Hello and happy Friday!
Annaliese Griffin here, Quartz’s resident food writer. I report from Vermont, where, despite an exceptionally wet summer, we’re currently enjoying tomato after tomato, with a supporting cast of basil, sweet corn, and blueberries.
Despite being a cook’s dream, late August is a weird time of year. It’s still summer here—and technically will be until September 22—but I’m wishing for autumn weather, while questioning whether I made the most of the hotter months. My hankering for a few more sunny beach days is at odds with my anticipation of foliage, apple picking, and sweaters. Frankly, it’s all a little confusing. Today I’m here to share my coping methods.
Catalogue your summer escapades. It might feel like June was just yesterday and summer has flown by without regard for your reading list or travel ambitions, but trust me, you’ve done more than you think. Jenni Avins, this newsletter’s usual author, wrote a few years ago about returning to work after vacation. Referring to her then-recent trip to the Oregon coast she wrote, “Before our return flight boarded, my boyfriend and I took 20 minutes to write down what we did each day on vacation. It not only made me feel like our trip lasted longer—we did so much!—but it also eased a bit of that “Where did the time go?” feeling.”
Use this trick to appreciate the summer you had. Make fresh tomato pasta for dinner and an Atlantic Beach Pie for dessert—an ultimate August dinner. Then enjoy it with the people you’ve spent the most summer hours with, and make your own summer appreciation list. Mine includes taking out-of-towners to wood-fired pizza night at our local farmer’s market, eating Wellfleet oysters in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, and splashing around the town pool with my three-year-old.
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Tomatoes on pasta. This is less a recipe than a reminder that you probably have a similarly simple tomato-based dinner solution in your own repertoire. Here’s mine.
Remember bruschetta, that very 1990s, very Italian-ish appetizer? It was good, right? It’s even better when you turn it into a pasta. Boil a pound of spaghetti in super-salty water, then roughly chop about two pounds of tomatoes. Put the tomatoes and any juices that run out in a bowl and add two or three cloves of minced garlic (I use a garlic press), a handful or two of torn basil leaves, a splash of red wine vinegar, a good glug of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Drain the pasta then put it back in the warm pasta pot. Dump your tomato mixture in, toss to coat the spaghetti, and let the whole thing marinate for 10 minutes. Sometimes I add chunks of fresh mozzarella, mostly I don’t. Serve with or without parmesan.
Goodbye summer FOMO (fear of missing out). On a recent afternoon, I found myself alone on the deck of our vacation rental—a rare moment of peace in a boisterous, dual-family getaway. What I really wanted to do was take a nap, but I was determined to read a few chapters in my book. So rather than surrendering to sleep, I found myself snoozing and waking in fitful bursts, like a college student after an all-nighter.
Thu-Huong Ha, Quartz’s books reporter, counsels against this sort of obligatory reading. “Summer reading in particular, like the wider umbrella of vacation reading, carries a sense of duty, and turns reading into an act of productivity,” she writes. She’s dead-on when she says FOMO isn’t really fun.
To truly read for pleasure, Thu offers some sound advice. “Don’t force yourself to finish a book you don’t like,” she writes. “Read the books people give you as presents, even if they seem to have completely missed the mark. Think of reading as a very long, meandering stroll—not a scavenger hunt.”
August vs. Autumn. While I still feel the tug between the languid, easygoing days of summer and September’s back-to-school vibe, my London-based colleague Rosie Spinks is much less equivocal about the whole thing.
“Fall is the most optimistic time of year,” she wrote in an essay for The Pool last year, inspired by the French celebration of la rentrée to post-vacation life. “Autumn is a much more fitting reset point on the calendar than January, when it simply too cold to be optimistic about anything and we are all exhausted from the forced indulgence that is Christmas. In September, with a (hopefully) restful August behind us, we can enter the last quarter of the year with a vigour and resolve to do things a little differently.”
I love the idea of celebrating September’s renewed energy—but I have to admit I’m a little overwhelmed anticipating it. One strategy I have adopted is to keep a list of all the restaurants, movies, shows, museums, and shops I want to check out. When someone recommends something great, I jot it down in a note on my phone to refer to in those “I don’t know, what do you want to do” moments.
Right now I have two local restaurants and hikes on the list, along with the new season of Killing Eve (which our own Adam Epstein emphatically recommends) and—because my tastes in television are very, very basic and I am a procedural junkie—the return of Law & Order: SVU.
Deep breaths. Look back over that list of all the lovely times you had this summer. Now close your eyes. Would you rather read or take a nap right now? Make room for that this weekend, and the next, and all year long.
Simple Cooking by John Thorne. One of my favorite reads of the summer was this 1996 compiliation of Thorne’s essays and food-focused newsletters (yes, pre-email newsletters)! It was a welcome departure from the chef-obsessed, aspirational viewpoint that has come to dominate food writing. Instead, Thorne is an inquisitive and detail-obsessed generalist, whether the subject matter is New England baked beans or obscure cooking tools. In the book’s introduction he writes, “My goal as a cook has always been not so much to attain some specific sense of mastery as to be able to just go into the kitchen, take up what I find there, and make a meal of it.” Fall goals, set.