places and times in your life through the sandwiches you’ve eaten? Couldn’t be me.
My life was saved by an egg sandwich that morning, and while that’s a phrase that’s been true on more than a handful of occasions in my life, there was something especially important about this one. Even in my depleted state, I could recognize the beauty of a $3 sandwich of egg-and-potato omelet on crusty bread, a demonstration that you only really need a few ingredients in a sandwich if you know exactly what you’re doing with them. (Saving lives, that is.)
“To the Graduating Class of 2023…”
The sale and ensuing decline of Twitter—a place I spent a lot of time, made a lot of friends, and launched a writing career—felt a bit like the end of an era. Instead of throwing a funeral, though, I decided to have a graduation ceremony, and this was my commencement address.
You are what you say, not what you say you are. The words coming out of your mouth or off of your keyboard say far more about you than the ones in your bio do, and if you ever have to issue a statement claiming “that’s not who I am”, I have some bad news for you. (Yeah, it is.)
Consider the possibility of other perspectives. You’ll be stunned at what you might learn if you’re just willing to listen and keep an open mind, and you might even make a friend or two along the way.
You are under no obligation to engage someone acting in bad faith on their terms.
Celebrities are just like us. (They’re bored and on their phones most of the time, too.)
To that end—money can buy lots of things, but money alone cannot make you the person you wish you were. (Not even 44 billion dollars of it.)
There is almost always someone smarter than you out there, and there is also someone much dumber than the both of you confidently explaining something in that person’s area of expertise to them right now. Seek out the former, and try not to be the latter.
You do not have to have an opinion on everything. Frankly, it feels great to sit one out from time to time.
“How to Fail Every Day”
Becoming a parent for the first time is a learning experience in many ways. More than anything, it’s about learning how to fail, and accepting that that’s just part of the job.
When you first become a parent, people—relatives, friends, absolute strangers, all presumably well-meaning people—will suddenly barrage you with not-so-subtle reminders that you should be having a Very Good Time right now.
Aren’t they a little treasure?
This age is just the best, isn’t it?
Oh, appreciate these times, they go by so fast!
The intent may be pure, and come from a place of sincere nostalgia for their own child-rearing days past, but the actual effect is to make you feel like a failure for not appreciating this magic period in your life in the way that you should because you’re near death from lack of sleep.
There’s no time to dwell on that, though, because it’s just the first of many failures.
Did you let the baby fall asleep on top of you instead of in the crib? Failure.
Did you leave the house without putting a hat on the baby? Failure.
Did you feed the baby formula instead of breast milk? Failure.
Did you let your child perceive a screen, if only for the briefest of moments, a fleeting apparition of a television in their peripheral vision? Oh, you’d better believe that’s a failure.
I wish that the earliest days of my children’s lives existed in my mind as soft-focus highlight reel of magic bonding moments set to twinkling piano music.
The reality is that my clearest memory of the first two months of parenthood was having a breakdown in my office’s parking lot because I dropped my iced coffee, an iced coffee I had very much been counting on to do eight hours of work for me that day.
I had failed to sleep, and I would now fail to work, all the while failing to be at home helping my wife with the baby.
Now, I’ve ended each of these retrospectives this week with a question prompt, but I’m not so arrogant as to ask you what pieces of mine you liked the most.
I’d like to hear about something of yours that you’re proud of from this past year.
Big or small. Toot your own horn. I want to hear it!
I’ve held a few things back for the final day of the ACBNnual tomorrow; I want to close out the year talking about the present and future.
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
I just re-read the feeling like a failure piece about kids as I am currently GOING THRU IT. Hits home. My 10 week old daughter loves watching football on TV so much. I purposefully turn her away and she will strain her neck to uncomfortable positions to keep watching.
Anyways, she has a lot of thoughts about the college football playoffs this year as she has watched basically the entire season with me (I gave up trying to stop her and now we discuss the games afterwards lol)
Love these retrospectives, Scott. Is it too late to report on my best reads of 2023? I didn't get to it on Best Books Day, so here goes:
The Thursday Murder Club books by Richard Osman (4 of them so far) are perfect. Lovable characters, subtle plots, dry humour, and irritant-free writing style. No deep moral messages. No dire warnings about the future. Just adventures in crime by a bunch of (trigger warning) seventy-somethings in a seniors residence. Trust me. Read these books, best read in order. The first one is called The Thursday Murder Club, and it rolls on from there.