One Year of Buttered Popcorn

A newsletter retrospective.

Hope everyone’s getting excited for Thanksgiving! It’s one of my favorite holidays, because it’s a day that’s centered around eating with the people you love, whether that’s your family or your friends. I truly love seeing all my friends post their Friendsgiving pictures on Instagram.

I hosted Friendsgiving this past weekend, whipping up a feast for twenty of my friends, with quite a few contributing delicious sides, desserts, and drinks. The centerpiece was a dry-brined turkey rubbed with a sage & thyme mayo. The recipe, from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, guarantees a terrific bird. It’s not too late for you to cook your turkey in this way; the day before Thanksgiving is the exact time to start the dry brine. My only advice for this recipe is do not salt the herb mayonnaise… if you adequately salt the turkey for the dry brine, it’s sufficiently salty. My turkey was super tasty, but very salty, especially when adding the gravy. The day-after leftovers somehow got even saltier, so my plan for the rest of the meat is to put it into a turkey noodle soup.

State of the ‘Stack

Just about a year ago, I published the first post of this newsletter. It was a Q&A with myself to introduce Buttered Popcorn and lay out my goals for this whole endeavor.

Introducing Buttered Popcorn

This is how it ended:

Do you have any ambitions for this newsletter?

Not really, I just thought it’d be fun! It would be very cool to get press credentials for the New York Film Festival or something, but I don’t think this newsletter will ever get that big.

Buttered Popcorn is still not that big — it’s a very small but very engaged readership! But I did get press accreditation for NYFF this year. Mission accomplished for gaining some legitimacy… trying to keep that going year-round.

I mostly started this Substack for fun, to have a creative outlet for all of the movies, food, theater, and other art things that I have spent so much of my time taking in. I’ve been learning how to write as I go, since the extent of my formal training was one comparative literature course in freshman year. It’s been great doing this, even if I still spend more hours than I’d like to admit to crank out my little takes. The biggest struggle has just been finding the time to write; I have like ten different pieces in the pipeline, some for over six months. I’ll get to them…

The first subscribers to Buttered Popcorn were my supportive friends, but now there’s quite a few readers who stumbled upon this little glorified blog of mine. My thanks to all of you for reading, and special thanks to those who send me nice notes, suggestions, and typo corrections. It really means a lot. With the second year of this newsletter, I hope to keep doing what I’m doing, but hopefully with writing that is more concise and eloquent.

I’m keeping this short and sweet, so I’ll close this out with five of my favorite pieces from the first year of Buttered Popcorn.

A brief blurb on a photography exhibition by An-My Lê that really affected me.

By far the most read piece on Buttered Popcorn was my dinner and a movie recap for The Holdovers. Christmas season is coming… should I run it back?

Although this was very long, my write-up of three $100+ dinners in one week was exactly what I wanted to accomplish in my food writing, when I was still eating at restaurants on the regular.

My list of Copenhagen recommendations will not steer you wrong; I’ll publish similar lists for Barcelona and Lyon next month.

Those of you subscribing primarily for food content may be disappointed by how much I just want to write about movies. I’m trying to find a good balance between my two passions. This personal essay on Dìdi took forever to write, but I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.

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If there’s a post that you particularly enjoyed, or would like to see more of, do let me know! I’m working on some reviews of movies that are out this week, should have those up tomorrow. But if I blow my deadline, have a great Thanksgiving!

KitKat Photos

And finally, I haven’t kept up with the promise of having a lot of cat updates in this newsletter, so here’s some recent KitKat cuteness. She turns 5 next week!