Catch Rad Joy 10/9 with Café Marie Thom
Plus, my field trip to Janie's Mill, merch and new menu in the works.
Hello, readers!
And for those of you in Chicago, happy fall, officially. I am ready for steaming mugs, baggy, neutral-toned outerwear, super soft blankets, hugging my friends during cozy hangouts, and horror movies.
As you may know from Instagram, I have paused online cake ordering. Cakes will be resuming in a couple weeks as I take a short break and draw up the new menu for the season. I am also working with a local artist I really admire to mock up some new merch for the season — we’ll be commemorating 3 years of Rad Joy. But more on that later. On to the exciting stuff that is happening very soon!
Monday, 10/9, 6-10pm:
Dessert with Café Marie Thom at Apero Chicago
This Monday, I have the very distinct pleasure of providing a dessert accompaniment to a chef I’ve been admiring from the sidelines since I moved to Chicago last year. Chef Thom Padanilam of Thommy’s Toddy Shop (TTS) will be setting up at Apero Chicago in North Center on October 9th from 6-10 pm for a reimagined French bistrot dinner that is a bit of a love letter to their friends in the industry and what I feel is very of-this-era-Thom.
There will be bone marrow! And ducks in puff pastry! Mussels! And a pistachio dessert, dreamed up by moi. Follow TTS for the full menu and more details, to be released tomorrow. I asked Thom a bit more about their background and the concept, and in his own words:
Thom Padanilam is a chef and founder of Thommy’s Toddy Shop. TTS is a condiment company and pop up restaurant that aims to amplify the flavors of South India, the ones I grew up with and cherish. I’d been working as a line cook at Superkhana International when the pandemic hit. When they pivoted to staff-driven culinary offerings, I started TTS to explore what made me fall in love with cooking: understanding my connection to “home” through food and sharing that.
The pop-up menu is classic French bistrot food reimagined through my perspective. The pop-up name is an homage to the iconic Café Marie Jeanne, a beloved restaurant that closed during the pandemic. I’ve had the pleasure of learning from many former employees of CMJ and they have helped me to grow into the cook I am today. I hold a lot of love and reverence for those people that helped and inspired me and this menu is a reflection of those feelings.
Field Trip to Janie’s Mill in Ashkum, Illinois
On Tuesday, I took a field trip out to Ashkum, Illinois with my chef friends Dylan Heath (Apero) and Michelle Back (Banana Phone Treats). The total round trip time was nearly 5 hours from Chicago, and marks the most land I’ve traversed in the state of Illinois during my residency so far. As we drove through the acres and acres of mono-cropped farmlands, I asked my friends about their culinary careers, childhoods, and relationships to the places we would drive through, both rural and urbane.
There were the tall, browned, orderly corn stalks that reminded Dylan of the time he almost got lost in the fields with his brother as they made their way back home after discovering highway treasure by the pond they regularly visited as children. And the outskirts of Chicago with bustling street life and brightly lit signs, an energy that reminded Michelle of Baltimore, where she used to eat buckets of blue crab with her family. I felt incredibly lucky to get to know both of them better during this road trip.
When we arrived at the mill, I had no idea what to expect. We pulled up to a small warehouse tucked between a gas station, police station, and a row of small houses. We’d enter to find a woman covered in flour, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of brown bags of flours stacked neatly on top of one another, and the largest machinery I have ever physically been close to! Jill, our tour guide, walked us through the milling process, showed us how products and byproducts are stored, explained the many quality control measures that go into such an amazing end product, and introduced us to some of the wonderful people that make it all happen.
I also shared some sour cherry blondies made with a 1:1 blend of Janie’s Mill turkey red wheat and all-purpose flours. To my delight, everyone loved it, and so did I! What a weirdly, unique and satisfying closed loop situation: seeing the whole grain/berry, watching it be transformed into flour, and then baking with that product, and being able to feed the suppliers with it. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without them. And we wouldn’t be able to do any of this without the land that always gives so much to us.
Thanks for following along. I know I say it often, but I’m so grateful to share what I can, and to know that it resonates or is of interest to people.
xXo,
V