Each week (give or take one or two here and there) I share three things I like – It could be a book, a movie, a podcast, an album, a photo, an article, a restaurant, a food item, a beverage, or anything else I simply enjoy and think you might too. You can find a whole pile of things, especially books, I like and recommend HERE.
1) Summerland by Michael Chabon
To my moderate shame and significant chagrin, I had never read a Michael Chabon novel before picking this one up on the recommendation of a friend. What a delightful book. I read this on the heels of a couple other novels that would have easily been featured in a “Three Things I Despise This Week” post (if I suffered from enough self-loathing to write such a thing), and that dark backdrop made the good points of Summerland pop even more. It is fantastical, whimsical, child-like without be childish. It is replete with villains and heroes and gadgets and magic and strange new worlds. And it is centered around baseball (the way battle is done in these worlds) and the relationships between fathers and children. So really I may not be the best judge of how objectively good Summerland is, but I can tell you it was fictitious catnip for my mind and heart. I loved it.
2) The Original Chipwich
I have a firm conviction that some foods are meant to be basic and unaltered and that any additions are definitive subtractions. This list includes hot dogs (no such thing as a gourmet hot dog), burgers (keep your reductions and pineapple slices), pizza (if it has goat cheese or hot honey it’s not pizza, it’s a flat bread), and of course the classic ice cream sandwich–the one that is all artificial and inexpensive and spongy and sticks to the roof of your mouth. The only exceptions to my rule are when culinary geniuses re-invent these classics in such a manner that they essentially create an entirely new delicacy (eg. The Chicago Dog). The Original Chipwich is just such a delicacy, and it is better and cheaper than the Toll House offerings. It combines delightfully artificial vanilla ice cream with soft, classic chocolate chip cookies. They freeze neither too hard nor too soft. And they are of moderate size, leaving the consumer feeling moderately undisgusting. As a long time consumer and appreciator of all things ice cream treat, these have climbed into my pantheon of delectability.
3) Nitro Coffee
I drink my coffee black, pretty much always. My go-to beverage at a coffee shop is the Americano. I don’t especially enjoy the flavor of cream in my coffee, nor does it benefit my middle-aged waist line (especially not with the quantities of coffee I consume daily). However, iced coffee is borderline abominable both because it is adding water to coffee (if I wanted that I would go to Dunkin or buy a Keurig) and because ice displaces coffee, meaning I am forced to consume less. So, when it is 95 degrees outside in Nashville in mid-September, and all my midwestern friends are crowing about the delights of autumn, I want something that is cold, black, and un-iced. Enter, nitro coffee. The nitro carbonation adds an element of creaminess without the flavor or the calories. It is served cold without being watered down. It is cold-brewed, offering strong and mellow flavor. And it comes with added cool factor of resembling a Guinness (but also with the potential risk of being served by an unskilled barista who leaves you with half coffee/half foam). All in all, it is a wonderful warm weather coffee beverage, which sadly is still in-season here in the South.
