What Good Shall I Do This Day?
It's Friday, and I'm here to do my best.
Hello, friends.
Welcome back to Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
I prefer, whenever possible, to burst into your inboxes on Friday morning with cheerful enthusiasm for the weekend ahead.
But, well… this week kinda sucked!
I don’t think my politics are a secret to anyone who reads this newsletter regularly, so I’m not revealing anything by saying that the results of Tuesday’s election were a stinging disappointment to me, as I suspect they were to many of you. I did not want this, and I certainly did not expect this. Amongst all the complicated feelings I’ve been forced to sit with the past few days, the most stark is the feeling that I was wrong—not about what I believe in, but about what I thought mattered most to my fellow Americans.
I’m not going to dwell on that here, though.
I’ve spent most of the last decade riveted to my social media feeds, railing against the things I thought were wrong and screaming about the way I think things should be. That all feels a bit pointless in the moment we’ve arrived in. I see now that I cannot force change in the hearts of others, not through the volume of my voice or the eloquence of my words. I cannot tell anyone to be better.
I can only try to be better myself.
There is a sign hanging by the door to our garage, one I’ve had for years. It’s a shared totem among a small group of dear friends, and it bears a simple question:
What good shall I do this day?
I’ve walked past it countless times, so often that I barely notice it anymore.
I’d become numb to the question, but it’s been rattling in my head for the past two days. This place is not what I want it to be, not what I believe it can be.
So what am I gonna do about it?
I don’t have that answer today. I’m looking for it, though.
In spite of the horrors, it is in fact Friday.
One of the most-needed Fridays in recent memory, in fact!
I plan the content of these newsletters well in advance, and that means that even though I was relatively worthless for most of the past week, stewing in first anticipation and then grief, I have a full slate of ACBN-approved good things for you as always today.
Perhaps fortunately, they lean toward the comfort-food side of things today.
I’ve got a hearty, family-pleasing pasta, my ideal version of my very favorite cocktail, some nerve-soothing music, an event I think you should attend this week, and more!
Let’s call it for this week. It’s the weekend.
Before I get to anything else, though—
If you’re in or near my home base of Louisville, Kentucky, I have something good for you to do this coming week!
This Thursday (November 14th) at 7pm, I’ll be joining esteemed food writer and cookbook author Anne Byrn at Carmichael’s Bookstore (2720 Frankfort Avenue in Louisville) for a conversation centered on her superb new cookbook Baking in the American South.
Anne and I have been acquainted for several years since meeting through Substack’s Food Writing Fellowship. I’ve become a big fan of her work in that time, including her excellent newsletter Between The Layers, and I’m quite looking forward to our conversation.
If you’re in Louisville, I encourage you to join us—and if not, I’ll point out that the holidays are coming, and her book is the perfect gift for the baker in your life!
Now, on to my usual nonsense.
Italy has mountains, which means it also has hidden valleys. That’s just science.
In coming up with recipes for this newsletter, I strive for a few things.
First and foremost, I want to make good food—food you’ll actually want to eat, or at least food I’ll want to eat. (Why cook it, if not?)
Beyond that, though, I try to keep an element of silliness in what I do. Cooking is a release for me, even if I accidentally turned it into a side hustle a while ago like the good Millennial that I am.
I want the time I spend in the kitchen to be fun.
It is in this context that I chose to take the most Midwestern of flavor combinations—chicken, bacon and ranch—and apply it to a pasta dish that I would call Hidden Valley Carbonara.
(No, I don’t know how I got a Food Writing Fellowship either. To paraphrase Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters, though: when someone asks if you’re an award-winning food writer, you say yes.)
Hidden Valley Carbonara
1/2 pound bacon