8-21-26

Good Friday Afternoon All!

We've reached that part of the season where summer begins to have a bit of an identity crisis. Is it beach time or back-to-school time? It’s a little like when half the family wanted to go see Barbie and the other half wanted Oppenheimer. What kind of people are we? Apparently, both. We’re not quite ready to pick a side—and this week’s menu isn’t either. If you’re in the same boat, this one’s for us.

Because on one hand, summer is still very much doing its thing. Local farms and gardens are absolutely exploding with the good stuff right now. We’ve got peaches and berries showing up at breakfast and dessert this week. We've got peppers, green beans, and tomatoes...oh my...all over the place.

Our Summer Vegetable Lasagne is basically your garden in a casserole dish. Minus the compost. We felt that would be taking the farm-to-table concept a little too far. Zucchini, summer squash, eggplant, tomatoes, and all the good cheesy stuff layered together.

The salsa accompanying our Chicken Fajitas will be puréed from chef-picked, garden-fresh tomatoes, because this is that brief and glorious stretch of the year when tomatoes actually taste like tomatoes. If that doesn’t convince you, don’t worry—the dependable consistency of grocery-store tomatoes will be waiting faithfully for all of us again soon enough.

Even the soups are caught between seasons. Roasted Corn Chowder is about as late-August as food gets, while Chicken and White Bean Chili is our first little acknowledgment that football season is coming.

Think of Chicken and White Bean Chili as chili preseason.

We’re not quite ready for the full-fledged, cold-weather, game-day beef version. But it’s right around the corner, and we need to start getting ourselves into shape. Tender chicken, white beans, tomatoes, peppers, and plenty of chili spices seem like an entirely reasonable warm-up.

Then there’s the pork.

If you missed our pork roast with Gribiche a few weeks ago, consider this the teacher giving you a second crack at the exam. This time we’re slow-roasting pork shoulder with plenty of garlic and the Simon & Garfunkel herbs—you know, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme—until beautifully tender, then serving it with that bright, mustardy, herby Gribiche-style sauce.

If you did order the pork and Gribiche last time, congratulations—you aced the exam on your first attempt, and we’re confident your demonstrated good judgment will guide you appropriately this week as well.

And then we arrive at Wednesday, where late summer’s identity crisis really takes hold.

First: lentils.

Lentils.

Even the word sounds sensible. Dependable. Like a Chevy Malibu wearing Dockers and comfortable walking shoes. Something you would absolutely serve at an accountants’ conference.

This is not that lentil.

Think of our Lentil Salad as the Ferrari-driving, Versace-suit-wearing member of the lentil family. Lots of garden-fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, scallions, and fresh herbs, all brightened with lemon and a vivacious vinaigrette.

If this salad were an undergarment, we probably couldn’t discuss it appropriately in this forum.

No granny panties here.

These are darn sexy lentils.

And where do sexy lentils lead? Naturally, to Italian Wedding Soup.

Okay, maybe that connection is a bit of a stretch. They are, after all, still lentils. But if lentils were ever going to land you a mate, these are the ones.

Finally, Wednesday brings us to Surf & Turf.

Not the $120 Capital Grille or country-club version. This is the version for those of us who just went back-to-school shopping, paid tuition, bought dorm-room supplies, or sent a child off to college accompanied by a check large enough to briefly reconsider every financial decision we’ve ever made.

There’s nothing we won’t sacrifice for our children’s education.

But this week, decadent food doesn’t have to be one of those sacrifices.

So we’re giving ourselves the responsible-parent version of Surf & Turf: Beef Stroganoff and Garlic-Lemon Shrimp Scampi with Capers. Still luxuriously indulgent beef, slowly simmered until fall-apart tender. Still champagne-worthy shrimp, sautéed with butter, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, white wine, lemon, and capers.

Beef, shrimp, butter, mushrooms, wine, sour cream, garlic, and all the other things that make adulthood slightly more tolerable.

Just considerably less likely to require a second mortgage.

Enjoy the last glorious stretch of summer. We’re certainly going to.

Have a Great Weekend,

Brian and The BAC Team

8-14-2026

Good Friday Afternoon All!

First and foremost, we have an announcement we have been waiting several weeks to make:

Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, lettuce is free at last.

After several weeks of caution surrounding the Cyclospora outbreak, we are bringing salads back. We remain enormous fans of leafy green vegetables and are very happy to stop treating lettuce as though it recently escaped from a biological weapons laboratory.

Beyond that, this week finds us in a slightly strange culinary place. It is unquestionably still summer. It is August. The tomatoes are glorious, the corn is glorious, and we remain in deep and committed denial regarding any suggestion that summer might someday end.

And yet...

School supplies have begun appearing everywhere. College kids are packing and leaving. Parents are looking simultaneously proud, exhausted, and considerably poorer. Somewhere in the distance we can hear the faint rustling of backpacks.

Accordingly, the Wednesday half of this week's menu has developed a decidedly back-to-schoolish personality, despite our refusal to acknowledge what that might imply about the calendar.

Before we get there, however, a few things worth mentioning.

Our French Onion Egg Bites may be one of the easier predictions we've made lately. Caramelized onions finished with a splash of sherry, spinach, Swiss cheese, and fresh thyme. Basically breakfast French onion soup, except the scalding broiled cheese won't burn the roof of your mouth, and the drippy onions won't require a bib.

Unless, of course, you like the bib....No judgment here.

Our other breakfast/snack remains the absurdly useful Overnight Oats, this week topped with mango and summer berries. At this point these have become something of a permanent resident. They're good, they're nutritious, you folks keep buying them, we keep enjoying the leftovers, and they possess the additional magical quality of being incredibly healthful.

We're also offering Mustard and Fresh Dill Chicken Salad with Celery and Scallion. Nothing terribly complicated here, nor should there be. Good chicken salad, fresh dill, mustard, crisp celery, scallions. Sometimes lunch does not need a résumé. Sometimes, however, Dessert does.

Chocolate Pots de Crème—basically chocolate pudding, if a proper Frenchman were to make chocolate pudding. Of course, a proper Frenchman would never make something called chocolate pudding. Thus: pots de crème. It is what chocolate pudding becomes in the hands of trained chefs. If pudding is the cook, pots de crème is the chef. Rich, silky, deeply chocolatey, and just pretentious enough to earn the French name.

Summery Beef, Potato, and Garden Vegetable Soup—essentially the best of both worlds. A hearty beef-and-potato soup engineered specifically for mid-August, loaded with tomatoes, corn, zucchini, green beans, carrots, celery, and the sort of vegetables currently spilling out of Michigan gardens. Hearty enough to satisfy. Summery enough that eating it does not constitute an admission that fall exists.

Monday's Vegetarian offering is Spinach, Feta, and Garden Vegetable Pie, accompanied by a Mediterranean-inspired Wild Rice and Lentil Pilaf and cool tzatziki. Think loosely in the direction of spanakopita and mujadara (rice and lentils), but without requiring anyone to pass a geography exam before dinner.

As for Chicken Piccata...there is really no need for us to discuss Chicken Piccata. We know many of you stopped reading the moment you saw it on the menu, jumped over to the website, and ordered it.

We have data. Carry on.

The Garlic and Herb Roasted Pork Loin, however, deserves a few words. First, it is brined. Second, it is actually juicy. Third, its cooking time will consist of exactly as long as necessary in a relatively gentle oven—not several additional hours in a fiery inferno as though the poor animal had committed some terrible crime. This is not Grandma's cook it until it's done, and then cook it three hours more just to make absolutely certain pork roast. To Grandma's credit, however, she made one hell of an Egg and Scallion Potato Salad, which is precisely what we're serving alongside it, together with our creamy mustard-chive sauce and summer vegetables. So this one's for you, Nonna.

And that brings us naturally to Wednesday and our creeping back-to-school comfort-food problem. We begin with Chicken Noodle Soup.

Not your mom's tin-can Campbell's stuff. House-made chicken stock, a good splash of white wine, chicken, vegetables, noodles, and fresh herbs. Basically everything you remember fondly about Mom's chicken noodle soup, except prepared by people who have spent far too much of their lives standing in professional kitchens. Joining it is Broccoli Cheddar Soup. Basically, every point made about Chicken Noodle holds here as well. You know exactly what it is, just not how good it can be.

Wednesday's vegetarian dinner is about as broadly appealing as we know how to make vegetarian food: Four Cheese and Spinach Stuffed Portabella, topped with fresh herb pesto and served with Lemon-Herb Roasted Potatoes and our Michigan Sweet Corn and Tomato Salad.

Cheese. Spinach. Mushroom. Potatoes. Pesto. Corn. Tomatoes.

Nobody needs a flowchart.

Then comes Lasagne—beef, sausage, tomato, garlic, wine, herbs, mozzarella, Parmesan, goat cheese, and ricotta—because apparently Wednesday had not yet accumulated enough childhood comfort food.

And finally, making its return after a well-earned absence, our Mustard and Brown Sugar Glazed Beef Brisket, served with creamy mashed potatoes, horsey sauce, and summer vegetables.

Somewhere between the Chicken Noodle, Broccoli Cheddar, Lasagne, brisket, and stuffed mushroom, Wednesday became the culinary equivalent of buying a fresh box of pencils and realizing the sun is setting noticeably earlier. We don't like it either.

Fortunately, there is still corn. There are still tomatoes. It is still August.

We intend to behave accordingly for as long as possible.

Have a Great Weekend,

Brian and The BAC Team