Summer Isn't Over Yet: our August cookbook club night

We called our August night Summer Isn’t Over Yet. The weather had other ideas.

The plan was a park picnic, put together with our friends at SocialSip Toronto. Permit sorted, book chosen, everybody signed up for a dish. Then the forecast turned and stayed turned, and by the day of it was clearly not happening outdoors.

So we moved the whole thing into a party room and ran it from there instead.

That room is where Sauté Sundays started. Before the waitlist, before Jrew’s, before any of this looked like a real club, it was a handful of people in a party room with too much food between them. Ending up back there for a night we’d planned as an outdoor picnic was not what any of us had in mind, but it turned into one of the better evenings we’ve had. People stayed late. The rain outside made the room feel smaller in a good way.

For anyone finding this and wondering what actually happens at one of these: Sauté Sundays is a free monthly cookbook club in Toronto. Every month we pick one cookbook. Everyone who’s coming claims a recipe from it, cooks that dish at home, and brings it with them. Then we put it all out and eat together and talk about how it went, what was harder than the recipe made it sound, what people would change. There’s no ticket and no cost to attend, and there’s no requirement to be a good cook. Plenty of people show up having cooked something for the first time that morning.

August’s book was Endless Summer Cookbook by Katie Lee, which is built around exactly the kind of outdoor warm weather entertaining we’d planned the night around. Reading a book about beach days and backyard parties while it poured outside was funny in a way that made the whole thing better, honestly. The food didn’t care where it was being eaten.

If you’ve been thinking about coming to one and haven’t yet, this is the version of the night nobody plans for and it still worked. That’s more or less the whole idea.

More on the book itself in the cookbook highlight.

September is Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking, Sunday the 20th at Jrew’s. RSVP on Luma, or subscribe for early access.