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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The Phoenix summer heat had so fried my brain that I forgot Texas includes Austin.

In my defense, Texas is a large place, and it’s easy to lose stuff there.

My realignment with reality was helped immensely by the discovery of a Texas indie music blog, helpfully called Indie Texas (site). I’m going to be lazy and cover “the first three bands I thought were kind of interesting,” a feat that did not require clicking to go back to older posts.

My other discovery was the Homesick Texan site (she has a cookbook, too). I was rather taken by the creamy chipotle shrimp with mushrooms and wild rice (recipe), so that’s the agenda for dinner. To accompany the early stages of boiling the grain, let’s check out darkwave band The Blackstone Rangers (Bandcamp). 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.”
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That, sir or ma’am, is a vegetable.

It’s not just any vegetable. It is a pickled green bean. Iowa, the next stop on the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project, also has German and Dutch immigrants, and these are people who felt that vegetables are happiest when soaked in vinegar and allowed to putrefy. Since I regard Vlasic ultra-hot Polish dill pickles as an entire food group comparable to chocolate in importance, pickling a green bean struck me as a splendid idea.

Also a splendid idea is Ames, Iowa’s Peace, Love, and Stuff (Reverbnation), the band that introduced me to the term “psychobilly.” Shall we be full of spit and vinegar? (Well, vinegar, anyway. Spit would be gross, in context.) Read the rest of this entry »

This is pork on the verge of a volcanic explosion.

One iconic dish for Illinois is Chicken Vesuvius, which I’ve been intending to make for over a week, except that suddenly chicken is a thought that makes me sicken. So I bought a ham slice and a package of hot Italian sausage — decisions that also turn this dish from a two-hour project to a fairly quick dinner.

Since the theme today is clearly “unexpected delights,” I skipped the Boston Phoenix’s first choice for Illinois and went with its second choice, Yawn (Bandcamp). As is so often the case lately, I can’t figure out the lyrics and nobody seems inclined to tell. But the production makes me smile. Read the rest of this entry »

Arizona — the state in which I live — presented a problem for the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project. The band is not the problem: the Boston Phoenix anoints psychedelic art-pop band ROAR (Bandcamp page), and since the alphabet didn’t align with my plans to see a local band, that’s fine.

No, the problem is the food. I’ve cooked a lot of Southwestern food for the blog, including salsa, chilaquiles, multiple variants on the enchilada, assorted tacos, corn muffins galore, and a variety of pulled meats. Everything left is either labor-intensive (tortillas, refried beans) or deep-fried (fry bread). I seriously considered trying to make corn tortillas… but I can walk to multiple stores that sell them in less time that it takes to earnestly press balls of damp masa between two dinner plates.

It was clearly time to hit the road for an iconic Phoenix dive experience: Carolina’s Mexican Food. We know it’s a dive because it’s in south Phoenix (literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks). And we know it’s a dive because it uses the Dive font on its sign. (No, we cannot sing “Dive fontin’” now — it’s dinner time!) Let’s take a listen to ROAR (who probably eat here) and see what’s in the styrofoam plate. Read the rest of this entry »

Behold the kick-off of the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project, which is #5 on my Life List and a heck of a lot easier to break into manageable steps than items #1 through #4. Since my knowledge of music is more eccentric than encyclopedic, I have recourse to the Boston Phoenix’s top indie band picks for each state. (This project will not be done in 50 days, as there are upcoming albums and live shows that I also want to write about.)

First up — since I’m going in alphabetical order, and it’s too early in the alphabet for me to be confused yet — is Alabama, for which the band is The Sunshine Factory (official site). The obvious culinary choice for Alabama is sweet potato pie. Pie crust is insanely caloric, so the plan here is a crustless pie, using A Bird in the Kitchen’s recipe as the starting point.

Pie contains sugar. The Phoenix recommends “Sugar Cane” as the must-hear track from recent album Sugar. I say we start there. Read the rest of this entry »

I could, at this very moment, be contemplating a morning listening to artist Lisa Congdon and an afternoon of learning to make balloon animals, had I but planned my life far enough ahead for Camp Mighty‘s weekend of developing useful skills.

The most compelling part of the program might be organized impetus to make a Life List of 100 items one positively wants to squeeze into one’s lifetime. My start at one is here: be warned that I led with ambitious goals, then calmed down.

And last night, I could have heard The Tontons (site), a psychedelic-indie-jazzy-bluesy band from Houston. But we’re going to hear them anyway! Along with a “bucket list” sort of recipe that fits “somewhere between Houston and Palm Springs” — I’ve thought about making seafood enchiladas for years but never have, as I can’t wrap my head around the cream-sauce interior, even though I make a decent Béchamel. That is all about to change. Shall we?

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Want to pull my pullet?

My Secret Recipe Club assignment for October was A Little Nosh, which is a site I’ve visited before for recipe ideas. Every one of Amy’s baking or breakfast projects looks mouthwatering… but if you’ve been following my State Fair entry extravaganza, you can guess how eager I am to bake right now. Fortunately, she also had the answer to a question that had been on my mind for almost a year: is it possible to make “pulled chicken” in the manner of pulled pork?

The answer is a resounding YES. Indeed, it’s easy, with her Pulled Chicken for Dummies instructions. Since she’s from somewhere on the Atlantic seaboard (yes, I feel vaguely like a stalker!) and I usually pair chicken with hip-hop or R&B, I thought Washington, D.C.’s Thievery Corporation (site) might be a fun and eclectic accompaniment. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s proof that “nuts to you” is a compliment.

My first mission with the Secret Recipe Club was to choose a recipe from The Gonzo Gourmet. Since she handily lists the recipes every girl should have in her repertoire, I started there and found… lo! Spiced Nuts. No store-bought flavored nuts have ever measured up to the ones my grandmother made at home… and this recipe has no blanching of almonds to make me blench.

Since The Gonzo Gourmet writes about San Diego farmers’ markets, a San Diego band was a natural match. One of the big local indie bands, Echo Revolution, turns out to have a Beatles- and Depeche Mode-influenced alt-rock indie vibe that works for me to the tune of buying its most recent album, Counterfeit Sunshine.  For a taste of the sound, let’s pull up the band’s MySpace page and get nutty.

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Peeps on Cupcakes!

My original goal was to make carrot cupcakes that looked like Easter baskets, but the supply of appropriate candy at Walgreen’s on the Saturday was so woefully limited that I decided the solution was a gratuitous application of instant cuteness at two packs for 79 cents.

I also used canned frosting. Since these cupcakes are all about pretense, that seemed like an apt theme for the occasion, starting with MGMT, a band that’s psychedelic enough to appreciate cupcakes with multi-colored Peeps. Read the rest of this entry »

Doesn’t that look like a tennis ball?

This isn’t entirely a coincidence, as I’d solicited dishes to go with tennis-themed songs. Calls for “racquet of lamb” were hilarious but outside the scope of my appetite. However, @KiraPP’s suggestion of stuffed onions was very do-able, and once one has to have stuffing, then @Archucookie’s mention of “LOBster” was a lay-up (oops! wrong sport!).

Although cream does not figure in the stuffing recipe, let’s start with vintage Cream, including a very young Eric Clapton. Read the rest of this entry »

Look! It’s not chicken!

I’m in the awkward position that the recipe turned out not to be complicated enough for the band I’d intended to write about (yes, there is a surprise coming) but edible enough to include. So I decided to treat this as an opportunity to explore. Since shrimp and red beans are vaguely New Orleans-like, I went looking for New Orleans indie bands and found Caddywhompus (listen) by the method of “choose an odd music combo.” Read the rest of this entry »