ON THE BAR.

natasha pickowicz, mostly.

Hello, friends!

It’s July 1, which means it’s basically September. As I panic about all the time I haven’t yet spent at the beach, I’m also struggling to come up with an intro for this week’s newsletter. I think it’s the sort of languorous-yet-jittery energy of a peak summer holiday week—the season is slow heat, but the holiday itself involves beach traffic and literal explosions. (My dog also rolled in something horrendous this weekend, and I can’t get the smell out of her fur. This is a particular kind of torture for someone who’s trained to smell things for a living.)

Whatever the reason, I can’t organize my thoughts this morning, so I’m just going to tell you about a few things.

First, I’m sending out what I think is a pretty good bonus edition newsletter to paid subscribers this weekend. It includes my favorite recipe for using all the radish tops, garlic scapes, and various other confusing (but delicious!) greens we’re encountering at the farmers markets this time of year. It’s an easy recipe that’ll serve you year-round, but it’s especially great for summer because it relies heavily on a pressure cooker for most of the cook time, so it keeps the kitchen cool. I’ll also be giving a roundup of some favorite hangs (food-related and otherwise) in the Pioneer Valley for those of you en route to Tanglewood this year. And as promised in last week’s newsletter, the link to a virtual tasting with me will be sent—the first of the seasonal ones promised to paid subscribers! I’m excited about this one, and I hope you’ll join me.

I always feel a little weird about making some things for paid subscribers only, but then I remind myself that I’m a small business owner and not, like, Netflix, and this is all actual work with actual value. Anyway, if you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription, here’s that button!

Second! We are DYING to finally be able to announce that we’re hosting none other than Natasha Pickowicz, pastry chef, bake sale activist, and author of More Than Cake: 100 Recipes Built for Pleasure and Community. July 27 @ 4PM! Save the date!

Natasha will be at Dear Annie in conversation with Folu Akinkuotu, local author of one of our favorite Substacks, Unsnackable. The two will be offering dialogue and Q&A in a casual format, and an afternoon hang will follow. Treats from More Than Cake are being whipped up by Maura + co at Sofra Bakery (where I myself did a stint turning out Chocolate Earthquake cookies for a year-ish!). This is going to be a truly lovely afternoon, and I’m so honored that these profoundly inspiring women are spending it with us.

Dear Annie is small and tickets are limited, so please get them now! We haven’t announced the event to the *general public* yet, so y’all get first dibs for being newsletter babes. Mwah.

I usually have a list of reading to share, but book catalogues are taking up a lot of my mental inventory as I’m preparing to stock the shelves at Wild Child (opening August! come to our moving sale 7/13 for 25% off everything in store!).

Something I’m thinking a lot about is how I hope to differentiate this new iteration of Wild Child from the shoppy shoppes of the world. Don’t get me wrong! I love a woman-owned tinned fish company moment. I enjoy a splatterware set. But the world doesn’t need another place to buy these things, and I also crave critical food theory outside of universities and weird ceramics made by someone most people on the internet haven’t heard of. The cultural flattening is getting me down, as is the gendered capitalism that’s been repackaged with wonky fonts and primary colors. But I still want it to be, like, fun. Watch me try!

One thing I did read was “The Who’s Who of Wine Cool,” by the Punch staff for Punch. This semi-annual roundup is always interesting to me, in part because they usually ask me to weigh in, in part because there’s no real rubric offered for what ends up on the list (what defines “cool?” for example). I find this is more and more often the case with “Best Of” lists of late, which could just as easily be read as a list of contributors’ BFF’s as anything (help! there’s still a journalism ethics student stuck in my body). I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing—there are problems with the gatekeeping of accreditation associated with traditional reviews, too. Just naming a thing I’m noticing! I also think it’s interesting that the headline slug that comes up in Google search results is “The 10 Best Natural Wine Producers to Know in 2024,” but the headline on the website that results from a click is the aforementioned “Who’s Who,” which abandons the natural wine indication. Perhaps this is an SEO maximization thing, perhaps this is an effort to distance the content from the big, bad Natural Wine Movement. I know not. Anyway! Lots of good producers old and new on the list (including some who are our BFF’s), so take a look. I’ll continue to grapple with access vs. expertise in the media on my own time.

And finally! There’s no Special Sauce list this week because Rebel Rebel will be closed Thurs 7/4 through Sunday 7/7! We still have plenty of wine that would qualify as special sauce in-house, so feel encouraged to come by and freestyle for yourself!

Hope you get some good rest in this weekend. Highly recommend getting weird with this 1969 Gal Costa album.

Ciao, babes.

XOXO,

Lauren