summer cooking bucket list + the perfect summer wine + lots of reads

Hi, happy August! I can’t believe we’re already in the final few weeks of summer — every year around this time I start to get obsessive about my summer bucket list. Did I cook all the fun summer recipes? Did I make it to the beach? Did I enjoy enough outdoor dining? Did I drink enough wine outdoors on patios? It’s definitely a little obsessive and Type A of me, but I love trying to make the most of every last minute of summer before the weather starts to turn.

With that, here’s a bunch of recent recs, recipes, and reads from the last two weeks.

Good things to read

What Is ‘Vacation’ When You Have Young Kids? | The Cut

The Embryo Matchmaker | The Cut

The Great Clout Reset | Slate

How TikTok Changed the Meaning of a Million Followers | Time

The Ones We Sent Away | The Atlantic

The Era of Ultracheap Stuff Is Under Threat | The Wall Street Journal

How Cooking Videos Took Over the World | The New York Times

Is David Solomon Too Big a Jerk to Run Goldman Sachs? | New York Magazine

The End of Progressive Elitism? | The Atlantic

I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings | The Atlantic

The Problem of Nature Writing | The New Yorker

A Tiny Cabin, a Little Island and a Big Change: ‘Am I Crazy?’ | The New York Times

It Took $1.7 Billion to Fix Fire Island’s Beaches. One Storm Wrecked Them. | The New York Times

What Happened to Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt? | The New York Times

Hollywood’s Slo-Mo Self-Sabotage | The New Yorker

Trust Me: Never Having Children Doesn’t Mean You’re Going to Be Lonely | Vogue

“And Just Like That . . .” Has One Too Many Cosmopolitans | The New Yorker

A Different Way to Think About Screentime | Culture Study

Good things to cook

Some recent things I’ve made and really loved: Green curry glazed tofu. Harissa avocado chicken bowls. Spiced chicken kebabs (tip: I used this recipe but shaped them into burger patties and served on burger buns with red onion and tzatziki, and it was perfection.) I’ve also been cooking my way through Ali Slagle’s I Dream of Dinner, so in the last couple weeks I’ve made two recipes from the book: gochujang shrimp and shishitos, and bacon jalapeno smash burgers. (I’ve said it before, but this book is delightful, and every recipe is incredibly easy, minimal number of ingredients, and very weeknight-friendly.

It’s also the tail end of summer when I start scrambling to cook everything on my summer cooking bucket list. Still hoping to make this summer: grilled red pepper and mozzarella panzanella, skillet meatballs with peaches, basil, and lime, tajin grilled chicken, orecchiette salad with halloumi croutons, BLT tacos, classic panzanella. (Invite me to your summer cookout and I will bring one of these!)

And, some summery recipes I’ve already made this summer that are always on my summer cooking bucket list and should maybe be on yours too: strawberry cream cheese tart, any fruit crisp, esquites, hot honey corn salad, grilled corn and avocado salad with feta dressing, greek pasta salad, caprese salad (I don’t follow a particular recipe here but my one crucial tip is you should reduce the balsamic vinegar on the stovetop a little so it’s less runny and more like a glaze — worth the extra time!), tomato sandwiches, tomato toast.

Also going to be making tomato cheddar toast for lunch on repeat this week to use up some of the bounty of farmshare tomatoes I got this week.

Recommendations

Some recent things I’ve been loving:

Photo Shuffle: My husband sent me this Wirecutter article the other day about Photo Shuffle, an iPhone feature I had no idea even existed but am now completely obsessed with.

An app that digitizes your cookbooks: I have a sizable cookbook collection, but in the past, one hurdle to using my cookbooks more was that I didn’t have an easy way to search them for a recipe that would use up things I had on hand. But the app Eat Your Books has completely changed that and really helped me use my cookbooks more. Once you set up an account, add your cookbooks from their list, and then you have an easy way to search for an ingredient and find recipes in your cookbook collection that use it. It’s free for up to 5 cookbooks, paid if you want to add more.

A perfect summer wine: I tried this Weingut Beurer rosé at Frank’s Wine Bar in Caroll Gardens, Brooklyn last weekend and was obsessed. Our group tried to order a second bottle but alas, the one we had already was the very last bottle they had in stock. So when I saw it at my favorite neighborhood wine store a few days later, I bought two bottles — and they were also the last two bottles the store had in stock, so I’m getting the feeling this wine is a hot ticket this summer. It’s light, juicy, just a perfect summer rose. What they like to call a “patio pounder”! (I may or may not be currently begging my wine store to get more in stock…”

A contender for New York’s restaurant of the summer: I hear some people say the restaurant of the summer is Libertine or Roscioli, but since I rarely go out in Manhattan these days, I wouldn’t know. Here’s my own pick for restaurant of the summer for those who like to stay in Brooklyn: grab a reservation immediately at Bar Vinazo in Park Slope, a new Spanish wine bar with a terrific list of wines, vermouth, and sherry, and an excellent menu full of tinned fish and other Spanish tapas. Go have a glass of wine and some anchovies and thank me later.