A pretzel is what I tied myself into, trying to come up with something original for this month’s Lady Behind the Curtain Dessert Challenge (here), with the theme ingredients of pretzels and caramel. My bacon — which doesn’t appear in this recipe, but could! — was saved by the discovery at the 99 Cents Only of frozen soft pretzels.

A soft pretzel is a bread-like substance. From bread-like substances, it’s a short step to bread pudding.

To get ourselves in the proper festive mood, let’s try the very first live performance of a song from Cassadee Pope’s upcoming album. “Good Times” is the kind of party song I usually avoid, but there’s something about sounding as if Avril Lavigne took up the kind of 1970s rock that was influenced by country’s Bakersfield Sound… it just amuses me. Read the rest of this entry »

In Oz the Great and Powerful, carnival magician Oscar Diggs visits the Land of the Plot Holes.

Faced with an incomprehensible quest, Diggs musters his power of suspending disbelief, which enables him to float over dark bottomless pits of implausibility, held aloft by only a wink, a smirk, and determination to hold onto his top hat. His reward is wealth, power, redemption, kisses with the one hot chick who doesn’t hate him yet, and the opprobrium of people who got as far as the second volume of Frank L. Baum’s classic series.

Come with me into the spoiler-filled Land of the Plot Holes… but first, learn the magic phrase that will get you from point to point over this rough terrain.

No, it’s not “there’s no place like home.” It’s “wait, what?” Say it with me. “Wait, what?” (If no children are present, “WTF?” will also work.)

Here come the credits, delightfully in black-and-white turn-of-the-century clip art, so try your utmost to disassociate this look from Monty Python’s Flying Circus… Read the rest of this entry »

Not only is it possible to construct a dessert using peas and carrots, it’s a downright good idea, and the result will go beautifully with a few cucumber sandwiches and petit fours for an elegant afternoon tea.

While peas and carrots actually were random ingredients hanging out in my kitchen, they’re also the March challenge ingredients for Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker.
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This is the very first time I’ve tried to make pastry from scratch, for which I can thank — with a rueful, flour-coated smile — the Lady Behind the Curtain Dessert Challenge for March. [Spoiler: despite being fluffy rather than flaky, the results tasted good. So there's hope.]

The key ingredients were almond paste and pastry. For two entire months of planning, I swore I was going to make a sort of tart with prefab pie crust, prefab almond paste, and jelly in a nice jar. Then I found myself standing in the baking aisle of Transitional Neighborhood Kroger with nary a tube of almond paste to be seen… but sliced almonds marked 40% off.

It’s not that I dare mightily: it’s that I’m both lazy and cheap. So this coffee cake is entirely made from scratch, and would probably have still been pretty easy if I were better at it.

For no really clear reason, this coffee cake got me listening to the stream of Megan Hilty’s new album, It Happens All the Time (buy at Amazon, buy at iTunes), so don’t hesitate to check it out, particularly her cover of “Dare You to Move” (which is not quite the same as “dare you to make pastry,” but it’ll do).
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Jessica Fletcher joins the Golden Girls in the Fresh-Baked Mystery series by Livia J. Washburn (official site). In Killer Crab Cakes, retired schoolteacher Phyllis Newsom is housesitting her cousin’s B&B on the Texas Gulf Coast, and she’s managed to haul along her boarders from her hometown: Carolyn (the bitchy one), Eve (the mantrap), and Sam (the boyfriend). Mayhem ensues.

The book moves at a leisurely pace, leaving the reader time to ponder which recipe to try (or to think about booking tickets to the Gulf Coast, as the descriptions are seductive). I should probably make the cookies that Phyllis enters in the baking contest, but I cook so many sweets, and I’ve  often vaguely wondered whether seafood Mexican involves cream cheese or cream or what… so the seafood quesadillas, it is.

As a reminder that today’s grandparents and retirees are children of the 1960s, not the 1930s, here’s a little Donovan cover about a crab. I went with a cover because there doesn’t seem to be a clear live tubie of the original — and also because this Sou’sideLiam is a nice listen. (He has a Youtube channel of covers of music of this era.)

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This month’s Improv Cooking Challenge at Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker involved “hearts and flours.” Of course, I wrote this down as “hearts and flowers,” which is slightly different. The result is these lavender-filled, lemon-glazed croissants, which are meant to be both quick and easy. The flour, however, is already mixed into the pre-fab croissant dough. Or you could make your own croissant dough.

The natural accompaniment is Ontario’s SayWeCanFly, whose song “Hearts and Flowers” is not the usual romantic piffle or anti-piffle. SayWeCanFly (last seen here, with cucumber cake) is Brandon Barrie’s moody, introspective, yet ultimately cheerful acoustic project. It bespeaks weathered barns and… well… fields of lavender under cloudy skies.

So let’s preheat the oven to 375 (or whatever the dough says on the package) and make a little something for afternoon tea.

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Black Forest Brownies are so easy to make that, if right now on the morning of Valentine’s Day, you haven’t whipped up a sweet dessert to share, you can get this done and still have plenty of time to sprinkle rose petals, whip through your tax returns, or negotiate peace in the Middle East.

This month’s Lady Behind the Curtain Dessert Challenge ingredients were chocolate and cherry. Play your cards right at the dollar store, and these brownies are also a bargain! Plus, they can be varied in numerous ways that I’ll describe at the end of the recipe.

Valentine’s Day calls for a dopey love song, and handily, Tegan and Sara’s new album Hearthrob (buy at iTunes, buy at Amazon) has that song. It’s called “Love They Say,” and it’s reputedly constructed from every cliché in the love-song biz. Billboard‘s right in saying it cries out to be in the soundtrack to a teen movie.

Preheat your oven to 325, and let’s embrace the chocolate. Read the rest of this entry »

If Martha Stewart were a 40-ish widow in rural Ohio, the result would be Suzanne Dietz, heroine of Bedeviled Eggs by Laura Childs (official site). Suzanne is one of three partners in The Cackleberry Club, an adorable breakfast/lunch/tea restaurant with an adorable bookstore nook, an adorable knitting supplies nook, and a slew of adorable community activities. Her partners and best friends are Petra, who does the actual cooking, and Toni, who seems to be the town wild child.

In this book, third in the series, an adorable community event (“read dating”) turns sour when a mayoral candidate is murdered. Some of the murder-related scenes (and their aftermaths) are so grim that the extreme coziness starts to read like Dietz’s deliberate pushback against a harsh small-town reality, though the character’s not self-aware on that level.

What this book supplied, along with so much adorability that I feel a lingering guilt at not decorating for minor holidays, is a slew of tempting egg dishes. One is a breakfast pizza that sounds remarkably like the famous Kum & Go breakfast pizza but turns out to be made with biscuit dough. This was a must-try. And it just calls for a little swing, with Hilary Lester and Mick the Knife covering Dean Martin.

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Colton Dixon blinded me with science.

While I wasn’t overwhelmed by his stint as a reality-TV personality on American Idol, his launch into Christian Contemporary Music coincided with my seizing on the research question of whether Idol alumni would have an easier time building sustainable careers if they started in a niche genre, rather than being hurled at pop music. It’s hard to get more “niche” than CCM while still singing in English — no, as far as I know, no group sings in tongues — unless one dedicates one’s life to smooth jazz.

So I started reading Dixon’s interviews, generally enjoyed how he talked about music, and figured, with the release of his debut album, A Messenger (buy at iTunes, buy at Amazon), that thoroughness required giving it a listen to see if he delivers on his promises to do musically exciting things.

There is no logical or theological reason this should be paired with orange muffins that are secretly filled with strawberry jam. Dixon does not, for instance, have a jam band (that would be Season 11 winner Phillip Phillips). His style is unsurprisingly alt-rock, spurring (fair) comparisons to genre-mates MercyMe and Casting Crowns. Let’s preheat the oven to 350, find an orange, and contemplate this album track-by-track. (If you use Spotify, you can follow along without committing.)

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Today, Andy Skib fired me as a fan. He didn’t put on a Donald Trump-style toupé or haul me into the board room. It wasn’t even personal. The reasons were purely economic.

Since his firing me resulted in some new ideas for the painfully slow-going music-industry novel in progress and re-ordered my priorities for 2013 (not to mention leaving me with music to enjoy from the days before I was deemed unworthy, including the aptly titled Lost in America EP reviewed here), I’m not going away mad.

His firing me as a fan was a natural consequence of changes in the music industry, and it’s the implications of those changes that I want to talk about here. The frivolously easy apple desert is the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, so you may as well preheat the oven to 375.

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When Selena’s father told her he was going to drop by to show her a new purchase, she didn’t expect a motorcycle.

Selena is the proud co-owner, with her boyfriend Geoff, of a restored cottage in the humble Brentwood section of the Coronado Historic District. The house was barely a shell when they moved in, but with love, elbow grease, much recourse to Craig’s List, and some help from day laborers whose papers they didn’t check too closely, the two of them have made it a home.

The place may be small — it’s under 400 square feet — but it means home ownership.

This is the dollhouse that I impulsively bought as a shell, with no idea what I was going to do with it. It’s a Dura-Craft Sweetheart Cottage, which purports to be 1:12 (standard dollhouse scale). Since I didn’t know better, I filled it with vintage furniture in 1:18 (smaller than standard dollhouse scale). It seems happy that way.

Since Selena’s about to invite her father, Len, in for a cup of Earl Gray, how about we take the tour?

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If that’s a banana in my curry, I’m plenty glad to see it.

This dish is called Voodoo Chicken because when I invented it, I was slogging through one of those dreadful snuffly colds that intensifies for weeks. I resolved to throw into one easy-to-make dish every health-inducing ingredient I could find in the kitchen. And I woke up the next morning with a bare minimum of symptoms.

Bet your chicken soup can’t say that!

It also fulfills the requirements of combining bananas and nutmeg for the January Improv Cooking Challenge at Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker.

The dish is an implausible mish-mash, which means its musical accompaniment is another implausible mish-mash that somehow works: The Caribbean (Facebook). The band’s most recent album, Discontinued Perfume (iTunes, Amazon), is a bizarre and wonderful fusion of rock, jazz, folk, lounge, and Brazilian music. Let’s preheat the oven to 350, regard some chicken breasts with a bleary eye, and check out “Mr. Let’s Find Out,” the track that’s earned the loudest critical plaudits.

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Appropriately, my lunch at the Angel’s Trumpet Ale House before seeing $ellebrity (the acclaimed indie movie about the celebrity photo industry) was invaded by participants in the No Pants Light Rail Ride.

This latter event is what it says on the tin: participants ride light rail while not wearing pants. Since highs today barely scraped 50, many of them were wearing parkas, mittens, scarves, and Viking helmets… but no pants. They merrily took photos of one another to distribute via Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. But most — or at least those who were still sober when I got done with the movie — would probably have been freaked out if I’d started snapping shots on my iPhone to post on my Facebook, blog, or Twitter. Pantsless candid images under their control were fun and funky. Pantsless candid images without their consent quickly shift over the line to creepy.

The rise of microcelebrity is one factor that director Ken Mazur omits from his exploration of the relationship between celebrities and paparazzi, but I think it has something to do with how we got from the days of the glamorous photo op to today’s norm that there are no boundaries, and that it’s somehow selfish and inappropriate for celebrities to resist living every moment in the spotlight.

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Murder on the Menu by Miranda Bliss is very thoroughly a chick-lit prymance, so we’ve drifted a long way from my normal tastes, apparently on a sea of split pea soup.

Sadder but wiser gal Annie Capshaw, still smarting from the end of her perfect marriage, apparently took a cooking class in the prior book. Together with her ditzy and gorgeous friend Eve and the oh-so-luscious instructor of the course, they solved a murder and then decided to open a restaurant together. Further mayhem ensues. The hot cop this time is a cranky former flame for whom Eve still carries a torch. The restaurant is in Alexandria, Virginia, on King Street, probably near Patrick Street.

Nonetheless, I’ve been wanting a good split-pea soup recipe, and at the time I wrote this, I’d been coughing and sniffling my way into a chilly, dank winter, so here is the moment!  A restaurant-based plot calls for a restaurant-based song by Irish rock band The Thrills, still on their indefinite hiatus since 2008.
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These muffins are my effort to find a cure for the common cold. They contain raisins (iron! potassium!), walnuts (protein!), pineapple (manganese! vitamin C!), orange juice (more vitamin C!), carrots (anti-oxidants!), and enough spices to decongest an elephant.

This throw-everything-in approach fits well with my pick from Run Hundred‘s top 10 workout songs list for January (and yes, I do feel hypocritical when I’ve been in no condition to go to the gym). The first time I heard somebody on the radio rapping “I wear your granddad’s clothes – I look incredible,” I figured this was some odd Will Smith schtick. (You must admit, Will Smith looks incredible in basically anything.)

No, it’s “Thrift Shop” by hipster-rapper Macklemore and producer Ryan Lewis featuring Wanz. And it is about… wait for it! Thrift shopping. Preheat the oven to 375 and let’s make some muffins.

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This divine toffee from Candy Apple Dead by Sammi Carter (blog) is the first in a series of trying the recipes recommended by all those mystery novels in which major characters cook up a storm — an idea which was sort of suggested by Joyed_ and named by kyoat.

I found a list of cozies with cooks. I hied myself to the library (hie ho!). I brought home the first four books I found. Themes are, therefore, indicative of the author’s state of mind, but not of mine. (My state of mind involves joining Sweet Sharing Monday, hosted by Say Not Sweet Anne.)

Abby Shaw, back in her picturesque Colorado hometown after a law career and a divorce, has inherited her Aunt Grace’s candy shop, Divinity. Recipes for a few of the many tempting candies Abby makes are provided at the back of the book. So let’s arm ourselves with a stick of butter, an appropriate soundtrack from Paolo Nutini, and the official recipe as provided by Ms. Carter’s publisher — and get cooking. (If you feel impatient, there’s a box score at the end, summarizing my views on both the recipe and the mystery.)

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My freshman year of high school, I had to read Les Misérables twice, first in French, than in English. It wasn’t easier on the second go.

The memory is so traumatic that my first act upon getting home from seeing the movie of the musical (official site) was to Google the dude who’d been the one other freshman in second-year French. It turns out the reason we didn’t form a life-long friendship birthed in shared literary agony was that his family moved away at the end of that school year… and these many years later, his personal web site still bitches about how much he hated my hometown. Well, at least that made him easy to identify.

Had we known that Les Miz is essentially Lord of the Rings set in early 19th-century France and gone horribly wrong, the novel might have been easier to endure. We know it’s secretly LOTR because all big scenic shots are composed in CGI Swoopy-Cam, where we have to look down from a vast distance on the crawling impersonal bulk of Mordor… I mean, Paris. See, Frodo has these legal papers he needs to drop in a pit of flame… well, come along, and we’ll discuss the 12 lessons of Les Misérables-the-movie-of-the-musical. Read the rest of this entry »

The Hipsters — Selena, Veinous Dude, and Fido the cat — wish you happy holidays.

It’s time for year-end lists, not to mention listing to starboard from excess eggnog, so let’s make a list of the lists that you’ll find after the jump.

Top 5 Failed Projects (if you enjoy schadenfreude, you’re maden in the shaden)

Top 5 Life List Experiences (in which falling off the horse counts as an accomplishment)

Top 5 Experiences Not on the Life List (but they should have been)

Top 10 Blog Posts on Food or Music of 2012 (where I get to introduce you to some favorite people)

Top 5 Projects for 2013 (the times, they are a-changin’)

Are you ready to get jumpin’?
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The Steampunk Orchid is my retreat from writers’ block, which has been particularly immovable lately. The problem — diagnosed this morning after I’d apparently reached some magical quotient of Little Bits of Wood Painted and Glued — is that both the main plot and the most suspense-filled subplot reach a temporary resolution simultaneously. So both the reader and the author go: “Okay, that’s taken care of. Let’s go make cookies!”

Now I get to go through the earlier chapters and pull up another subplot so that there’s something to herd the reader into the new chapter. Fortunately, the material exists — it’s just not very well deployed.

That’s how I feel about my collection of Little Bits of Wood, some days. The process got me thinking about how many “truths” on creativity don’t necessarily ring true when I’m in the middle of creating. If you’d like to come along for a house tour, I’ll share the thoughts, too. If you’d prefer musical accompaniment, Paste distributed a free sampler of holiday music (get download link here), which I’m not going to attempt to review because that’s too many subplots for a single blog post. Read the rest of this entry »

Quadruple chocolate Nutella cookies are one essential to a well-ordered life.

Another essential is knowing how to determine the best place for a musician to tattoo the name(s) of his or her high-roller fan(s). This question may become pressing in the new music industry of the 21st century. Indeed, you, armed with a spare $1000 and a love of hard rock, could make it a pressing issue for guitarist Neal Tiemann (@nealfingtiemann — no doubt any British ancestors pronounced that middle name “Fotheringay-Haugh”).

The inestimable Mr. Tiemann’s band, Hell or Highwater (a project of Brandon Saller of Atreyu), is about to tour with The Darkness, and the guys have set up a little Kickstarter fund to cover gas and van repairs, as all indie band vans break down somewhere between Barstow and Oklahoma City. Two tattoos are available. The band’s music, I’ve talked about before — here, for debut album Begin Again, and here, for a live show under the group’s former name of Black Cloud Collective — so we can get right down to the important issue of where that tattoo should best go. And we can make Nutella-based cookies, loosely using flower7′s Food.com recipe.

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