Saturday Night Supper Club

An essay on comfort food by Anneli Rufus for Gilt Taste.

There’s also how the brain links emotion, memory, and sensory stimuli. Popsicles nibbled to break childhood fevers, pizza when your track team won, coconut on your honeymoon: The brain associates good experiences with specific flavors, fragrances and textures, coding them as harbingers of happiness. Henceforth, even when you neither have a fever nor have won a race, eating Popsicles still brings the rush of relief and pizza feels like a reward.

An interesting read.  However, personally, popsicles aren’t about relief.  For me they’re all about happiness and joy.  Frozen happiness and joy.
 

Sawako Okochi, who was the sous-chef at Annisa and the chef de cuisine at the Good Fork in Red Hook, Brooklyn, will be starting a monthly pop-up dinner series in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, called the Otakara Supper Club.

She said that Otakara means treasure in Japanese. Her first dinner will be on Saturday for just 12 guests who will dine on a snack, like miso-glazed rice balls, with a Negroni-style cocktail, followed by a five-course dinner: Homemade tofu with dashi gelee, uni and shiso; zucchini blossoms stuffed with crab in a plum-rice sauce; clam ceviche with field greens, sorrel and lime; milk-brined veal with sweetbreads, spring onions, a sage-bacon sauce and vin cotto, and mochi azuki ice cream envelopes.

Guests can buy two tickets for $100 (for both) and bring a guest.

“That makes it more interesting,” Ms. Okochi said. Except for the cocktail, dinner is also BYOB.

It will be held in an outdoor setting in Fort Greene, weather permitting, or in an indoor space, the addresses of which will be shared only with those attending the dinner.

Ms. Okochi will hold another on July 23.

In a special father’s day post at Eater, second generation chefs talk about what they learned from their dads.

Excellent article by Sara Jenkins, chef at Porsena.

 I like to say that my success as a professional cook is about putting out home-style food in a restaurant setting. I come from a long line of great home cooks, starting in my memory with my grandmother Dorothy Thorndike Harmon, who came from a long line of extremely self-sufficient Maine Yankees for whom gardening and preserving and raising at least your own chickens was just what you did. Well into his eighties, my grandfather maintained both an ornamental and a vegetable garden, even though he had long outgrown an economic need to raise his own vegetables. He did it out of habit and genuine pleasure in the sense of purpose gardening gave him—and, I hope, genuine pleasure in the seasonal produce he enjoyed on his table.

The most interesting ice cream cake in the world.