My urge to make green chile chicken enchiladas for New Mexico was driven by fond memories of El Patio de Albuquerque (Yelp), a funky little place near the University of New Mexico that serves a mean enchilada, as well as sopapillas that might reasonably cause a girl to swoon with delight.

Enchiladas in New Mexico are very mean. Salsa verde, done right, will blow the top of your head off and send your socks flying into next week. My discovery after two rounds of enchilada-making is that getting this right requires proper New Mexico chiles, which were not to be found at the Ultra-Luxe Kroger. So what we have here is an enjoyable and fairly easy enchilada recipe that will not frighten small children.

In the resulting mild and replete mood, let’s turn to Albuquerque’s Breaking Blue (Reverbnation), an Americana band whose members are probably feeling the burn at El Patio even as I type this. Read the rest of this entry »

The vengeful ghost of Neil Postman goes on a rampage against popular culture in God Bless America (official site), a dark comedy written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait.

As a recognized hipster, I think I’m supposed to wallow in self-congratulatory agreement with the premises of the movie with the same gusto as I lap up the faux butter on my small-no-I-will-not-upgrade-to-a-large-no popcorn. And as protagonist Frank enforced the values of “niceness” by shooting people, there would every now and again splatter out a sentiment I agreed with. Yet on the whole, I ended up more uncomfortable with my moments of being seduced by this movie than with an early scene in which a snuffling baby is dispatched like a skeet (and that came close to being a walk-out-now deal-breaker for me).

Read the rest of this entry »

New Jersey is all about the pizza.

The pizza it’s all about is not the pizza I know. It is a pizza with the sauce above the toppings. Rising to this occasion required special goodies, including taking a running leap at Jamie Oliver’s pizza crust recipe (here), which works and is a lot better than any prefab crust I’ve tried.

Of course, New Jersey is all about location, location, location. So today’s band is Real Estate (official site), a sunny lo-fi psychedelic pop band from Ridgewood, NJ. Let’s start with “Out of Tune.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Who knew sour could taste so sweet?

My urge to make a pure lemon cookie with a hint of spice coincided with an urge to check in with musicians whose work I haven’t looked at in a while. Let’s also link up with A Little Nosh’s Tastetastic Thursday and see what other cooks are up to, while we’re at it.

Armed with a recipe from Lunches Fit for a Kid, I left my butter to reach room temperature and did some random playing around online. Having cooked my way through New Hampshire, it seems odd to listen without having a state in mind; so perhaps we’ll call this state Curiosity (or Confusion). Being in a state, it makes sense to start with Mates of State, who just released a new video for “Unless I’m Led,” from the 2011 album Mountaintops (buy on iTunes or Amazon).

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rare that I read a recipe and have no idea what the outcome will be. The Keene Pumpkin Festival’s recipe for pumpkin casserole (here) stumped me. Is it a cake? A pudding?

New Hampshire’s The Conniption Fits (official site) raises similar questions. Is this an original rock band or a cover band (its Youtube site is mostly covers)? Is its sound basic wall-of-guitars rock, electronic club music, or something in between with an early 1990s feel?

After listening to its self-titled 2011 EP, I still don’t know. I’m also not sure about the pumpkin casserole. Come, let us visit Schrödinger’s kitchen. Read the rest of this entry »

The native cuisine of Nevada is “casino buffet.”

Doubt this claim? The University of Nevada at Las Vegas Libraries and its Center for Gaming Research have a delightful and informative online exhibit devoted to Las Vegas dining here, and the buffet looms large (as well as long and well-stocked) in early restaurant history. I even ate at one back on my Thanksgiving trip, here.

My first thought for finding casino buffet locally was to hie myself to the Wandering Horse Buffet at Talking Stick Resort for breakfast. This casino belongs to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa community, the same organized, aesthetically sophisticated, and cheerily “foodie” tribe responsible for the Salt River Stadium at Talking Stick, where I saw the Rockies play the Diamondbacks during last year’s spring training. Hieing, of course, requires a band or two for Nevada, so let’s start with a quintessentially Vegas video from Charlie Rivero (Reverbnation). Read the rest of this entry »

It seems I’m one of maybe three women born in the United States who never swooned over a boy band or even a teen idol.

This made the April top 10 workout songs list from Run Hundred (here) especially provocative, as it includes One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” and I’m not entirely sure what a One Direction is, other than a sign pointing straight from pre-teens’ pockets to Simon Cowell’s bank account.

In honor of my skewedness from mainstream culture, I decided to make lemon-chocolate-chip cookies, as lemon and chocolate is one of my favorite flavor combinations, and it’s difficult to find in the wild. This involved taking the traditional Toll House recipe (here), cutting it in half, and making some wild-eyed modifications. Read the rest of this entry »

Shyly hiding behind those strawberries is a magical barely-any-fat cheesecake based (admittedly more loosely than I’d originally intended) on the Swedish Ostkaka (recipe), which I’m promised was brought by immigrants to Nebraska.

Nebraska also offers a nifty regional-music blog, Hear Nebraska, that lists bands. In a moment of shallowness, I became deeply smitten with the photo for All Young Girls are Machine Guns, due to the singer’s playing a stringed instrument that’s shaped like a machine gun. Fortunately, I also liked the act’s music (Tumblr, Reverbnation, CDBaby), as it turns out that singer-songwriter Rebecca Lowry is the leader of the mythical Ukelele Resistance that I’ve been nattering about for years now. Read the rest of this entry »

Montana means bison.

Not literally. Literally, “Montana” probably means something like “big-nosed gaijin wanted name for state with lots of mountains.” But in a culinary sense, Montana means bison.

I’ll confess up front that ground bison makes the best burger I’ve ever accomplished in my home kitchen, with the least effort. At $9.99/lb, it had better.

Paying fair price for an album from Trego, Montana’s Pterodactyl Plains (Bandcamp, official site) seems downright cheap, in comparison. Pterodactyl Plains is a Boston Phoenix best-of-state pick; it identifies the band’s style as “electroacoustic,” which apparently means acoustic piano with brooding bass and drum, distortion effects, fugue-like vocals… it’s beautiful and menacing. I have no idea what “In the Air” is about, but the way the vocals interweave with each other and the piano is drop-dead gorgeous. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, I am gripped by the conviction that I need to live in Missouri. So far, the job market has laughed derisively, but there was a time when I got as far as scoping out St. Louis, and on that trip, I had my first encounter with that fine local speciality, toasted ravioli.

Feeding that conviction is Paste’s “10 Missouri Bands You Should Listen to Now” (article), as it was painful to narrow the list to three and tempting to do track-by-tracks on several.

Since it would be imprudent to feed that conviction with excess fat, I’m going to make oven-baked “fried” ravioli (instructions from How Sweet Eats) with a fresh tomato-basil salsa. In the spirit of appreciating good band names, this calls for Sleepy Kitty (official site). Next time somebody complains that a band isn’t doing enough for its fans, I’m going to insist that person memorize “Gimme a Chantz!” Read the rest of this entry »