For this year’s Reader Key Ingredient Cook-Off, we asked some of Chicago’s top chefs to create a dish to honor a person who influenced their cooking. The exercise stirred many kitchen memories. Dish: Braised octopus with chile bean paste and ramps

Exploding head syndrome: Did David Cronenberg diagnose it first? Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • That French unions have negotiated a deal making it de rigueur for workers to ignore electronic messages from their bosses after 6 PM? —Tony Adler

Q: I’m a 20-year-old submissive woman. I’m currently in a confusing affair with a 50-year-old dominant married man. He lives in Europe and has two kids close to my age. We met online when I was 17 and starting to explore my BDSM desires—out of the reach of my overbearing, sex-shaming, disastrously religious parents—and we’ve been texting daily ever since. We’ve since met in different countries and spent a total of three weeks together....

You can hardly blame Philadelphia comics creator Brian “Box” Brown for his infatuation with professional wrestling. By the time he was a toddler, Junkyard Dog, Ricky Steamboat, and Hulk Hogan were household names. They pummeled one another in nationally broadcast matches powered by a promotion machine that, according to Sports Illustrated, produced “a showbiz package so flamboyant that it makes the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade look like a Russian funeral procession....

Turin Bicycle 4710 N. Damen Runner-Up Comrade Cycles

Forward-looking new-music ensembles dedicated to the work of living composers, especially young ones, seem to be proliferating unstoppably in Chicago these days. The likes of Ensemble dal Niente, Fifth House Ensemble, and Eighth Blackbird regularly perform pieces written for vocalists, but Fonema Consort has distinguished itself by focusing on vocal music. Costa Rican composer Pablo Santiago Chin and singer Nina Dante founded the group with composer Edward Hamel in 2011, and it’s already become an important creative force in the city....

It Felt Like Love Returning to the subject of worthwhile art movies with unpromising titles, tomorrow Facets begins a weeklong run of a new American indie called It Felt Like Love. With regards to the title, I suspect this one was meant to evoke junior high poetry—the main character, after all, is a 14-year-old girl beginning to experience feelings of lust and romantic longing. Writer-director Eliza Hittman makes it clear that the heroine doesn’t experience these feelings naturally, but rather is forced into them....

Lost in Alphaville Originally formed as a Weezer side project, Matt Sharp put together the Rentals in 1995 to explore his new wavey synth-pop side. By 1998 it was his full-time musical outlet; but one year later the Rentals had officially disbanded. The Rentals’ albums, Return of the Rentals and Seven More Minutes, were wildly fun pop records, driven by simplistic, fuzzy bass lines, topsy-turvy Moog leads, and sugary vocal harmonies (originally provided by Rachel and Petra Haden of That Dog) that supplemented Sharp’s dry deadpan....

Nothing much pleasant ever occurs in a trench. Long, narrow ditches are the natural habitats of trench foot, trench mouth, and trench warfare, to name just a few discomforts. Certainly nobody expects good food and good times to inhabit a trench. And yet that’s the name chosen by Heisler Hospitality’s Kevin Heisner and Matt Eisler to reboot Trenchermen, their popular Wicker Park tavern, after founding chef Patrick Sheerin stepped away at the end of last year....

Eric Klein Youth Code If you’re like me you probably spent Super Bowl Sunday finding ways to fit Cat Butt jokes and other grunge references into the chatter about a fairly boring football game—I think I might have gone a, um, Tad overboard. Anyway, if you also spent more time talking about Seattle’s musical legacy or Bruno Mars’s set than Denver’s lackluster performance you’re also probably anxious to see some live music....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, February 23, 2017. Proposed restrictions for downtown street performers on hold A City Council proposal that would ban street performers from making noise that can be heard from more than 20 feet away is on hold. Forty-second Ward alderman Brendan Reilly, who proposed the legislation, delayed a final vote on the plan after meeting with some street musicians. He’s also in talks with Mayor Rahm Emanuel about finding alternative spaces for performers such as city parks....

The Roches’ Speak My mom spends a lot of her time out of the country lately, so I get to see her a lot less than I’m used to. On Sunday I was able to spend much of the day with her, which was great; aside from it being Mother’s Day, it was also nice to just catch up and hang out with her. The same day, my friend Alfred Soto posted this Roches song, claiming it was the best Mother’s Day song ever....

The crusade for same-sex marriage was in part a heady debate over constitutional principles. In June the struggle reached its climax as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled laws forbidding same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Now only bitter-enders such as Kim Davis refuse to live with the results. In some eyes Davis is a hero, but she’s not to me or to anyone I know, or to anyone in that vast circle of distant acquaintances speaking their piece on Facebook....

It’s budget season at the Board of Education, which means we’ve entered that twilight zone of misdirection where the bosses say one thing and do something else. Then Lauren FitzPatrick, ace education reporter for the Sun-Times, revealed that DeNard lives in Flossmoor. So the board needed to give him a waiver on the requirement that school employees live in Chicago. I’m gonna miss that unit, man. Claypool needs advice on schools because he has no experience with them....

More than two years after I first heard a rumor about its opening date—which at that point was supposed to be fall 2012—the Lagunitas Brewing tap room in North Lawndale is finally in business. Last Tuesday it held an unveiling party, mostly for the press (I wasn’t invited—a small blow to my already negligible professional pride), and on Wednesday, June 25, it will officially welcome the general public. Second, and perhaps of more interest to beer nerds, was that the tap room’s 32 draft lines will pour not just year-round Lagunitas beers but also tap-only oddities and one-offs shipped from the brewery’s home base in Petaluma, California....

various locations shopakira.com Runner-Up Penelope’s

Ultimate Painting Ultimate Painting—a new British duo featuring James Hoare of Veronica Falls and Jack Cooper of Mazes—have arrived stateside, and will be playing an in-store tonight at Permanent Records to kick off their tour. The band’s self-titled debut LP—just released on local imprint Trouble in Mind, a label that’s constantly cranking out quality records—is a loose-limbered, meandering collection of Velvet Underground-influenced pop, heavy on jangle, melody, good vibes, and fuzzy guitar shredding....