Hello from September! The 90+ degree days persist in Atlanta, but the sunset is arriving earlier. I found this Shade Map, a fun tool that lets you see where the shade is on Earth at any time of day.

Aside from my regularly scheduled seasonal screed - get rid of Summer, forever - we’ve had fun over here. The 3rd year of Camp Gloria, our annual summer camp house party, was a success and included many new beats like mini planter painting, square pizzas, and a spelling bee. A social exercise wherein willing participants are hecklers; intellectuals become mere mortals, and many claim to be stumped by “connoisseur.”

Congratulations to my friend Carissa () for taking home the inaugural trophy! Condolences to the rest. And a most honorable mention goes to Ray & Emily for bringing a Yeti cooler full of Spaghett fixings.

I’ve begun a daily series on Substack Notes where I share Pins that have followed me around that day, mostly focused on design and interiors (it’s my line and place of work, so it’s kind of like you’re seeing my algorithm). If you’ve found your way to this newsletter because of it, I’m glad!

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

GETTING INTO FANCY TEA

It has recently come to my attention that my midlife 😡 nervous system doesn’t do well with coffee after about 4 PM, at least on workdays. Unfortunately, the need to stay awake during work hours remains unchanged.

Despite years of being snitty about tea (referring to it as “herb water” [derogatory]), I’ve come to enjoy a late afternoon loose leaf in a friendly little tea cup. I like the slightly tannic, malty flavors of the Leaves & Flowers “Special Breakfast” and “Mountain Beauty” teas. I use this OXO strainer which has really accelerated the loose leaf agenda, and I take my tea with a teaspoon of this fancy, woo-woo honey from Symbeeosis.

HERE’S YOUR ONE CHANCE, FANCY …

Casa Contenta, once featured in a 1951 issue of Architectural Digest and site of many Hollywood parties attended by first-name celebrities like Marilyn and Audrey and Clark, is going to be someone’s for $11.5M. I covet everything about this house. As the listing says, glamorous doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Which brings me to my next point:

REAL ESTATE PHOTOGRAPHY SHOULD BE FANCIER

I want to see where the morning light hits. A little dusky detail in a boudoir corner, a tease of what could be. I don’t want a fisheye lens. I don’t want the squinty “bright and airy” Lightroom preset. I definitely don’t want to see can lights on full blast.

I know, you can only work with what you’ve got. As a culture, we have decided that Millennial Grey and Ceiling White are the aesthetic standard for real estate websites.

But the children yearn for a different world! One of stories and texture and color and character; one where we can collectively turn away from cool neutrals and let the photographers cook.

I present as evidence: this listing in Connecticut. The storytelling!! This place is begging for an Americanized, Emerald Fennell adaptation of Rebecca.

FOR THE MISCELLANY FANCIERS:

Your cookware got worse on purpose (much like most everything else)

How influencers are rewriting the rules of estate sales

An absolute buffet of free, printable graph paper templates

Ordinary abundance: “Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be ‘the limit of human felicity.’ A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe.”

The fictional homes we still think about from : Father of the Bride, Stepmom and Call Me By Your Name are top of this list for me. I also pitch the March Sisters’ house from Little Women (2019), as well as Auntie Mame’s townhouse (1958) for consideration.

I leave you with this “gin trunk”:

And a playlist for those late, late summer attitudes:

BBLT Pasta

For this BLT recipe: the B stands for both Beef and Bacon, L is for a Light crunch, and T, obviously, is for tomato. The panko does the work of “bread” and also gives a crunchy romaine texture.

INGREDIENTS

3 large beefsteak tomatoes, cored, seeded, and chopped
1 tsp. salt
6 oz. of thick-cut bacon, chopped into lardons
½ cup, panko bread crumbs
1 lb. ground beef
1 yellow onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tbsp. tomato paste
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
½ cup dry white wine (sub: chicken stock)
1 cup, whole milk
Small-shaped pasta like orecchiette or shells
1 cup, basil leaves, shredded
½ cup, parmesan, shredded
Zest of one lemon

WHAT TO DO

Toss chopped tomatoes + teaspoon of salt in a colander in the sink, and let juice drain (about 15 minutes, pat dry before using). In a large, high-sided pan, fry bacon in a teaspoon of olive oil until crispy. Remove from the pan and reserve. Add panko to the pan on low-medium heat, stirring constantly until toasted brown and crackly -- add these to a separate bowl (they’ll be a topping).

Add a tablespoon of olive oil to the same pan and brown beef, about 8 minutes, seasoning with a pinch of salt. Add onion and garlic to the pan until softened, stir in tomato paste and ½ tsp. red pepper flakes, cooking for a minute more. On higher heat, deglaze with wine (or stock) until evaporated, then add milk and cooked bacon, and reduce heat to low, simmering uncovered until all liquid is gone. Meanwhile, cook the pasta of your choice (I like orecchiette), reserving ½ cup of pasta water.

Add tomatoes to the ragu, ½ cup of basil leaves, and cook 2-3 minutes until cooked down slightly. Combine pasta with ragu, a bit of pasta water to loosen, ¼ cup of parm and lemon zest. Plate and top with remaining basil and parm.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

And as I dreamily declared to Adrian, midway through a butter-drizzled lobster roll, while overlooking a serene Penobscot Bay: “I am very good at leisure.”

This is a special Trip to Maine edition of the newsletter, and might get cut off in your email due to pictures, so on and so forth. Open the email in your browser to enjoy the whole thing.

A magpie in a spreadsheet: planning a trip
How I do it: I collect bits and bobs of Internet research, fragments of travel guides past and present, and do a lot of dog-earing and screenshotting, all in service of a loose itinerary. Central command is typically a multi-tab Google Sheet, locations categorized by a series of dropdowns, and supported by a Google Map to plot them out; a Notion dashboard for reservations and general housekeeping, and an active Notes file for save-for-later bookmarks and reference images.

Incredibly, all of these channels work really well together in the end, but I can respect that this would seem overwhelming to anyone not in my brain. At the end of the day, I like a loose structure but don’t like being told what to do. Orienting days by vibe and location matters more to me than highly-ordered sightseeing.

Working with a travel agent:
For this trip, I ventured out for a little logistics support from my friend (and former Pinterest colleague) Jess, who’s working with Fora as a travel advisor. Jess not only got us some terrific rates at hotels in Boston and Portland (with perks!), but she recommended a real highlight - a raw bar & wine tasting sail around Casco Bay. I’ve never worked with a travel agent before (my reference has always been Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard’s characters in Waiting for Guffman), but the experience was so seamless and lousy with perks, that I’m already planning to work with her on our Christmas trip. This isn’t #ad, by the way -- but if you’ve got a trip coming up and want to work with someone who has Good Taste (™), Jess is your girl.

The Maine Highlights:
There are so many wonderful things to say about Maine, it’s like the best parts of New England wrapped up in one green, pine-scented package. We spent two days in Portland and the rest of our week up the midcoast (or Down East, depending on who you’re talking to), landing in the little community of Deer Isle, about a 3.5 hour drive from Portland.

Maine is called “Vacationland” for sensible reasons - there’s beach, there’s nature, there are mariner shirts that come by their name honestly. It’s also a vacationland for literary types, and people who love to support independent retail. I’m both of those things! On top of that, Portland (“Maine’s big city,” as two different Mainers told me) enjoys a strong reputation for excellent restaurants, but I don’t really want to go anywhere that’s TikTok-hyped or famous for having a line around the block. Bearing that in mind, here are some of my favorite places we visited:

Portland:

• Stay: The Longfellow Hotel was modern and lovely, about a 20-minute walk from the Old Port (where most of the fanfare and tourist activity is). It was quiet and quite comfortable (the $100 F&B credit we got by booking with Jess helped with that!) but I’d stay closer to the downtown area next time.

• Breakfast/Brunch: Central Provisions - I had a salt & pepper popover with a perfectly poached egg nestled inside, and I’m still not really sure how they did it.

• Lunch: Luncheonette - a tiny little lunch restaurant with a backyard patio, I had a perfect potato salad and the tofu katsu sando and Adrian got a tomato pie!

• Dinner: Wayside Tavern - calling it a ‘neighborhood bistro’ is too diminutive of a description. This was one of the best restaurant experiences I’ve had all year!

• Shopping: Blanche & Mimi - This little store in the Old Port is essentially my entire personality in a retail format. Cookwares, homewares, bits and baubles, fancy incense, cozy textiles all tightly packed in a tiny, sunny storefront. Soleil had a lot of great locally-made and small gift items, and Ope! Stationery had a fabulous selection of notebooks, pens, and cute stationery sets.

• Bookwise, we stopped at Print Bookstore (I found a few Cometbus zines! In 2026!!) and Bold Magazines, which had an awesome selection of independent food and art magazines.

Midcoast Maine and Deer Isle:

• Stay: We parked ourselves at The Ark, a historic inn built in 1793 and recently under the management of two innkeepers, Andrew and Bosco, former designers whose style and taste is impeccable and keenly felt. They host a rotation of chefs-in-residence in The Ark’s dining room (noted by the NYT last year), which was novel and fun. I had a terrific tea-infused gin martini that I’m eager to recreate at home.

The Ark also introduced me to the work of local artist Barbara Sullivan, who makes these bas-relief frescos that are both whimsical and deeply satisfying!

• Local fare: Lobster rolls at LDI Lobster Dock & Dine on Little Deer Isle, red snapper hotdogs (a Maine tradition not made of red snapper, but dyed bright red) at Panacea in Wiscasset, local Penobscot oysters at Brooklin Inn with a fish sauce mignonette.

  

• Fancy feast: I am generally over tasting menus, but dinner at Aragosta was exquisite. There is really nothing quite like eating a meal that came from literal feet away, from the oysters to the produce. I walked out with a freshly-signed copy of Chef Devin Finigan‘s cookbook, A Kitchen on Goose Cove.

• Bopping and pottering and frittering around: Stone Soup Books in Camden, the Isle au Haut mail boat that took us on a 90-minute, no-frills cruise around the coastline of Isle au Haut (half of which is part of Acadia National Park), Blue Hill Books and Working Loose in Blue Hill. Fun fact: the Blue Hill Fair in September inspired the setting for Charlotte’s Web!

If you’re thinking of heading to Maine, you’re already on the right track.

And because I cannot resist sharing real estate in this newsletter, here is an 1802 inn for sale in Camden, absolutely riddled with chintz and fussy little Laura Ashley frills. Let’s go in on it together.

PICKLE DE GALLO DRESSING

It’s nothing to do with coastal Maine, and listen, I know we’re all concerned about salad right now. Hear me out: local lettuce (like our beloved CSA co-op, Love is Love), or buying a whole head of lettuce, not the bags.

With that said, I made an unhinged salad dressing the other night that I felt the need to make public. It involves Grillo’s Pickle de Gallo salsa, umami flavors, and a bit of sweet-sour. I mixed it into a couscous, cucumber, and tomato salad. A hoot and a holler! It also doesn’t photograph well, so, sorry about that.

I use two small appliances for blending salad dressings and marinades: I’ve shared my KitchenAid mini food processor before - I think my specific machine has been discontinued, but this seems to be the next generation. I also love my Cuisinart stick immersion blender for the same purpose - it comes with a little 3-cup mixing cup to make storage and cleanup easier.

INGREDIENTS

2 tbsp., Grillo’s Pickle de Gallo (you could sub dill relish if your store doesn’t carry PdG, but it’s not quite the same)
1 tbsp., honey
Pinch of salt and pepper
1 tsp., Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp., dried oregano
1 clove of garlic, minced (if not using a food processor)
¼ cup, white vinegar
½ cup, olive oil

WHAT TO DO

Put all ingredients except for the olive oil into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until combined, then continue to blend as you slowly pour olive oil into the mix. Taste and adjust as you like - you may need more honey or salt & pepper, but it’s better to build as you go than to add too much at the beginning.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

What was on in May: a baby shower for our nearest & dearest, steak frîtes with entrecôte sauce at least twice, a West Coast back-and-forth, some South Carolina gardens, a polo game, a couple of dinner parties … whew. Keep track on my Instagram.

Meanwhile, a moment for my new favorite specialty bookshop, William Stout Architectural Books in SF’s Jackson Square. New and used books, all obviously focused on architecture and design, and the staff is incredibly friendly. I picked up A Dictionary of Color Combinations, vol. 2 and The Kitchen: Where Function Meets Pleasure.

GOOD TASTE: FLAVOR PROFILES

LITERARY:

• James by Percival Everett; every ounce as good as you’ve heard!

• My Friends by Fredrik Backman; unfortunately, I’m ~50 pages in and this one is shaping up to be an early return to the library. I don’t love the writing style. It gives Chicken Soup for the Soul (derogatory).

VISUAL:

• “River Bend” (above) by InPlace and Vaughan Howard Architects in Australia, a restoration of a midcentury dwelling set to become an artist-in-residency retreat. This case study is also a great example of interior photography doing the work of conveying warmth, softness, and craft:

  Since completion, 24 artists have been residents in the Garambi Baan program, with initiatives that seek to repair connections to craft practices that hold deep cultural significance. ‘Residents have noted that River Bend feels like a healing place – a notion that extends across the project, from healing country, to healing broken connections with culture, knowledge and land … The repair of this piece of architecture has, in a small way, contributed to providing a safe space where healing journeys can begin.’

• I like this provocation from that tableware is design’s new safest bet. There’s a lot of merit to the argument that tableware (think cups, plates, cutlery, small tabletop decor, etc) is the next best bet for home retailers if you think about the cost of furnishings at scale. Going big on smalls makes a lot of sense for new brands entering the market, as well as for established retailers pushing inventory that’s easier to move (literally and economically).

  • I think this is paid off in how actual people are protecting their wallets, staying home à la “we have wine bar at home,” and still wanting to be creative and show off. Whether you call it ~eclectic aesthetic~ or just budget prioritization, the fact is that people are out here making tea light holders out of baguettes. We have all got to find the whimsy where we can these days!

• I just discovered Reath Design and have pinned so many images from this 1910 Craftsman project of theirs, talk about a dream. That green fireplace!!!

And the lovely discovery of Storied Colors. New entries arrive each Sunday at 06:00 GMT:

At time of publication, today’s color is Lycopene Red.

On the west coast hotel beat
Traveled to San Francisco for work a couple of weeks ago and stayed at the reopened Huntington Hotel in Nob Hill. Wow! The Huntington is a hotel with an incredible history in SF, and its Ken Fulk redesign spared no details (classic Georgian lines, cream and coffee color schemes in the rooms, soft pink hallways, jewel-toned communal spaces). It is fabulous from check-in to turndown, situated right in Nob Hill with a view to Huntington Park, Grace Cathedral, and the Fairmont San Francisco, an intimate bar (Arabella’s) and an iconic restaurant (the Big Four).

USEFUL:

• How the heck does Shazam work? don’t act like you haven’t thought this before

• How to Google/search better, some examples:

  • “… bubble level uses your phone’s gyroscope as an actual level

  • … metronome opens a working, adjustable metronome”

• Unusual ways to use a notebook via

• 10 small ways to feel better this week via

2 important questions of the season:

• Boneless wings aren’t really wings. Is that fraud? (YES and NO!)

• Is shrimp overrated? (NO! See below)

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

Spring break forever! In the meantime:

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been reading:

• Cover-to-cover: After languishing at #200+ for a year in the library queue, I buckled and bought a copy of The Correspondent, which I then read in a single night. It’s as good as you might have heard! Same goes for Heart the Lover.

• Even more fiction: A range from very, very good to just fun: Family Happiness (Laurie Colwin), Luster (Raven Leilani), Mutual Interest (Olivia Wolfgang-Smith)

• Next up: American Fantasy (Emma Straub), The Secret History of French Cooking (Luke Barr), An Awfully Big Adventure (Beryl Bainbridge), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk)

Admiring:

• It’s a $1.37m 1929 Rock House in Palm Springs with a cobalt sink and a cowboy pool and unfortunately, I desperately want it

• And this adorable cottage on the Isle of Skye that’s now sold, but was the project of one of my favorite TikTokers, Caroline McQuistin

• From Joey, a friend of the ‘letter with exquisite taste, this absolutely astonishing 18th c. stone & shingle estate in Connecticut that is begging to be turned into a spendy & silly little inn, 7k sq ft for $7.4m

• A bedazzled Cook’s Illustrated: a folly, a whimsy, a thing that didn’t need to be made … and yet!!

• This Wildsam Field Guides x Delta partnership makes so much sense! (City guides for Manhattan, Boston, Austin, LA, Seattle)

• Some old-timey meat & game recipes from The 1800’s Housewife!

• These vending machines at Decatur Estate Antiques:

• I find myself increasingly concerned with clothing tags and fabric content, so I am really excited about this “How It Wears” materials analyzer tool. You can upload a picture of a tag or copy/paste the fabric specs of a garment to learn what it’s made of, how to care for it, and what some watch-outs are. So useful!

• Friction, as both a concept and scientific principle, is so important. It’s so easy to get swept away with the tide of AI doomerism, and I think the documentation of a return to slow/return to hobbies/work-effort-meaning is how we know not all will be lost. Humans will always want to learn new things by trial and error, or search for ways to fill their time meaningfully, or flex on each other with their collections of things (like records or film cameras).

• Relevant: get off the Internet, go make something cool

• Finally, read this if you’re despairing about the state of the world

• The wonder of modern drywall (!!!) I know how this sounds (dare I say … dry), but building materials, just like anything else, can actually be fascinating when you take a moment for them. There are just some things that you don’t think about all that often, or ever, maybe. We’re all just out here taking drywall for granted.

I put a playlist together that, humbly, absolutely rips on a midday spring walk. Starts out quiet, gets to dancing, rounds out mellow. Spin it and save it.

A SPRING VEG & CHEESE FRITTATA

Sometimes a Sunday in April can pop up a little grey and humid, an afternoon walk is threatened by the possibility of rain and the attitude becomes less than cheery.

It is a Sunday like this that Spring must absolutely come back into your step, by way of an eggy bake of springtime flavors and salty cheese. This is a story of a recent Sunday in our house! Wouldn’t you know that the clouds parted in a matter of moments after making this frittata! A divine sign.

INGREDIENTS

2-3 eggs per person
¼ cup, whole milk
1 tbsp., olive oil
3 tbsp., butter
1 clove of garlic, chopped
1 tsp. of each, salt & pepper
1 tsp., herbes de Provence
3 green onions, white parts chopped
½ cup asparagus tips and mid-stems, chopped in ½” pieces
½ cup frozen peas, thawed
½ cup mozzarella, roughly cut into ½” pieces
¼ cup feta cheese crumbles
¼ cup shredded parmesan
¼ cup, chopped fresh tarragon

WHAT TO DO

Place half of the cheeses (mozzarella, feta, parm) all together in a separate bowl.

Heat oven to 375F. Blend eggs, milk, garlic, salt & pepper, herbes de Provence in a food processor until incorporated and foamy (about 3-4 pulses). In a 10” cast-iron (or high-sided, oven-proof) skillet, warm olive oil over medium and cook green onions and asparagus until bright green, about 5 minutes. Remove half of the vegetables to the bowl with the half-portion of cheeses.

Turn off heat and add egg mixture to skillet, gently combining the remaining half portion of vegetables in the skillet and eggs with a wooden spoon until evenly distributed. Cook in the oven for about 10 minutes or until the top seems partially set. Add the remainder of the cooked vegetables, the peas, and the cheeses to the top of the skillet, adjusting so they’re even on top but not disturbing the bottom layer. Cook for another 10 minutes or until the edges of the eggs are slightly browned.

Remove from the oven and let stand to cool a bit for at least 10 minutes, but up to 20. Top with the tarragon.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

THE FINE FLOWER ARTS

• My friend Brian and I took a flower arrangement class together from local floral queen Caroline Worth. We had a great time yapping and jabbing flowers into foam, but it was also a focused effort of left brain-right brain thinking. Flower arrangements are one dash color theory, one dash geometry, and a healthy pinch of intuition; putting a centerpiece together is easy in theory, challenging in practice! Grateful for the time to activate student mode alongside a bestie, and also to focus on making something beautiful.

  

THE DECORATIVE ARTS

• Unfortunately, extremely up my alley, throwing a party for new French doors

• A room recipe from , one of my favorite Substacks for design and interiors: “Room Recipe: A Dreamy Bathroom Filled with Antiques”

• God. I need this lamp as a wall sconce!!

“BIC Lamp reinterprets the legendary BIC Cristal at a 12:1 scale in its three most recognizable versions-classic black, blue, and red-as a floor lamp, pendant light, or wall sconce. Made with materials chosen to evoke the original with the utmost precision, while guaranteeing optimal lighting performance, this lamp celebrates one of the most widespread and beloved objects in the world.”

THE MUSICAL ARTS

• Some might say this newsletter overly concerns itself with niches, and this performance by Angine de Poitrine is no exception. It is so strange, and yet after like 5 minutes, I’m fully locked in and convinced this is Frank Zappa reincarnation par excellence. As one commenter put it: “It’s abundantly clear that these guys are on the frontlines of whatever this is.”

• I made a playlist for the shoulder season of late winter-early spring. Not that deep, it’s just a lot of what I’ve been listening to over the last few months. Save it or just enjoy it! I miss mixtapes!

The Culinary Arts: A Spring Chicken with Olives & Oranges

Sad to say I have found myself in a cooking rut this winter, so indulge me with a bit of a rewind to Spring 2023. I riffed on Melissa Clark’s original recipe for “chicken tagine with blood orange,” and I’m eager to revisit it now that spring flavors are on the horizon. What I said at the time:

“This roasted chicken is a fresh, vibrant one for early spring dinners. There’s some depth to it, thanks to ginger, nutmeg, and turmeric, but it’s made for sunnier days with briny green olives and the addition of a quick-preserved orange.”

Check out In Good Taste vol. 90, “Spring Seasoning,” for the recipe in full.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

In their stead: some light reflections and as ever, food for thought … no matter how slowly your gears are turning.

Some good tastes of and from 2025:

• Shooting a ton of film. It’s kept me less phone-tethered, a definite fringe benefit. I took a film development workshop at the local film lab and I also picked up a Fuji XT20 to adapt the foundations of what I’ve learned to a digital device, which has proven to be a useful way to track my own learning journey!

• Borrowing more books than I buy. According to my library profile and my own unreliable memory, I finished at least 25 books last year. I fell back in love with fiction, gobbling up a lot of novels and inadvertently a couple of series. The last book I finished for the year was Ali Smith’s Autumn, itself the first part of a series that I’m not sure I’ll commit to further.

  • Biggest highlights: The Cazalet Chronicles series by Elizabeth Jane Howard - I loved this so much, I bought copies of my own. I am not alone in wondering how I didn’t know about this series beforehand.

  • Also: Albion by Anna Hope, Thrilled to Death by Lynne Tillman, Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt

  • Here’s a good book recommendation generator!

• Possibly controversial in my professional line, but I really dialed back my use of LinkedIn in 2025. For me, LinkedIn induces more anxiety than any other platform (Substack is a close second, lololol) and I really don’t need more worry/bad news, at least in my worklife.

  • I spent some time with Cosmos (I really like being able to search by color or hex code), Aren.a, and mymind.

On hobbies

• How to start making zines from

• “your hobbies don’t owe you anything”

• And so; a random hobby generator (mine: amateur astronomy; bus spotting; pen spinning; candy-making)

• in defense of thinking small

Strong opinions, loosely held:

• Consider the topic of how pleasant a car’s turn signal should really be (the fact that this is a trend on TikTok, because of course it is, is also pretty funny in its own right)

• A wonderful take on how having a discovery mindset works wonders, by way of figuring out how pen caps work. In a generalized way, I feel this piece from sums up my own magpie approach to assembling this newsletter. Being curious, maybe even overly inquisitive, about seemingly silly and basic things is more than important, it’s essential to cultivating taste and perspective and POV and all that.

On art:

• News you can use… ! Research shows that going to an art museum, a gallery, and/or just seeing some original works of art contributes to positive health effects

• Storyboards for Nighthawks fans: “The Nighthawks drawings reveal how Hopper choreographed his voyeuristic scene of the nighttime convergence of the man, a couple, and a server in the eerie Deco diner, refining every nuance of the countertop, the figures, the architecture, and the effects of the fluorescent lighting.”

• “If you have good taste, you know Noguchi”: a good primer on Isamu Noguchi, whose canonical art you’ll almost definitely recognize, and some of the crossover of his work into fashion. We’re lucky in Atlanta to have his only playground, Playscapes, on hand in Piedmont Park. The fiftieth anniversary of that work coincides with the “I am not a designer” exhibition at the High Museum this April!

On new year reflection templates:

• 40 questions to ask yourself about your year

• This annual personal planning template by Grace Clarke is blowing my mind??? Which is not a phrase I’d normally use to describe something called an “annual personal planning template.” It’s in Google Slides - make a copy!

• How to Discover What You’re Actually Good At - The 12 points of pleasure at work from

What I will not be consuming in 2026:

• Anchovy martinis. I’m now exhausted by the bastardization of the form. We don’t need more offbeat flavor martinis!!

• I might be over mushrooms! Sad if true!

BEST THING I’VE MADE IN 2026: RANCHY CHICKEN

This is less an actual recipe than a lazy person’s dinner idea on a Sunday afternoon. The basics were simple: buttermilk-brined chicken is excellent, I had three small containers of ranch dressing leftover from a pizza delivery (shoutout to Glide Pizza), and a 3-pound whole chicken that needed roasting.

So I soaked that bird in that ranch dressing for four hours covered in the fridge, after seasoning it inside and out with salt and pepper. Popped it into a 350 oven in a roasting pan, rotated it once after 45 minutes, let it cook until the thigh temperature read 165 on the Thermapen, let it rest on the cutting board for about 15 minutes, and carved it up. Chickeny, insanely tender and moist, a little ranchy, a lot of fun and stupid simple.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

Travels, hither and thither:
Cornwall! The southwestern county of England, Cornwall has a lot going on at once. Rugged coastline, Arthurian legend, artists’ retreats, brooding moors, fishing villages, claustrophobic hedgerow-bound roads broken by hilly vistas, incredible food, Cornish slate and granite … ! It’s enough to fall in love.

Why Cornwall?
An easy, flip answer is that I was inspired by this silly travel article from New York. The more genuine one is that my life and work these days are so online, I have found myself craving quiet and literally touching grass. I really wanted to sit in a field on an old rock and look at trees in a different country. I’d also heard about the light in St. Ives and wanted to see what that was all about. It should be noted that I also started reading Daphne du Maurier for the first time in 2025, a strong influence on the actual trip planning.

Getting to the Cornwall coast
We booked direct flights from Atlanta to London and took a sleeper train from Paddington Station to Penzance. We spent about 5 days traversing Cornwall from Penzance to the towns of St Ives, Mousehole, and Newlyn by double-decker public bus, and then rented a car, driving steadily northeast.

Farm stay: Coombeshead Farm
One of the brightest highlights of an incredible trip was staying at a working farm/inn called Coombeshead Farm, situated on the edge of the Cornwall-Devon divide. This is where I got my wish fulfillment of quietly sitting in a field looking at trees, with a sweet room in their lovely 9-room guest house.

The restaurant was wonderful, too, everything grown or raised basically within arm’s reach, down to the Mangalitsa pigs that romp around for a few years and then … well, cheers to those pigs for their service! On a softer note, you can read about the ancient trees on their property, part of a larger effort of regenerative agriculture. One living oak dates back to the Cornish rebellion of 1497!

On my radar: landscape mode
I’ve been noticing more and more lately a more bucolic approach to hospitality that retains thoughtful design elements. It dovetails with trends in home/interiors towards the natural, a desire for fewer degrees of separation between maker and consumer, and the whole “experiences > things” generational narrative. I’ll admit that some of it can come off a little Petit Trianon, and is particularly attractive to me in my DINK (dual-income no kids) lifestyle. But a cottagecore-inspired trip where you sit by a stream and maybe pet a goat (“harvesting a new kind of luxury”) sounds a lot more interesting than pointsmaxxing at a Marriott.

Solo San Francisco dining, for introverts who still want to people-watch
The best parts of traveling for work are yes, seeing new places, but also, dining solo the night before (or following) a meeting. Especially if I’m not on the hook for attending client or team dinners. Three of my solo favorites from SF this year:

• Bon Délire (French bistro) in the Ferry Building, so darling with a horseshoe-shaped bar and no bad views;

• Flour + Water (famous pasta; Mission District), who will do half-size portions for solo diners;

• Nopa (American; Alamo Square), with its seasonally rotated martini (mine was a late-summer tomato martini) and wonderful service

Whirlwinds: Brooklyn and Boston
A couple of weeks ago, I took my bestie David to Brooklyn’s Grand Army for his birthday dinner. We had their “lowbrow seafood tower” (a half-dozen oysters, shrimp cocktail, kewpie deviled eggs, whitefish dip) as well as an order of their nutritional yeast + aonari popcorn that I practically inhaled.

Before sprinting to LGA after my work meeting, I got to catch the absolutely lovely Monet and Venice exhibition currently up at Brooklyn Museum. Go see it if you can! The pieces are lovely and rarely (if ever) shown as a full collection.

Finally, just this past weekend my husband and I got to attend my personal BravoCon, going inside the studio and meeting the cast of America’s Test Kitchen! I think ATK is the best cooking multiverse there is for home cooks, from Cook’s Illustrated magazine to the mobile app. Their recipes are beat-for-beat more consistent than NYT Cooking, it’s content over personality, and they frequently revisit their archive for consistency. I want ATK around forever.

And the studio was incredible. So many gleaming pots and pans! A wall of Le Creuset for filming! Did I literally start sweating before meeting Bridget Lancaster, Julia Davison, and Lan Lam? Yes. And I even got to tell Julia about my party chicken.

When not hobnobbing with niche celebrities, Adrian and I had an absolutely outstanding dinner at Oleana in Cambridge, thanks to a tip from my pal Irina. It’s Turkish & Mediterranean small plates, a standout being “Sultan’s Delight:” tamarind beef, smoky eggplant purée, basil. I can’t wait to figure out how to make it at home. Also got to enjoy a whole sea bream at Select Oyster Bar in Back Bay on the direct recommendation of Cook’s Country’s own Bryan Roof!

Did you make it this long? Here are some non-travel links:

• “The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card”

• How to get your attention span back

• Some thoughts about hope and even ways to be hopeful of having good days: Michael Rosen’s guide to having a happier day in bleak times

FERMENTED MAGIC: SHIO KOJI

Part of all this America’s Test Kitchen yap is that it recently introduced me to shio koji, a Japanese condiment made of rice malt and salt. The original premise was to utilize it as a marinade to mimic dry-aging for steak, but I have now used it as a marinade for all kinds of meats & vegetables. It reduces the amount of salt needed in a recipe and builds a slightly nutty, umami-rich flavor to everything. I am obsessed with it. You need it in your life. Proof of concept: this roasted chicken thigh that marinated in shio koji for 6 hours, no other seasoning needed:

Go forth and marinade!

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

I miss summer house parties. Well, I miss a certain long-past genre from my twenties, the kind not held for anything but the joy of hanging out. Maybe there would a house show or laundry room karaoke for added entertainment. Granted, a lot of these parties operated on punk time (11PM), I always seemed to leave covered in an unexplainable amount of glitter, the food situation was rarely more than a family-sized bag of tortilla chips. Uber didn’t exist yet, Atlanta taxis would straight up ghost you (and probably still would). But those summer house parties were a reliable source of spontaneous fun that feels increasingly like -- did we imagine the whole thing?

Much has been written post-2020 about “the death of the house party.” Nostalgia for house parties is one reason I host a summer camp-themed house party. The approach has aged up and cleaned up a bit, shall we say. Camp Gloria is respectfully held on a late Saturday afternoon to accommodate more “middle-aged” lifestyles and life stages. It’s less spontaneous, taking a few months of advance planning and prep, but schedules are less spontaneous now anyway. At this point in my life, I’m willing to say an arrangement of grape Uncrustables > that family-sized bag of tortilla chips on a sticky countertop.

Late-summer high-end real estate beat
Like many of you, I love a good Zillow creep for big houses that are either beautiful or make no sense (or sometimes both).

• This astonishing property in Highlands, NC is incidentally one of Burt Reynolds’s former (and apparently favorite) homes. I get it, because Highlands is one of my favorite places. But the stained glass, stone, and wood!! The strange and winding bathrooms!! Take it all in!!

• I have to give Dwight Howard kudos for asking some lucky someone to pay over $11 million dollars to live in Suwanee, Georgia. This property is fascinating. Why does the fountain in the driveway seem so disproportionate? Why is there a kitchen (one of six!!!) that looks 2D?

For dinner party menus, look backward …

… Like with Georgia O’Keeffe’s recipe for Tomato Aspic (courtesy of the Beinecke Library at Yale). We’re all so crazy about tomato sandwiches in late summer, but what of the aspic?!

This, partially inspired by my own experience with tomato aspic at the Colonnade in Atlanta (a local treasure that should be protected at all costs). I am no expert but by my calculations, it’s savory jello, and that’s a good thing. The Colonnade’s tomato aspic is best described as a gummy, boozeless Bloody Mary with crunchy bits. It is a vibe, a moment, a whole mood, and honestly really, really good. I think if you like briny stuff and/or martinis, you’ll like a tomato aspic. I am itching to foist one onto my friends/captive guests.

The real real recession indicators?

• “I went back to skinny jeans, and it feels incredible”

• “The hottest cafe is in someone’s living room” (gift link) which naturally begs the question: did I get scooped by the paper of record?

Brains broken; we should spend more time with single-use websites

• A website of rotating sandwiches

• The Internet’s #1 website about shoelaces

• Periodic table of tools

• A weird old book finder

• This doesn’t strictly count since it’s a collection on Are.na, but here are some very good sign-offs

I made a Spotify playlist of songs that sound like August 2025 to me. Dreamy, a little cheeky, hazy. I’ll probably keep adding to it throughout the month.

THE POOL SANDWICH

You don’t need a pool to enjoy the pool sandwich (but it does make the experience 100x better). You just need an appetite for an “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of summer lunch.

A great pool sandwich is pretty salty, pretty crunchy, pretty hearty. It is built on a foundation of thick bread, has no condiments that will spoil in the sun, and bears a hefty amount of shredded iceberg lettuce. The real pro move is to stick some potato chips in those bad boys.

You could, of course, eat this sandwich year-round, especially if you’re having a picnic in the shoulder season. I think the most important experiential aspect is to be a little warm when you’re eating it. The pool sandwich scratches a very specific itch on a hot day after paddling in cool water. And of course, it’s ideally paired with a hot post-pool shower and catnap on the couch.

INGREDIENTS (FOR 4)

4 ciabatta rolls
2 beefsteak tomatoes, sliced a quarter-inch thick
8 pickle slices (cut a dill pickle gherkin lengthwise or use sandwich-sliced pickles)
About a cup and a half of shredded iceberg lettuce
A pack of red wine beef salami (or regular salami), split across each sandwich
~2 oz. sliced deli turkey (about a third of a package)
~3 oz. aged provolone cheese, thinly sliced (I used a box grater)
Sour cream & onion potato chips (optional)

For the dressing, whisk to combine these ingredients:
¼ cup olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced fine
2 tsp., red wine vinegar
1 tbsp., Greek seasoning (I am a recent convert to Cavender’s)
Salt & pepper to taste

WHAT TO DO

Brush the dressing equally and liberally across the ciabatta halves, divide + layer on the rest of the ingredients. Sandwiches!

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

And of course, from other travels, a moment for the lovely bounty of Northern California in July:

Now, this is a bit longer of an issue, so you may want to open this email in your browser in case it’s cut off in your inbox. As always, I so appreciate you reading In Good Taste, opening links, giving it the ol’ thumbs-up treatment, sharing with a friend, all of it. It means a lot to me!

In good taste: using flower frogs

• For me, it all started with this TikTok on arranging flowers by using cut stems as support. Now I’ve learned about flower frogs, I am obsessed with them, and shan’t be turning back. Turns out you can buy these spiky little guys that suction to the bottom of a vase and have gorgeously arranged, fully upright bouquets like it’s nothing.

• As someone who’s borderline obsessive about having fresh flowers in the house, whether cut from our yard or our CSA, the news of flower frogs has quite actually changed my game!!! 20/10 recommend.

“We have restaurant at home”

• I’ve been observing the influence of commercial environments on how people are designing and styling their home interiors. You can see it in larger trends informed by travel (or the desire to), like people wanting to recreate luxury hotel environments for their primary bedrooms, or wanting signature scent memories of hotels in their bathrooms, or searching for apothecary aesthetics.

• “Shopifying the home” is adjacent to this. Sometimes it looks like literally using “apothecary” as an old-timey search term, looking for milk glass and deep walnut tones and weck jars (which have been trending recently on TikTok).

• People are designing dopamine menus like small plates restaurants for their personalities, shopping for French tempered water glasses (e.g., Duralex Picardie) and dining sets straight out of French bistro central casting.

• Pinterest predicted aspects of this trend, naming it “Cafécore” back in 2024, anticipating an inner barista who lies dormant in us all. But as you can see, I think the trend has become more substantial than at-home lattes. (Disclaimer: I work at Pinterest and specifically on home and lifestyle.) It’s not like this stuff really ever goes out of fashion, but it’s interesting to watch a design sensibility change shape over time.

• Laura Fenton wrote a really nice piece on making your everyday home more like a vacation home in her Substack, . I like the concept of “treat yourself like a guest”! How nice!

Snugs:

Specialty boutiques that sell special things:
During that weekend trip to Greenville (SC), I got to visit one of my favorite stores ever, We Took to the Woods. Walking in is a whole sensory experience, it’s beautifully designed and a pleasure to take it all in. Gutted that it’ll be closing its storefront soon, if you find yourself in the upstate of South Carolina anytime this year, make a point to stop in.

The Sour Agenda: mustards & vinegars
At We Took to the Woods I picked up two beautiful bottles of vinegar, one aged red wine and another sherry, which come in these substantial stone containers with a cork and a ribbon. Aesthetic!! I’m already a big fan of the brand’s mustard. I ride for mustard as an ingredient in so many things beyond just dipping sauce or salad dressing. As it is, we might as well have a mustard pantry. We’ve got whole-grain, stone-ground, smooth, with tarragon, with champagne, with lemon … Maille, Pommery, Edmond Fallot; if there’s a ✨ premium mustard ✨, I have zero impulse control.

But back to vinegar: I recently came upon Flamingo Estate’s Persimmon Vinegar and would recommend it if you felt like splurging on vinegar either for yourself or as a gift. I love a vinegar profile beyond the standard red/white/sherry. Anyway, I think the Flamingo Estate brand is a little … taken with itself (and at its price point, is not exactly everyday vinegar), but I’m glad to support my neighborhood specialty shop, Young Blood, while furthering the Sour Agenda.

Miscellany:

• “The Avengers, but for film buffs” is a funny and accurate YouTube comment about Richard Linklater’s upcoming Nouvelle Vague, which I will be seeing the moment it arrives in theatres. (I don’t really think Zoey Deutch has even half the charisma of Jean Seberg but I’m willing to wait and see.) Cannot. Wait.

• Louie Edison’s fabric collages

• A few summer playlists and songs to stream:

  • quiet mornings, slowly waking up to the smell of fresh coffee ☕ (acoustic, breezy, well-rested)

  • Japanese Funk: Tokyo Summer (nostalgic, funky, upbeat)

  • “Here Comes Love, Tenderness, and Kindness” - The Cigarettes (instrumental, 80s summer, shimmery)

  • “l’histoire de ta vie” - Céline Dessberg (delicate, stripped-back, quiet)

  • “DIVA” - Saint Levant (summer pop, crisp, highly danceable)

BLT CAPRESE SALAD

Recently, I had a nice conversation with one of the owners of Lucian here in Atlanta about Nigel Slater. Along with Diana Henry, he’s one of my favorite food writers; A Cook’s Book is another mainstay in our house. His style is so straightforward and yet warm, his recipes are unfussy and give the home cook plenty of room for creativity and interpretation.

One of the ways I’ve used the persimmon vinegar cited above is in this “BLT”-esque caprese salad, inspired by a recipe in Nigel Slater’s Eat (a mainstay in our kitchen cookbook rotation). The ingredients are familiar, flexible, and robustly summery. This fed 2 of us for dinner as a side to a chicken leg, but would make for a solid main on its own!

INGREDIENTS

Cup or so of fresh basil (no need to de-stem)
5 tbsp. olive oil
Pinch of salt & pepper to taste
1 tsp. za’atar
1 tsp. vinegar (could sub apple cider vinegar in lieu of persimmon)
3 ripe tomatoes, sliced
8 oz. diced pancetta (could sub out diced bacon)
4 medium-sized bocconcini, or one ball of mozzarella ripped into 1-inch pieces
Sea salt

WHAT TO DO

Basil, salt and pepper, vinegar, olive oil, za’atar in the food processor until it’s saucy (taste it for more salt/pepper preferences, or olive oil for consistency). Fry pancetta until it’s crispy, and lay on paper towels to drain and cool for a couple of minutes. Roll mozzarella in the pancetta crisp, adding a slight bit more oil to make it stick. Layer tomatoes on a plate, then sea salt, then mozzarella and excess pancetta, then basil sauce.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

Work trips have kept me busy lately, as well as a Spring break staycation at the top of May. We gardened, we dined, we went on neighborhood tours of homes. Tours of homes are a funny thing because they’re really just a public excuse to lurk on your neighbors. One of the homes on a neighboring street contained a collection of baseball memorabilia so one-of-a-kind and massive that I can’t believe it hasn’t been scooped up by an actual museum. Another included a fully restored classic car garage kitted out with vintage cars and a pristine jukebox. What a world!

Propaganda lists:
No matter which side of the social Internet you’ve found yourself on, you’ve probably seen those “Propaganda I am/am not falling for” lists. At least for now, I think the trend is pretty funny and spot-on for the monoculture hype cycle we find ourselves in — see also things like “safe hate spaces” and de-influencing.

It’s not a new framework, as fans of the classic NY Mag Approval Matrix or those hot or not/tired vs wired/ in-out lists would know. It’s another spin on the social signifier that is “taste”; in other words, telegraphing that you have enough of it to be really discerning. Ultimately, nobody wants to feel like they’ve been played by the invisible hand of hype. Everyone wants to feel like they’re above being sold to. And it’s really fun to be opinionated (or exasperated) on main! Anyway this trend is about on its way out, I’m sure, so here are mine:

• Propaganda I am not falling for: Cropped wide-leg jeans. “Butter-” everything (except actual butter). Jelly shoes. Restaurants without sound dampeners. Oura Rings. Beets. Tabis (the shoes that look like hooves). Benson Boone. Clear bag policies. LinkedIn. Smoothies.

• Propaganda I am absolutely falling for: Addison Rae. UV index. Midi length hemlines. Early-bird dinner. “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Small lamp supremacy. Non-branded hypochlorous acid. Lemony garlicky miso gochujang brown butter gnocchi. Shrimp salad. Being cringe = being free.

What’s a simple, underrated ritual that genuinely changed your life—and you wish you’d started earlier?: This prompt from r/simpleliving got me thinking. Mine would be making the bed every morning when I get up. Or taking a few extra moments to clear my desk at the end of the day.

• Grocery shopping as meditation

• Doubting without becoming a curmudgeon

Divine secrets of the Ya-Ya-Atlanta airport
You may know her as the airport too busy to hate: Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport is in fact the world’s busiest airport (the city loves this headline, I am not sure why). She contains multitudes (of concourses) connected by the Plane Train, and while she is not my favorite airport, she is my home airport.

I’ve been flying somewhat frequently the past couple of years for work, and thought I’d share a few ATL airport recommendations with you all ahead of the busy summer travel season. I have left Sky Clubs/lounges off this list.

Arrivals to Atlanta:

• When you hop off the Plane Train and take the long escalator up to baggage claim, be aware of the candid camera situation.

• For very quick pickup from the airport, ride the Plane Train to the International Terminal (E). Not applicable if you’ve checked a bag.

Departures from Atlanta:

• Have your drop-off/Uber veer to the left and take you to the lower-level departure zone rather than sitting in gridlock at the regular level.

In the airport:

• Art! There’s a ton of great art in the airport, like the walk between Concourses A & B, as Steve Waldeck’s Flight Paths illuminate the way. And the Zimbabwean sculpture collection between Concourses T & A is one of the largest outside of the country.

• Varasano’s in Concourse A for its (excellent) pizza and piano bar. Go all the way to the back of the “Food Hall” when you come up the central escalator, fight your way past the Chick-Fil-A line and grab a two-top at the huge windows or a seat at the bar while the piano player is there.

• Simply Books, also in Concourse A, is tucked behind the top of the central escalator, and is a bookstore with a great selection. It’s also got a secret section in the back with seating and plenty of outlets, so if you’ve got time to kill and some coffee and snacks, it’s a great place to work or read without a lot of distraction.

• Ecco or One Flew South in the International Terminal (accessible via Plane Train if you have enough time): everyone recommends these, and they’re right. The seating area outside One Flew South has great people-watching potential.

• I’ve heard great things about Chicken + Beer in Concourse D, but I rarely fly out of that one so haven’t been.

Miscellany:

• The modern human Umwelt: “There’s one type of noise that I actually don’t like and it really does cut through me and interrupt my thought process. It’s when someone in the cafe is on a Zoom meeting and I’m sitting near them. And I’m not alone in universally hating it. A lot of people complain about this.”

• Chainmail decor in the home (one of my favorite Pinterest Predicts trends that’s made its way from fashion to home)

• On my wish list: Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement.

CITRUS-MOJO ROAST PORK

Is it a full-afternoon cooking endeavor? Yes. Is it worth it? Also yes. It takes some time but slow-roasted pork with a Cuban-inspired mojo sauce is, in my opinion, the ultimate comfort food. I have shared a couple of recipes in the past for roast pork (e.g., in Vol. 48, Departures), but this is the simplest and maybe the best one.

At Publix, a 2-lb package of country style pork ribs costs around $14 and can last you for days in many variations: on rice as below, in quesadillas, in tacos, in a classic Tampa Cuban sandwich, et cetera. You could probably get away with making this in a crockpot, I don’t have one, so I made it the old-fashioned way in the Dutch oven. Low and slow, once again, yields absolutely phenomenal results. It’s so simple, so inexpensive, and rewards the patient cook.

INGREDIENTS

10 minced garlic cloves
2 tsp. cumin
2 tsp. pepper
¼ cup, minced fresh oregano
The juice of: 2 limes, 2 navel oranges, 1 red grapefruit
Salt to taste
¼ cup, olive oil
~2 lbs pork shoulder country-style ribs, salt & peppered all over
Extra lime quarters for serving

WHAT TO DO (note: updated for clarity!)

Mix the mojo ingredients in a large bowl (garlic, cumin, salt & pepper, oregano, citrus juice, olive oil) and pour half into a separate airtight bowl and refrigerate. With the reserved first half, toss the pork ribs thoroughly and cover with plastic wrap, refrigerating for at least 2 hours or 24 hours max.

Preheat your oven to 275. Add the pork ribs and their marinade to a Dutch oven (I used a 7.25 quart Dutch oven, but you could make this in a 5 quart depending on the size of the ribs). If they’re bone-in, nestle them in with the bone facing up. Place in the oven covered for 2 hours. At the 2-hour point, take the lid off, check the liquid (if it seems dry, add a half-cup of water or stock), rotate the pot and cook uncovered for another 2 hours.

Let the pork rest for 20 minutes, then shred with two forks. Serve with cilantro, rice, and lime wedges, and top all of it with the reserved citrus mojo sauce.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

New format for this edition, for no good reason other than I have a bit of spring fever. Buckle up for some errant thoughts, presented in no particular order.

New ways to order:

• A bit sad to hear about the closure of Gem Wine in NYC. I only went there once in January with my (Atlanta) friend Xun, but it was a cozy nook in a busy city. We shared some lovely buttered radishes and I had a nice glass of a Spanish red. I would tell you more about the wine, what it was and who made it, but they did this thing where there was no printed by-the-glass list, the server would just recommend something. Maybe this isn’t specific to Gem, but I thought (and still do) that this way of ordering is cool in theory but weird in practice.
  
  On one hand, pricing aside, ordering this way mitigates some of the apprehension people have around wine. You know, why not just let the actual experts pick something you’ll probably like? On the other hand, it’s awkward and I like looking at a menu. I like reference material! I’m not an indecisive person, but I like to have a little look-see, and I don’t always want to ask a question. Anyway, still, sorry to see them go. I really had a nice time, but I’m good with ordering a glass of wine in a restaurant without a whole performance around it.

Wine doesn’t need more gatekeeping:

• Speaking of wine: Atlanta really does trends on its own time, and not a moment sooner. While bigger cities have seemingly maxed-out on wine bars and small plates and French food, we’ve got 3 on deck. I am absolutely thrilled about each of them -- Fawn in Decatur, Madeira Park in Poncey-Highland, Sargent in Old 4th Ward, and I’m hopeful more are on the way.
  
  Wine’s having its moment here, with these cool casual spots providing an easier atmosphere for low-stakes learning. It helps that these wine bars are about 1000x more chic than the old brewery-food truck-park combo, or when Atlanta was really gone on Top Chef cheeseburger joints. However there must be balance in the natural world of taste and the other side of the spectrum here is the alleged rise of private wine clubs … which, I’m not sorry to say, sound like the opposite of a good time.

We’ll never be royals

• Finally, I have been watching Rachel Meghan Markle Mountbatten-Windsor Sussex’s show on Netflix, “With Love, Meghan,” and I am For It, even as I feel neutral about her as a public personality. The amount of hand-wringing about this woman is ick (amongst other things). The television program she hosts is simple, uplifting, visually appealing; she wears beautiful clothing and swans around a sparkling farmhouse doing fun, nice gift projects like candle-making. It’s fine!

Where and what to order this spring in Atlanta:

Brunch:

• Eggs & crispy potatoes at The Porter Beer Bar in Little Five Points

• The loaded avocado bowl at The Daily in Inman Park

Al fresco snack:

• Jammy egg and fries at aforementioned Madeira Park in Poncey Highland

• The smaller charcuterie board at Staplehouse in Old 4th Ward

Lunch:

• Split a turkey, pepperoni, and provolone hoagie at Little Hippo in Avondale Estates

• Or the tuna melt at Bona Fide Deluxe in Edgewood (it should be noted Atlanta has also been going through a sandwich shop phase)

Dinner:

• Agedashi tofu at Dead End Drinks in Kirkwood

• Oysters and larb anything at Talat Market in Summerhill

• Lamb skewers and smoked trout dip at Poor Hendrix in East Lake.

Top 3 martini spots:

• Classic gin martinis (2:1) from David at a mano in Old 4th Ward

• From Carter at Talat Market

• From Morgan at The Deer & The Dove in Decatur.

Miscellany:

• Ideas for designing a front garden. We’re on a mission to replace our front lawn with flowering and edible plants. Currently sprouting in our garden: sugar snap peas, zinnias, carrots, onions, ranunculus, and various wildflowers. See below: my “Outdoors, Great” Pinterest board with sections on the inspiration for our gardens front & back, give it a follow if you want!

• A couple of lovely pieces lately about color and design: what a blue apple can tell you about design, and why we’re so obsessed with the color blue

• Have you ever been on a trip and wondered where the bookstores were? Here is an incredible resource & map that charts out independent bookshops and sellers around the country, as well as openings & closings.

• A good Instagram Reel reminding you that the best travel souvenirs can be miscellany in a “junk” journal like ticket stubs, receipts, and other ephemera. And here is a very old-Internet looking list of journal ideas from poet Bernadette Mayer. Refreshing!

• Have linked to this before, maybe, but one of the places I’m most excited to see in Cornwall during our September trip is Barbara Hepworth’s studio in St. Ives!

MISO VINAIGRETTE

I want miso vinaigrette everything in spring. It’s good on grilled vegetables. It’s good on a crisp green salad. It’s good as a marinade for chicken or lamb. It’s easy to store for a while in the fridge in a mason jar, just bring it to room temp and shake well when you’re ready to use it. It’s my new favorite dressing to make!

INGREDIENTS

4 tsp. white miso paste
1 tsp. whole-grain mustard
1 garlic clove, smashed and minced
2 tsp., red wine vinegar
Small pinch of salt and pepper
2 tbsp., olive oil

WHAT TO DO

Combine all ingredients except the olive oil in a bowl, whisking the miso to warm it up and meld it a bit, and let the ingredients sit for about 10 minutes. Slowly whisk in the olive oil until combined and add more of it and the salt & pepper to your taste.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

Originally I thought of this Substack as a food newsletter. I was cooking a lot, as we all were in the thick of spring 2020, writing it down, and trying to figure out what my “thing” could be that wasn’t, well, my job (some people might call this a “hobby”). When I got really carried away, I thought maybe one day I’d turn it into a fully laid-out, printed work, something upward from a zine but downward from a true magazine.

Truth be told, In Good Taste isn’t all that much about food. And publishing with a greater frequency, a behavior that Substack rewards as a platform, is out of scope for me at the moment. But I do think this little gazette is consistently in the business of lighting up different tastes, on and beyond the plate. Hopefully you agree! Thanks, as ever, for reading and subscribing. Maybe it’ll become a true little printed gazette someday.

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I cringe as I write this, but if you like reading In Good Taste, please hit the like button. It helps with visibility on Substack. Email is becoming increasingly unreliable as a delivery channel (sending your issues to promotion or spam boxes), a situation that’s out of my control!

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to:

• Went to New York for work meetings, but stayed for a long birthday weekend at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a place that had been on my list for some time (see some highlights from ). Not only was the design cheeky + impeccable and the rooms well-appointed, but the hospitality is unparalleled. No detail goes unspotted. They even publish their own bedtime story booklet. I’m gushing but I’ve officially been spoiled for literally any hotel stay moving forward. Cannot recommend enough.

• Have been obsessed with the Cornish coast of England lately, partly thanks to this “steal my vacation” itinerary but also the usual suspects (Rick Steves, Monty Don). While air travel is not the most calming topic at the moment, SkyMiles tickets to the UK from Atlanta can be had for an absolute song in September. Off we go to Somerset and Cornwall for two weeks after Labor Day!

Admiring:

• Have been looking into wall coverings since we’re looking to refresh our study (like I said, In Good Taste has strayed from god’s light as a food newsletter). If I were planning a trip to Providence, Rhode Island soon (and I very much wish I were), I’d make a stop at RISD’s Huard Collection of archival French wallpapers.

• The disappearing shopfronts of Ireland and an Instagram (née Tumblr) of London shopfronts

• The illustrated envelopes of Edward Gorey

• A butter subscription?!

Other items of note:

• Signals of digital burnout

• A growing trend of analog hobbies like “retro gaming,” bookstores that encourage you to linger, a garden handbook with printables

• Relatedly, how to feel like you have enough.

• How the Once Popular Fast-Food Sunroom Became Obsolete

Reading:

Have been on an absolute reading tear this year, and it’s not even March. Library hauls so far in 2025 and ratings out of 5, happy to get more specific in the comments!

• Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

• The Anthropologists, Aysegul Savas, ⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Brightly Shining, Ingvild Rishøi, ⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Real Americans, Rachel Khong, ⭐⭐⭐

• The Wedding People, Alison Espach, ⭐⭐⭐

• Catalina, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio ⭐⭐

• I’ll Drink to That, Betty Holbreich, ⭐⭐ (only for length! This memoir is great!)

• Don’t Be A Stranger, Susan Minot - did not finish. I’m sure it’s great for someone, I just rolled my eyes a lot.

Up next in the queue: A Season for That (Steve Hoffman), Parade (Rachel Cusk, my prickly queen), Women’s Hotel (Daniel M. Lavery), Little Jewel (Patrick Modiano).

REFLECTIONS ON RECIPES + ROASTED SALMON

Someone told me in a playwriting class a million years ago that there are only a few plots, but an endless amount of possible combinations. Without waxing too poetic about it, I don’t think that recipes are that far off from the essentials of playwriting. There are consistent elements to build from: structure, characters, plot, action, resolution can be mapped to a recipe style, ingredients, sequence of events, the lightbulb moment, and service. There’s tons of wiggle room and creativity in cooking if you think about recipes in this way (anyway, this is why I’m not much of a baker).

I’ll be honest and say I’m not drawn to anything described as “plot-driven.” I like simplicity. I like slow-burn character development. I like interiority. I am not into splashy or explosive plotlines. My criteria aren’t really that steep. It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie or a book or a recipe: at its simplest, did it share something new with me? Shed light on a technique? Get me to think differently, more creatively, about work or life or the world or just dinner?

Tall orders for simple things like scrambled eggs, maybe, but that’s also why those old Buzzfeed food videos used to really scratch an itch. Think about it!

ALL OF WHICH BRINGS ME, OBVIOUSLY, TO SALMON. When I found this approach from the big brains at America’s Test Kitchen -- and I do think it’s an approach more than a recipe, per se -- I was fully unprepared for an elegant, flawless result. Again and again. It’s so simple but incredibly flavorful, and it’s unlocked a whole new way of preparing salmon in our house.

The ATK episode linked below is for an entire side of salmon (a 4-pounder), but I have done this with salmon pieces that weigh closer to 1.25 - 1.5 pounds because it’s usually just me and Adrian on weeknights. With that in mind, the below halves the ingredients from the original.

INGREDIENTS

1 piece of salmon, around 1.25 pounds per person
1 tbsp, kosher salt
1 tbsp, honey (room temperature or warmed slightly will help!)

WHAT TO DO

Salt the salmon, put it on a plate and refrigerate uncovered for an hour (or up to 4 hours). Pat it dry. Lay down a sheet of aluminum foil, folded about the size of the salmon piece, on a wire rack atop a baking sheet, spray the foil with some cooking oil. Place the salmon on the foil and brush with honey.

Set your broiler to high, set the oven rack about 7” from the broiler, and broil the salmon for 8-10 minutes, rotating it halfway for even color. Then bake the salmon on the middle rack of the oven at 250 degrees for about 10 minutes, again rotating halfway through, until a thermometer in the middle of the salmon reads 125. The video includes an arugula pesto to top the salmon, but we love it as-is next to some roasted frozen vegetables.

Credits: Recipe originally by Andrew Janjigian ･ Appears in Cook's Illustrated May/June 2018, and America's Test Kitchen TV Season 19: “Spring Dinner for Company”

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

Being from the South, snow culture is obviously not my culture but I’m happy to play tourist in it. Snow angels? Snowball logistics? Kicking snow around and staring at it? Standing on a frozen body of water? I am all-in. You absolutely can’t tell me anything when I’m in my coat and gloves on Laurel Lake!!

Anyway, we maintained our good health enough to host a New Year’s Eve party at home, complete with a shrimp forest (and pizza roll trees), martini and hot dog bar setups, and a deviled egg clock (pictured below, but original inspiration here).

On New Year’s Day, we dutifully ate our collards and hoppin’ John for luck and prosperity and all that. And wouldn’t you know it? A winter storm this past weekend blanketed Atlanta with a few inches of snow. We didn’t even lose power. Sometimes you really can have it all!

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to:

I really did have the honest intention to get in a few festive newsletters by the end of last year, but if I’m being honest, I was exhausted by Q4. And the pace of gift guides was particularly frenetic.

However, I do really like knowing what people’s favorite gifts are, whether it comes in the form of a thing or an experience or a gesture or whatever. I’d love to know what your favorite gift was! A couple of my favorites, should you be stockpiling ideas for next year:

• The ReMarkable, effectively a digital notebook that writes like a dream. It’s amazing for people who are insistent about physically hand-writing notes (🙋‍♀️) and also very Particular about their paper and writing utensil game (🙋‍♀️). It syncs via mobile and desktop apps and is a true joy to write with. I love this thing!

• A Yashica T4 point-and-shoot, sourced from a local antique shop, enabling a blitz through even more 35mm film. As I’ve gotten into photography, one limitation to my learning has been low-light situations (like interiors). My favorite camera, a Minolta SRT-201, is fully mechanical and I haven’t gotten around to getting a flash for it, plus a bunch of extra gear is just a lot to lug around. Having a trustworthy point-and-shoot with a flash has made me travel lighter, ha! (In other news, I’m starting to resemble this remark about camera collectors.)

• A KitchenAid meat grinder attachment. I’m excited to learn how to make breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, you name it: will it sausage? Don’t answer that. I’ve bought some hog casings from a local butcher here in Atlanta and will (probably) report back on my progress.

Admiring:

• There’s just no way to tell people about a “single-batch perfume subscription from England, released seasonally” without sounding insufferable. THAT. SAID. Ffern’s scents are phenomenal. I do not typically believe influencers when they say “people stop me on the street to ask about my perfume.” Ffern is the exception!

• This custom wax seal stamp; these paper placemats in cognac!

• OVER FIFTY REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD BOOK A TRIP TO MEXICO CITY IN THE NEXT SIX MINUTES … I didn’t, but can appreciate an urgent and direct prompt

• We drove past this house in the Berkshires every day and I don’t know what to say other than this is my dream home. The elegant curved windows. The kitchen’s Dutch door. The secret stone garden. The classic Federal details. If I had any number of million dollars, the speed at which I would purchase this property would be absolutely unprecedented.

Other items of note:

• The 25 “most important recipes” of the past 100 years. I love the way this is laid out. It’s making me want a “most important” index for our house, as a nice reference for the things we like to make and eat the most all year.

• The psychological reason for why we like antiques and other old things.

• The joy of clutter in Japan:

  • “For the nation of Japan is filled with spaces that are as meticulously cluttered as minimalist ones are meticulously simplified. These packed places, which are every bit as charming as the emptied ones, force us to question our assumptions and worldviews. What if we’ve all been wrong about clutter?”

• Looney Tunes backgrounds

• I want to host a DIY blockprinting party!

Listening to:

My Spotify Daylists were annihilated by holiday music playlists and I’ve been trying to reset my algorithm. In the meantime …

• Rose Main Reading Room (2024) - Peel Dream Magazine, catnip for Stereolab fans

• A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (2005) - Smog

• A lot of classical music. I really know very little about the genre but regularly stream Tampa’s classical music station, and the “From the Top” syndicated program on Sunday evenings. I try (admittedly, not very hard) to learn more about contemporary classical composition, but turns out I really appreciate the classics!

  • In a few ways, this essay on Experiencing Bach articulates a lot of how I’m feeling about listening to (and wanting to experience) classical music.

CRANBERRY SUMAC(K)TAIL

I’m not often inspired by what’s in the larger food magazine titles, the recipes and food writing always seem sponsored (or worse: not tested). Ever since the (justified) fall of Bon Appétit a few years ago, it just kind of seems like legacy publishers have given up on solid recipe content. This isn’t commentary on all food print media - just those household names that can still be found in newsstands.

But because I was going to be on one of those commuter-type flights with no seatback TV or in-flight WiFi, I idly picked up the Holiday 2024 issue of Food & Wine at the airport. I was pleasantly surprised to find a ton of great, useful holiday recipes in it! Including this cranberry-sumac punch from renowned chef Mashama Bailey, just in time for our New Year’s Eve party.

Everyone likes a festive drink option at a holiday party. It’s easy enough for people to add their own spirit to this punch, so everyone wins! While this requires a bit of planning ahead in terms of making sure the macerated cranberries have enough time to … well, macerate, it makes for a really delightful and elegant punch that is deceptively simple.

INGREDIENTS

2 bags of cranberries (fresh are easier to crush up than frozen, but you could use either)
3 cups of granulated sugar
2 tbsp., sumac
6 cups, sparkling water (I used a little less than 2 bottles of Mountain Valley Spring Water)
Optional: 3-4 large rosemary sprigs, strips of lemon peels

WHAT TO DO

Working one bag at a time, pulse cranberries in a food processor until coarsely chopped, 8 to 10 pulses. Transfer to a large bowl; stir in sugar and sumac.

Cover mixture, and let stand at room temperature, stirring occasionally. (The original recipe calls for 12-24 hours here, but ours was fine in less than 6.)

Pour cranberry mixture through a fine wire-mesh strainer set over a bowl. If you’re using a drink dispenser instead of a punch bowl, bundle the solids in some cheesecloth and leave them in the vessel - this also makes for easier cleanup!

Fill a punch bowl with ice; stir in the resulting juice from the cranberries (called the oleo saccharum), and add sparkling water. Garnish drinks with lemon peel strips and fresh rosemary. If you’re mixing with alcohol, sparkling wine goes terrific with this.

*This is not actually how you pronounce “sumac,” but I trust you get my drift.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

Little moments of everyday pleasure and hobbyism have been ruling the day for me, largely in response to the November of it all. But also, this is the time of year that my mind starts to wake up and I generally feel more creative and inspired. I’ve learned how to propagate my pothos plant. Hopefully successfully, but I guess we’ll find out. I’ve also been collaging, thanks to my new photo printer (more to come on this), and getting really into lamps for my home office. I’ve been making the “I love lamp” joke a lot lately and even the cat is sick of it.

It is here that we find one another, in the 106th edition of a gazette concerning taste and tastes, thinking merrily about little getaways for the brain and body.

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to:

• Bookshelf escapism: Reading a ton of fiction, thanks to the library ✌️and friends loaning books: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (my favorite book of the year? I am very behind the swell of culture on this one), All Fours (was about to give up halfway on this one, but am glad I stuck it out), Intermezzo (a book very much for the fans)

  • Incoming to my library hold queue: Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot, Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery

• Also leaning hard into interior design books lately. One current favorite is An English Vision by Ben Pentreath. So much inspiration! A cornucopia of beauty! I also like his writing style. Too many design books (just like cookbooks, honestly) read like they’re written by AI or want to treat their readers like they just fell off the turnip truck. I like that this one is unpretentious, presents new and interesting ideas, and seems to weight the write-ups in balance with beautiful imagery.

• Cooking escapism: Highlights have been roast carrots with green ranch dressing, pernil, a trillion quarts of chicken stock, Thanksgiving dinner (more below).

• Restaurant escapism: Having perfect duck marsala at our neighborhood fav Gigi’s (one of the best restaurants in Atlanta - all the news fit to print!), perfect hospitality at Ticonderoga Club, and a 10/10 tasting menu experience at Staplehouse.

• Wine: Favorites that Adrian and I keep returning to have been Union Sacré Carbonic Sangiovese, Arianna Occhipinti SP68 Rosso, Foradori Teroldego

Admiring:

• On the holiday inn beat:

  • this Swiss hotel that is cut off from the world for 12 hours a day. 10 rooms, stone-built, smack in the middle of snow and Alpine vistas. This quote from the proprietor is worth its own Grand Budapest Hotel sequel: “This morning, one of my waitresses quit … She jumped on the train and left for anywhere but here."

  • La Mission l’Ile de Yeu en France off the Vendée Western coast. I am imagining eating sardines by the pool, wearing a floppy hat, playing pétanque for money. Standard French fantasy stuff. Charm! Whimsy!

  • Fouquet’s in Tribeca (NYC) is on my dream list. I’m going through a bit of a pink moment right now (it’s the Millennial in me). This is just a beautiful hotel, like a strawberry macaron in hotel form, a little frilly and fussy and very coquette.

  • Speaking of dream stays, the NYT ran this list of cozy hotels for winter last year (gift link). First on their list is the Newbury in Boston, which we’ve stayed at once before for a night (and will again this year, to bookend our Berkshires Christmas). It’s outrageous, but worth the travel points-hoarding; it is a hotel that makes you feel like a movie star and once housed the favorite watering hole of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Also on the list - I’m dying to stay at The Fife Arms in the Scottish Highlands. Luxurious brooding in tartan? Yes.

  • For more on this topic, Eleanor Cording-Booth has a robust rundown of 24 European hotels for design lovers over on her Substack, . Bookmark it!!

  • And anyway, here’s a 9-hour playlist of hotel room air conditioner sounds.

• Miscellaneous real estate + interiors to admire:

  • Who wants to go in on this $22M piece in Charleston, SC?

  • Or this stunning Victorian mews house in London - all for a cool million & some (in either GBP or USD) - the diffused light over that kitchen!

  • Not for sale (that I can tell), but a sweet “camp, colorful, kitsch” Christmas cottage in Somerset

  • What a delight, this Camp Wandawega in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, a beautifully restored summer camp that hits just about every mid-century American camp/lodge detail

• I don’t watch The Diplomat, maybe you do, but I did learn that the US State Department has an Art in Embassies office whose entire function is curating art in U.S. consulates and embassies!

Other items of note:

• There is a calculator for everything !!!

• Need a nostalgia hit? MyRetroTV lets you “watch” television from any era via catalogued YouTube videos. I will be honest that the 90s TV station has really sucked me in a couple of times. They don’t make TV spots like they used to!!!

• How to fold a napkin in 13 different ways

• Tons of great stuff to be found in the Public Domain Review, from essays to images to film and beyond. For your consideration, snowball fights in art, 1400-1946!

Listening to:

• A couple of playlists from record label Numero Group, like Diner (“where the night owls and early risers convene”) and the one we played all Thanksgiving, Eccentric Deep Soul

• Long Time to Be Gone, Nora Brown (2022) - KWs: Appalachian, banjo, bluegrass, traditional folkways

• This performance of “Fire,” Lizzy Mercier Descloux (1979), the swag!!!

APPLE CIDER BRAISED CHICKEN

Every Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law Zach and I nix the traditional turkey for our family dinner. The last few years we have made variations on roasted chickens; we call them “dueling chickens” and they are a fun way to get creative with the main dish. This year’s hot new bombshells at the villa were a miso & mirin-marinated number (Zach’s), and a more rustic apple cider-braised guy with greens. We covered sweet and tangy and savory flavors between the two, and they went really well together!

It may seem like a lot, but it’s really a fairly straightforward recipe, very liberally adapted from Lidey Heuck’s at the NYT.

INGREDIENTS

1 whole chicken, spatchcocked (under 5 pounds, or you could do this with leg quarters), brined overnight, or for at least 3 hours, in a solution of 4 tbsp:4 cups of water -- as much as needed to cover the chicken
Za’atar rub: 3-4 tablespoons of za’atar (depending on the size of your chicken), 2 teaspoons of salt, 2 teaspoons of black pepper
3 medium shallots, chopped
5 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
1 tsp., smoked paprika
¾ cup apple cider
3 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
2 tbsp. whole-grain mustard
1 cup chicken stock
1 bunch of green onions, white parts chopped into rounds
1 leek, sliced halfway vertically and white part chopped into half-moons
~12 oz. of kale (I use the bagged kind because it’s easiest to work with and I’m lazy, but if you’re using fresh, just de-stem and tear the leaves into bite-size pieces)
¼ cup, shredded Parmesan cheese

WHAT TO DO

Heat oven to 350. Rub the chicken all over with za’atar mixture, and set skin-side down in a large oven-safe skillet (I use my biggest cast-iron skillet) that’s been just oiled. Sear for about 4-5 minutes on medium heat, flip over and cook until browned, 2-3 minutes more. Remove to a plate.

Add the 2 tablespoons of butter, and fry the shallots and garlic. When fragrant (not browned), add the cider, cider vinegar, and mustard, reduce by about a quarter, then add the chicken back to the skillet skin-side up. Pour the chicken stock around the chicken but be careful not to pour it on the skin or cover the chicken with any liquid. Stick in the oven and roast until a thermometer reads 160 on the breast (about 25 minutes).

Let the chicken rest again on a cutting board, add your kale, green onions, and leek slices into the skillet, combine the ingredients on the stovetop and let cook until wilted and brightly-colored. Remove the ingredients to a serving platter and sprinkle with the Parmesan, then rest the carved chicken on the greens. I added sliced Pink Lady apples as garnish to the platter, but not necessary.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

I’ve started keeping city notes in my Notes App based on recommendations I generally trust, and while I’m not traveling anywhere exotic in the near future, it’s still fun to put a mock itinerary together. I was reading about how Google Maps are the new travel agent for some people (to a degree, anyway) and thinking it would be kind of fun to build some out for this little gazette, maybe for places I know really well like the Southeast, but also places I’d recommend in busier spots like NYC, Chicago, or London.

In upcoming In Good Taste editions, because we all need something to look forward to these days that isn’t election, natural disaster, or otherwise catastrophic: more in-depth recommendations a year-in-review of our kitchen renovation, a home office refresh, and end-of-year inspiration from smaller shops to buy your holiday stuff from. 

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to: 

• Celebrating our 4th wedding anniversary with a staycation at the new hotel in our neck of the woods, FORTH Atlanta. Incredible hospitality, immaculate, great dining options, every design detail deeply researched, and the views are the best in the city. If you are looking for a premium option in Atlanta and are avoiding Buckhead (which you should, sorryyy), this is the move.

• Shoulder seasons are when Atlanta really comes alive. There are a million festivals every weekend in both spring and fall, everyone is in a good mood, and we’re all back on our porches remarking on the weather. We made it down to a couple of the fall festivals in our neighborhood, glad for Georgia foliage and the simple pleasure of a cinnamon coffee treat.

  Admiring:

• Times Life & Style “Living with Style” home tours. These videos scratch a different itch for me than Architectural Digest tours --  which I love, obviously -- they just have a more accessible quality to them. I say this even as one of my favorites involves hand-painted wallpaper. I love how unique and lived-in these featured spaces are. There’s so much charm in these homes that’s hard to stage.
  
  Standouts include the cottagecore whimsy of stylist/novelist/influencer Paula Sutton in Norfolk (UK), whom you may know as @hillhomevintage on Instagram. The outdoor dining situation she’s put together sucked me in, but then the combination potting shed/home office absolutely took me out. I keep coming back to it! 
  
  Another favorite of mine is the home of designer Beata Heuman in southern Sweden. There’s so much tactility in her design choices - from the previously mentioned wallpaper to the hand-drawn glass on mirrors to the big basket of walnuts. I won’t spoil the rest! The series in general is really lovely, and a calming alternative to frenetic online video content.

• Why we love the scents of saddle leather

Other items of note:

• Mapping the world’s best club sandwiches

• A little history of the anchovy

• My friend Avery wrote a nice piece in Eater Atlanta about independent urban farms and collectives in our forested city! With a lovely shoutout to dear friend of the ’letter and CSA wizard, Judith at Love is Love Farm! 

  

• I went to a wine shop in Chicago a couple of years ago, where I learned about how climate change is making it so that “southern England now has a climate very similar to that of the Champagne region some 50 years ago.” So when I came across this article about how the future of wine might be in Virginia, it was a nice domestic spin on the same story.
  
  A lot has been published about the life and death of wine; most recently, how much Millennials are to blame (as we always are) for the drop in industrial wine consumption, and how wine bars are filling the “third place” that companies like Starbucks have forfeited.
  
  All told, I think younger generations are actually forcing these older categories like wine to shift & adapt to a changing consumer, not just outright killing them (so dramatic). We see this shift changing the language of wine (descriptors like crushable, glou-glou, natty), changing habits (lower ABV or even zero-proof), people prioritizing experiencing over cellaring, being more open to different grapes and regions than their older generation counterparts.
  
  Jason Wilson of has written about this shift quite a bit, and better than I can (I am not a wine professional). I don’t buy that “young people aren’t into wine” is just a marketing problem (and I am a marketing professional). The category entry points have not changed with the consumer (and in fact, remain closed to most of us), the large players in the category have not changed with the consumer, the distributors & retailers have not changed with the consumer (navigating the average grocery store’s wine aisle is a miserable customer experience by design, change my mind!).
  
  Only the wine bars seem to understand that there’s a shift happening with the generations who need most to be convinced to support the category. There is so much to this topic that if any wine people reading this want a strategic consultant on their beat, hit me up lol.
  
  In any event, from a production standpoint, it’s the smaller producers and independents, from places like Virginia or Upstate New York or ancient plots in Italy, who seem to grasp that the wine world is changing and that they better get with it. And that doesn’t just mean cute packaging, though that certainly doesn’t hurt.

Listening to:

• 1970s Japanese soul

• “studying in oxford library at 3 am” playlist

• this playlist I made that reminds me of my favorite place (Highlands, NC) and of western North Carolina in general, especially in the fall

• The Academy, Lutalo (2024)

STICK-TO-YOUR-MCRIBS PASTA

I have been told I cook my best when I’m a little stressed out, which I choose to view as both feedback and a compliment. So that’s how I ended up coming up with what can be best described, by those who know (my husband), as McRib Pasta. With that in mind, know that emotionally, McRib Pasta is a dish that’s one-part light work burnout, frequently stirred, with a dash of headline-induced nerves and finished with a pinch of flaky “forgot to text your friend back” guilt, to taste. It also tastes like a McRib.

All that aside, it is really delicious and rich and autumnal, comfort food to the hilt! It comes together quickly (under 30 minutes) as long as you have done your mise en place ahead of cooking.

INGREDIENTS

3 tbsp. olive oil
1 tbsp. butter
1 big link of smoked sausage, sliced lengthwise and into ~1” pieces
1 orange bell pepper, seeded and diced
1 medium-sized zucchini, diced
4 cloves of garlic, diced
~2 oz. linguine pasta per person

For the sauce:
½ cup chicken stock
½ cup crème fraîche
1 tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp onion powder
1 tsp herbes de Provence (or equal parts dried thyme and dried oregano)
½ tbsp Dijon mustard
Salt & pepper to taste

WHAT TO DO

The order of operations here is vegetables first in melted butter and oil, then garlic, then sausage, then pasta noodles, then sauce; done in 2 separate skillets and a pot of salted water for the pasta. 

Cook the veggies and garlic until a bit browned in a larger skillet, then add sausage cut-sides down on medium heat. These will cook until they’re browned, which will take anywhere from 7-10 minutes. At this point you can boil salted water for your pasta noodles and make them as you normally would.

In a separate smaller skillet, add the stock, spices, mustard and salt + pepper, whisking to combine and at a simmer. Whisk in the crème fraîche and stir frequently over heat, letting the sauce thicken a bit. Describing consistency is challenging, but you don’t want it to be too liquidy, as much as you don’t want it to be too viscous. Just keep an eye on it and raise the heat up if you want more liquid to reduce. 

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

I’d been itching to host a summer party. Something lower-key than a seated dinner, not occasion-oriented like a birthday or a holiday, and bringing different circles of friends together to play. Turns out, not only is a summer camp party a solid theme to meet those criteria, but it is a great excuse to make your friends wear lanyards all day and boss them around! The inaugural session of “Camp Gloria” (named for the cat) took about a month to put together, from activities to swag to menu, and I’m already looking forward to next year. 

The first rule of Camp Gloria came in the planning stage: know your campers. So Adrian and I DIY’ed little activity-book lanyards with card stock, notebook paper, and mini Sharpies. The activity book included a small social game to encourage people to meet each other via shared facts (forced fun), a space for a self-portrait (to ensure they read the directions), and the rest of the pages to collect stickers for each activity completed. 

Main camp activities:

• Backyard croquet

• Chalk art

• Tile painting - featuring $0.11 ceramic tile from Floor & Decor and acrylic paint pens, this DIY Delft tile craft was the original inspiration

• Friendship bracelets and beading

• Coloring

• A selection of puzzles

• Water-balloon toss!

Camp kitchen notables:

• Hot dogs and the quintessential bagged salad with vinaigrette;

• Jessie brought Impossible Burgers with perfect housemade pickles and Lake Hour, my new favorite summer canned cocktail;

• Brian & Oscar made huge trays of amazing nachos and sandwiches;

• Xun unloaded a big bag of goodies including Strawberry Kit-Kats and spicy chips;

• Snacky stuff like RKTs from both me and Hannah (she is the true RKT expert), Costco cookies (you know the kind), watermelon I ate for days to follow, Goldfish;

• Iggy & Austin brought margarita pops and dirt cups! The magic about dirt cups is that when they come out, everyone immediately says “ohmygod dirt cups yesssss” -- this is camp canon;

• Emily & Ray, recent recipients of many bushels of summer peaches, made homemade peach ice cream that we’re still talking about

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to, outside of summer camp: 

• The fall pickup season of our CSA has begun, the first haul this week included … Georgia muscadines?! Not sure what to do with these bad boys just yet (aside from the usual suspects like jam or pie). If anyone has any interesting ideas, please drop them in the comments! Persistent plug to support your local farms & farmer co-ops by joining a CSA!! It’s the best, best, best.

• Library haul: Big Swiss (neutral-positive), Whale Fall (positive, so lovely), Sandwich (neutral-negative, the main character is insufferable), reading Sag Harbor next

• Continuing to take a mix of under-, over-, and just right-exposed film! I’m trying to post as much as I am proud of here as well as on Instagram. 

Admiring:

• Places I have been loving: 

  • Casa Yuma hotel on Playa Los Naranjos in Mexico, I love the use of organic, natural Mexican materials throughout (I had to google “chukum” - a vegetal concrete - but I also love the use of traditional Pueblan salmon pink bricks). I am increasingly drawn to the look of architecture styles that are very “organic modern” even if it’s not a personal style in my own home.

  • From Vogue, the California Case Study House of nepo babies Lilly Collins and Charlie McDowell

  • The Nancy Meyers of it all has become a little tiresome, much as she remains the queen of well-dressed home sets and with good reason. I am a fan of this gallery of stills from her films, mostly because it’s presented without drooling comment. That said, my favorites have always been the living room from Father of the Bride and the entryway of the British townhome in The Parent Trap.

• “Joyful architecture” is a trend I’m seeing all over the place in different forms, and it feels right for the time (as well as great phrasing)

• My home office project has sat in a Pinterest board for about a year, from paint choices to built-in shelving. I saw this Domino article about repurposing IKEA closet systems as display and storage in a kids’ bedroom - I love the idea of using shoe racks as gallery-like displays across an entire wall and swapping out themed displays! 

Other items of note:

• Just learned of the German back-to-school schültute, little decorative paper cones filled with school supplies and gifts as a first day of school tradition. This is a sweet idea for any kind of goodie bag situation. How lovely are these prints for the cones from Heirloom Art Co.?

• On rituals and routines: “The principle of committing to and accomplishing the work must take precedence over any ‘accessory’ that inspires or motivates the worker.”

• On palimpsest and not starting from scratch from

THE BROWN BUTTER RKT

A humble confession: I had never made Rice Krispies Treats before Camp Gloria. The ones I had growing up came out of the shiny blue package (which I still love) or I guess someone’s parents had already made them for a sleepover. I’d never known the visceral fold of marshmallow to cereal from my own hands! Time to learn.

I started from the base of this Caramelized Brown Butter RKT recipe (gift link) from NYT Cooking, with a few modifications. The most stressful part is the ratio of marshmallow:butter:cereal in the fold, and may come down to how crunchy or gooey you prefer your RKT (hence my modifications).

INGREDIENTS

6 oz. Rice Krispies cereal (about half-¾ of the full bag)
8 oz. salted butter + 1 separate tbsp. melted, to coat the parchment paper
2 10 ½ oz bag of marshmallows
1 tsp. vanilla
Large pinch of flaky sea salt

WHAT TO DO

Line a full-sized baking sheet with parchment paper and butter entirely. Pour the cereal in the largest mixing bowl you have.

In a large pot, melt the rest of the butter over medium heat. It will melt, then foam, then turn clear golden and finally start to turn brown and smell nutty (this took about 6-7 minutes on my stovetop) - add in flaky salt and vanilla and stir. Stir in the marshmallows and stir with a silicon spatula, constantly folding until melted and turning a nice golden tan. 

Mix marshmallow butter into the cereal bowl immediately, taking care to turn the bowl to scrape down the sides evenly until combined. Pour into the sheet, pressing and shaping with your hands (I had to spray some oil on mine to keep them from sticking). Let rest for 30 minutes to an hour, or until fully cooled, and cut with a bench scraper. 

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

Now, about tomato sandwiches. Every year, just as it starts getting hot out, the food content farmers bust out their best Foghorn Leghorn and the old tomato-white bread-Duke’s Mayo-over-the-kitchen-sink routine. (There’s even ASMR videos for it. I’m sorry.) Every year, the same circus! Like it’s something new! Maybe, subconsciously, I look forward to it? A new sign of the season. We used to know summer by a day’s length, or wearing white, or the first lightning bug. Now it’s just ChatGPT poetry about sandwiches.

Not that there’s anything wrong with pasta salads or tomato sandwiches. I enjoy them just as much as everyone else! I won’t say no to a little room-temp pasta salad at the picnic. I’m just asking questions! Some people’s industry plant theories are about “Espresso,” mine are about pasta salad and tomato sandwiches.

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to: 

• We came back from our Boston & New York trip with COVID but lots of great souvenirs. Highlights included a brown-butter lobster roll at Eventide by Fenway Park, a brunch stop at Commerce Inn, the Fenway Victory Gardens, dinner with David at il Buco, a detour from the downpour at Dear Annie in Cambridge, cocktails with Carter & Michael at Double Chicken Please (more the fellowship than anything, TBH) and my new favorite hotel in NYC, The Ludlow

• Planning a summer camp-themed party for next weekend

• Library hauls: The Fraud by Zadie Smith (pass; I know, sacrilege), Wives Like Us (smash, a book of the highest order of Silly), Four Squares (charming), The Skunks (smash, delightful!!)

Admiring:

• I have been reporting on the yellow trend in home design for work - you’ll be seeing more of it this year in all forms, if the pro’s are to be believed!

• One day we will renovate our main bathroom, and while I don’t love every design choice in this piece (feels a little busy), I love its vanity-to-ceiling vertical storage

• Come for the grass-thatched roof, stay for the incredible bookshelves around a staircase and throughout the interior - a gorgeous home in Dartmoor

• Such a good idea to scan and collage your travel ephemera

• Bear with me as I share this feature from a source called Mansion Global, about this man in Milton, Georgia who remodeled 4,000 square feet in his home after the 1993 movie Tombstone. This is the best news I’ve seen in the “rich people living a brat life” home category since I found out that Barbra Streisand has a mall in her basement! 

“We had started to put moss on the beams to try to make them look old, but the builder came back and said ‘Don’t put anymore moss on it, we’ve got to take everything off,’ because there is no moss in the original town of Tombstone,” said Wallace.

Other items of note:

• The “Life anti-checklist”: basically, a series of inconveniences by which you can measure how good your day actually is

• Why the British are obsessed with the Cotswolds (and honestly, I am too after reading Wives Like Us)

• A paean to peonies

A CHOPPED-UP SALAD FOR THE DOG DAYS

It is July, so I am at my lowest level of solar power, cosmically and cognitively. My workday lunches are more fuel source than fun and frisky, kind of a bummer to take back to my desk. The lack of inspiration here is a little ironic, considering where I work, but that’s me in midday mid-July! Dog days of summer! Dinner is the most inspired meal of the day.

All that said, I made a salad for lunch that was so nice, I had to share it. And it took no more creativity than an inspired shuffling of stuff in the refrigerator. This salad is kind of like if a Cobb salad took a Mediterranean vacation and read Rachel Cusk on the beach: strike the bacon and ranch, dial up the fresh herbs and fancy nuts. Revel in simplicity and clarity!

For the dressing: I’d made this pesto earlier in the week, because I had fresh herbs to use up. I think it’s worth making a batch so you get to make this salad with it (a happy accident), but it also makes quick work of a pasta sauce or as a lil dip for bites of roast chicken. My freestyle version skips the parmesan and opts for feta, uses whatever nuts are on-hand (like walnuts), and tastes a bit more acidic than the typical pesto. 

INGREDIENTS

5-6 leaves of romaine lettuce, chopped
½ avocado, cut into chunks
1 cup of cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1 hard-boiled egg, cut into quarters
¼ cup mozzarella, diced
Handful of shelled + salted pistachios
1 serving of canned tuna (I like Herb & Garlic, and I’m not afraid to say it)

For the pesto dressing:
½ cup of fresh thyme, fresh oregano, fresh mint, all stripped of stems
2 cloves of garlic
½ cup of basil
2 tbsp pine nuts or walnuts
1 tbsp. red wine vinegar
1 tbsp. crumbled feta
Salt + pepper to taste
Olive oil

WHAT TO DO

Put all the salad stuff in a bowl. Mix it around. When you’ve made the dressing, use about 2-3 tbsp. of it in your salad mixture and really toss it around until it’s fully combined.

For the dressing, throw the herbs, garlic, and nuts in a food processor until they’ve formed a paste. Add in the vinegar, a pinch of salt and pepper, and pulse again. Drizzle in olive oil to the dressing consistency of your preference, then add in the feta and add more salt & pepper if you’d like to. Pulse quickly and store in an airtight container for up to a weekish. 

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

The thought of what could go into the old café has been a distraction for me. A bookstore, a bookstore-game store (the game store part is for Adrian, not me), a bookstore-game store-wine bar, a bookstore-game store-wine bar-shoppy shop? The mind, it whirls. I am the embodiment of this TikTok parody in this moment- “I’m just such a merchant.” 

I’ve been idly reading about the state of independent bookstores (thriving, allegedly) and of other people’s experience opening & running them. I’m wondering where money comes from to start a small community business, what a business plan actually is. Maybe more precisely … I’m trying to pin down what is most interesting to me about the idea, beyond the fact that I could walk to it from my house? 😼

The last link above about running a bookstore in small-town Texas is a little cheesy, sure, but the notion of being specific (not exactly specialty, like only a cookbook store, or only rare books, but also not a generalist) stuck out to me. Having a point of view, but not necessarily a genre. What if a little bookshop in Atlanta just carried matters of taste? What if a newsletter turned into a bookshop?

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season!

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to, mostly offline: 

• Probably related somewhat to my shopkeeping musings: as work and work travel piles up for the Internet company that employs me, I’m craving the art of pottering (or variations on tinkering, pootling, wafting and pondering)

• Adrian and I are headed to Boston and NYC for a little summer getaway next week. I’m excited to bring my camera and a ton of film, go to Fotografiska and Casa Magazines, see David and Nathan and Carter and Michael, post up at Amor y Amargo and Grand Army, to take the train and cut a rug with Ted Leo in celebration of an all-time favorite album.

• Been out here and there just snappin’ away on film. The Minolta SR-T 201 is currently claiming the top spot as favorite camera on the roster. Everyone’s been so kind and encouraging about my new hobby, now I just need more friends to take it up so I feel less self-conscious! A few highlights from the past few weeks:

Admiring:

• A collection of contemporary collage

• The Magdalens Islands of Quebec: wow, I love this write-up and very much want to go right this minute: “dazzling and soothing, the kind of place that dislodges the clutter in your head and then sweeps it clear.”

• ran a very fun rundown of Audrey Hepburn’s costumes in Funny Face (1957)

• This collection of niche museums

• An absolutely lovely look at the home of the late Anne Broadbent - ​​described as “part interior-design project, part artwork, part performance,” and an even better descriptor here - “an aesthetic of abundance, teetering on excess.”

• A bit of a rabbit hole here, so bear with me, but I learned of a shop called Bon out in Tucson via . I am not really one to have a “capsule wardrobe” (honestly, I like shopping too much for that to work as directed). But if I could afford it, Bon’s assortment is how I would dress every single day. I don’t know if a shop has ever really captured my desired wardrobe aesthetic quite so exactly!!!  

Other items of note:

• Longtime favorite newsletter shared some relatable reflections on Borders (RIP) and its magazine/periodical section. For those who knew it, it was unparalleled, an icon, a legend, and the moment. The magazine section of the Borders on North Dale Mabry in Tampa, Florida was a cultural cornerstone of my youth!!! It’s where I discovered Maximum Rock & Roll and Adbusters (the irony there doesn’t escape me), Paper and Purple and all sorts of niche art magazines on thick paper stock that I’m sure are well out of publication

• A search engine that helps you find weird old books : it is exactly what it sounds like 

• Armadillo Online, there is nothing more to say on that matter

• The No Bummer Summer Club!!!

  

A SIMPLE SUMMER RATATOUILLE 

I’ve mentioned before that in this house, we believe in our local CSA! In the absence of a thriving edible garden (we have two tomato plants who are currently trying their best), the incredible Love is Love cooperative here in Georgia keeps us stocked in weekly vegetables. An abundant road of squash and zucchini naturally points toward ratatouille, and as a simple ratatouille is just slow-cooked vegetables, it’s hard to go wrong. 

I have not found much need to sweat the sliced zucchini or eggplant in salt ahead of time, as I prefer a soupier ratatouille and enjoy a more cooked-down, soft texture. If your preference is more structural, toss those vegetables in a couple of tablespoons of salt in a colander in the sink, and let them leak for about 20-30 minutes.

All in all, this is a simple, remarkable, snappy early taste of summer that loves to be eaten with garlic bread, next-day with some shrimp, and next-next-day on top of sticky white rice.

INGREDIENTS

All of these vegetables, chopped in ~1-inch chunks:
4 vine tomatoes
4-5 yellow squash and zucchini
2 medium yellow onions
1 large eggplant
¼ cup, olive oil + 2 separate tbsp.
1 tbsp. butter
5 cloves of garlic, sliced
2 tbsp. vermouth (optional)
4-5 whole anchovies
Salt & pepper
1 tbsp. herbes de Provence
2 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. Piment d’Espelette
¼ cup fresh basil, torn up into small bits for serving
¼ cup grated Parmesan (optional)

WHAT TO DO

In a Dutch oven, heat the 2 separated tablespoons of oil and melt butter, then add sliced garlic and cook on medium heat until it’s fragrant (but not browned), then toss in the anchovies, mashing with a wooden spoon as they cook down. Splash the vermouth in, raise the heat to boil for a minute, then lower back to medium heat. 

Add in all of the vegetables, shower them generously (1.5-2 tbsp) with salt, pepper, herbes de Provence, onion powder, and piment d’Espelette, mixing well (and patiently) to get everything coated. Note: there will be a LOT of vegetables in this pot - we have a 7 ¼ qt. Dutch oven and I get nervous there will be spillover, but the vegetables cook down quickly! 

Low simmer for 3 hours on the stovetop uncovered, stirring every 30 minutes to make sure nothing is sticking or burning on the bottom. Serve it in bowls with a little basil and Parmesan garnish, and top with a sprinkle of coarse sea salt.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

I tried to pick up both embroidery and calligraphy as hobbies with tactile appeal, but they didn’t stick. Adrian offered, “it’s because a new craft or hobby shouldn’t steal time from your reading in the evening,” which was incredibly insightful and exactly right. I needed to find a low-stakes hobby that would allow me to learn, but not at the expense of other activities or ways I like to spend my time. And, honestly, I’m not that crafty.

So I decided to pull out my old Canon Ftb and start learning how to use a camera properly. I’ve developed a couple months’ worth of film from a local lab now and have taken some truly terrible photos!! And I have accumulated a Minolta SRT201  and Ricoh XR7 along the way. It’s slow learning, in a good way. A practice of building patience, building skill; a real slow practice of being okay with being not great at something immediately. I’m out here trying to build a soft life in the everyday pinch, watching 2 hours of calm film photography in Japan, and just taking it easier on myself. 

Thanks to everyone who responded to the polls in the last issue, the Editorial Board values your opinions and input!!

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to, mostly offline: 

• Collecting books in my travels to Seattle and St. Petersburg. New favorite bookstores include Elliott Bay (Seattle), (still) Book + Bottle (St. Pete), and the anarcho surprise of Left Bank Books Collective in Pike Place Market.

  • Did not get to visit Peter Miller Books in Seattle (design + architecture), but I did get his book, which is wonderful 

• Being obnoxious in public with my cameras! Imagine all the dramatic pauses that come with figuring out shutter speed. These things are loud, too.

• Re-watching season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm on Delta flights. Since I’ve been flying a lot lately (✨climate queen✨) I have been picking one series and watching it through. I will forever love Curb even though it doesn’t always hold up with the current moment.

Admiring:

• I have three ideals of swimming pools in film: the first is from The Valley of the Dolls, the second from Call Me By Your Name (I am desperate for this plunge pool), the third is from The Graduate

• The new visual identity for American Girl - perfection, no notes!

• This archive of the homes and studios of famous artists - featuring standards like Fallingwater and standouts like the textural Cornwall studio of Barbara Hepworth

Other items of note:

• 9 habits of curious minds: “Some studies indicate that curiosity may have a genetic component (DRD4-7R has been dubbed the “wanderlust gene”), and most researchers agree that curiosity can be nurtured.”

• One of my favorite museum stops of all time is the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is a great read on why tiny things are so fascinating.

• Our friends Andrew and Darbie have started an amazing garden in Charleston, and gave us gigantic stalks of fresh oregano (among other monster herbs) on a recent visit to Atlanta. I cannot overstate the size of this oregano, and in fact, it is still fragrant and green many (many) weeks later?! Fresh oregano is a good thing and a good taste and a miracle. Here’s an article all about harvesting it. 

• Spanish cocktail culture (+/- large gin-tonics) is about to be the next “manifesting your Italian spritz summer” thing and I’m all about it. 

• Consider the lemon, from Bey to Kate Nash to Tony Montana and bey-ond

Listening to: 

• The new Vampire Weekend album, a funny phrase in 2024;

• The new Billie Eilish album, especially “Birds of a Feather”;

• The score to Challengers, which might be the perfect get-work-done soundtrack;

• “Cartagena,” Reyna Tropical (2024)

• Chappell Roan, who was amazing in St. Pete this past weekend! 

GARDEN CHICKEN SOUP

We returned from Seattle a little exhausted, so Adrian put together this soup (I am married to a Good Man, if that wasn’t obvious). I’m calling this “garden chicken soup” because it tastes very simple, very fresh, and an all-season antidote to feeling rundown. Sub out any pasta or rice you’d like. We used homemade chicken stock, but the box (or a bouillon cube) would do just fine. This is uncomplicated food for inflamed systems!

We both agreed it could use a squeeze of lime at the end, so feel free to add on your own. This may just cure what ails you, and leave you with great leftovers for the next day’s lunch. 

INGREDIENTS

3-4 carrots, chopped up
3-4 celery ribs, chopped up
5 garlic cloves, chopped
4-5 green onions, white parts chopped fine
½ onion, chopped
5 cups chicken stock
1 tbsp. Adobo seasoning
½ box (½ lb) of filini pasta (or small noodle shape, or rice)
5 chicken tenderloins, seasoned with salt & pepper
1 bunch of cilantro, chopped
(optional: juice of half a lime) 

WHAT TO DO

In a pot, sauté the carrots, celery, garlic, and green onions in a bit of olive oil, until softened. Add the chicken tenderloins and chicken stock to the pot, season with salt, pepper, and Adobo, and heat, submerged, to just at boiling. If there’s not enough liquid to submerge, add water 1/2 cup at a time, and keep on a low boil until the chicken reaches 165F with a thermometer.

Remove the chicken to a plate and shred with a couple of forks, then add back into the pot at a boil, along with the pasta (following the timing for pasta by the box instructions, or about 3 minutes). Cover the pot, lower the heat,and let it simmer for about 30 minutes. Top with cilantro and optional lime juice. 

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.

On content:

I’d thought perhaps #100 would present a turning point for In Good Taste, that maybe I’d refine its focus to a more specific area of interest. “Big numbers” (i.e. 100) are very persuasive to me (a Capricorn to the core), and with the eclipse and retrograde of it all, I think I was expecting a lightning bolt of clarity to strike on this front. After all, in all 4 years of its glorious existence, this newsletter has been a real lifestyle grab bag of food-design-culture-trivia, which I think is interesting to some of you and perhaps the reason you continue to subscribe (hopefully it is something like that, and less like, hate-reading). If you wouldn’t mind quickly answering a couple of questions, it would be VERY helpful to me!

On readers: 

There are hundreds of you, a small stat to Substack MVPs but massive to me, considering this is an erratic pet project and I am, regrettably, not Ina Garten. Most of you read this via email rather than on Substack. You’re spread across 24 US states and 15 countries. A good number of you are real-life strangers to me, which honestly has only fed my ego. And now that Substack has amped up its network recommendations, quite a few of you have ambled here of your own volition or on recommendation from more focused/prolific Substack writers (happy for you or sorry that happened!). 

As a general rule, you all seem to really like links to listicles, celebrity home tours, and pie-in-the-sky architecture. You contain multitudes!

OK, that wraps up our brief analytics report. At the end of the day, I’m glad to put this together when I’m able to. And I’m glad to have built a robust little living cookbook in the archives over the past 4+ years (because I forget how to make my own things all the time). And I’m glad for those of you who read this as it comes, who let me know that you enjoy it, who reply with corrections or continued thoughts, and generally let me cosplay as an email newsletter influencer. Thank you for all of it 🌞

A SCATTERING OF GOOD TASTES

What I’ve been up to, mostly offline: 

• A whirlwind work trip to Seattle, where I cut some terrific pizza with scissors at Willmott’s Ghost (inside the Amazon Spheres) and had an absolutely astonishing plate of tajarin pasta at Spinasse. I will be back in Seattle in a couple of weeks, with Adrian in tow for part of it, and I’m really excited to chomp some more. (Any and all Seattle recommendations are gladly received!)

• Learned to replace the light meter battery in my old Canon Ftb 35mm. I just discovered this local film lab that develops and scans weekly, so my interest in using my camera has been renewed! (I am persuaded not just by big numbers, but convenience.)  

• Library hauls: 

  • Come and Get It (Kiley Reid), probably the most recent of new fiction I’ve checked out lately. A lot of book reviewers are falling out of their chairs to praise this one, but I found it to be kind of messy and inconsistent. Just fine as a vacation book, though.

  • North Woods (Daniel Mason) - a really wonderful novel that tells the story of a single plot of land in Massachusetts over the course of several generations. It’s lyrical and gets a little creepy but hey, it’s western Massachusetts so that kind of comes with the territory.

  • Hello Beautiful (Ann Napolitano) - did I check this “modern spin on Little Women” book out in a spell of burnout? Yes. Did the Oprah’s Book Club badge seal the deal for this decision? Also yes. This is a silly book, but one that is engrossing enough to distract from the outside world, which was the entire point.

Admiring:

• This charming update of a 16th century English farmhouse

• Alessandro Michele’s apartment in Rome, perfectly appointed

• I’m in a perpetual state of redesigning my home office, and I really enjoy this series on different setups (and my current Pinterest board that’s a bit of inspiration chaos)

Other items of note:

• Online, we are all Girls

• Absolutely thrilled to share this deep dive into the unsung hero of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (unofficially known as, the Intergalactic Spaceport and Hot Wing Express): the Plane Train

• You didn’t know you needed a long, info-rich piece about industrial carpeting, and why carpet looks like it does in hotels and casinos, but you do! (It is genuinely fascinating.)

• “How you define the problem determines whether you solve it”

Listening to: 

• “I Feel You,” NoSo (2022)

• “Wanton Way of Loving,” Esther Rose (2017), when you’re in a Hank Williams mood

• Come Home, Hana Stretton (2023) - pairs well with quietly sprawling in the sunshine

• Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé, because who wasn’t 

• “Swimming,” Flawed Mangoes - I had a very main character moment listening to this with noise cancellation while walking through the airport, highly recommend this liminal vibe

SMOKY MISO SWEET POTATOES

While sweet potato season is past us (or yet ahead of us, depending on your perspective), we had some little fingerling guys and decided to give them a whirl in some miso. White miso paste provides distinct and comforting savoriness, a really nice contrast to sweet potatoes that always seem to be too sweet for my liking. To kick this up a notch you might swap harissa powder for the paprika. 

INGREDIENTS

1 lb. fingerling sweet potatoes, sliced in half lengthwise
4 tbsp. butter
3 garlic cloves, minced
½ tbsp., honey
2 tsp., white miso paste
½ tsp., smoked paprika
½ tsp., ground ginger

WHAT TO DO

Preheat your oven to 375. Melt the butter in a microwaveable bowl, then add the rest of the ingredients, mixing to combine and to keep liquid. Toss sweet potatoes in the mixture, then roast for about 30 minutes or until cooked through. Top with a sprinkle of sea salt.

That’s it. Stay rested and hydrated, open a window or two.