Oh. Canada.

Just as I finished the 50 States / 50 Bands / 50 Dishes project, indie musician Braden Barrie of Ontario, Canada, showed up among my Twitter followers. Either there’s a coincidence here, or this dude read me correctly, as I’d been considering a hasty run through Canada before calling it a day on geography.

Making a decision on Barrie’s project, SayWeCanFly (official site) was the easy part. Moody, introspective indie-type music, yet with a certain wistful upbeat quality on the choruses? Say, something that belongs on a weather-beaten farmhouse porch in rural Ontario, in some idyllic summer before the freshman year of college? No problem.

Canada is more challenging. Regional cuisines aren’t as clearly defined or as readily replicable as in the United States. Caribou? Think $20/lb at the boutique butcher. Fiddlehead ferns? Not in season. Butter tarts? My hips say no, and hips don’t lie.

However, Ontario has its “fresh, local ingredients” movement, and among the substances that are fresh and local is the cucumber. The deal was sealed when Barrie tweeted about stopping at a local farm stand for cucumbers and honey. Cukes it is! And this calls for cucumber cake (recipe from Honest Cooking). Preheat the oven to 350, brandish a cucumber menacingly, and let’s check out some tracks from Barrie’s new EP, Dandelion Necklace (buy on iTunes). Read the rest of this entry »

A journey of 50 recipes for 50 states begins with a single pudding… and ends with one, too.

Technically, Alabama was sweet-potato pie, but experience testifies that the difference between a custard, a flan, and a pudding is largely the angle of view. And now I’m going to contradict myself and try to construct a Wyoming apple pudding that doesn’t contain eggs and milk. I’m complicated that way. I also couldn’t face chopping apple with my damaged hand (it’s much better now) and wanted an easier approach.

Since this project — based on the Jiffy corn pudding that snuck into New Mexico — is highly experimental, it’s fitting to accompany it with the highly experimental music of Harriman Exit (Reverbnation). Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s open packages! Read the rest of this entry »

Wisconsin is supposed to make a girl feel bratty. Bratwursty, that is.

Problem is, I’ve made bratwurst before. And thanks to my ham, I have… well, I have a lot of ham in the house. Adding to the supply of pork and pork products seemed imprudent.

My solution was to meld the idea of bratwurst with apples and onions and the concept of Jefferson’s Virginia ham pasta. So we have ham, pasta, apples, onions, cranberries (a Wisconsin product!), and a sort of au jus.

I think I found piano-driven alternative rockers The Picture Perfect (Bandcamp) via Reverbnation’s local-chart feature. This is indie summer jam material, right on target for 2012′s young feel even though the latest album is a year old. It would seem that Reverbnation shares Paste’s ability to empty my wallet. Shall we find out why?
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Parsnip flan brought tears to my eyes.

The context was not joy, but frustration. Since much of the native cooking of the Pacific Northwest involves fish that would cost a fin and a tentacle here in Phoenix, I’d decided to go with the “emulate a fine restaurant” theory of cooking, choosing Crush (official site) for its parsnip flan, though my model recipe comes from a chef in Colorado via the Mother Earth News.

Accompanying this excitement requires exploring yet another of Paste‘s attempts to empty my wallet directly into the bank accounts of indie bands (12 Washington bands). As always, I will restrain my enthusiasm to three of the bands on the list, starting with the revelation that Seattle has a long-time, active soul scene, and that’s not a misprint for “sole scene,” no matter how often you’ve been to the Pike’s Place Fish Market and had flatfish flung at you. We’re going to check out Pickwick (Bandcamp), which is less Dickensian than OtisReddingsian. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of us are just hams at heart.

In trying to find a dish for Virginia, I dithered over numerous varieties of chicken. Then I suddenly remembered that I couldn’t remember having ever baked a ham before, and if I couldn’t remember baking a ham, then even if I had baked a ham, it wouldn’t count.

An authentic Smithfield ham isn’t something one can readily obtain in Phoenix… but a ham’s a ham for all that. Especially when it’s accompanied by a nice corn meal biscuit, in the spirit of Southern hot breads for future sandwiches.

To accompany hamming it up, I went a-Googling, through the fields of corn, and decided to start a three-band set with dark electronica band Dead Fame (Reverbnation), who are roughly what would happen if Joy Division had collaborated with The Cure. Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s ham it up. Read the rest of this entry »

Somehow, I’d envisioned Utah cuisine as hearty pioneer recipes, made from scratch and full of natural goodness.

Turns out that Utah cookery is mostly about the Jell-O, except when it’s about the canned cream-of-mushroom soup. Sour cream and Cool Whip are both used copiously, though presumably not interchangeably.

Among these classics is Pretzel Jell-O Salad (recipe from The Girl Who Ate Everything), which has the merit of mixing sweet and salty flavors. It’s usually made with strawberries, but I wanted to try something a little edgier, since the risk level involved in having never made Jell-O before wasn’t high enough for me. I have a vaguely Middle Eastern feel in mind, with peach Jell-O, nectarines, honey, and coriander.

To accompany this adventure in sugar overload, let’s listen to Baby Ghosts (Bandcamp). As well as being the Boston Phoenix’s 2012 pick for Utah, the band’s hyperkinetic lo-fi sound, with punk and rockabilly undertones, provides an appropriate soundtrack for working off the calories in this dish. Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s go! Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

A rolled taco is a happy taco.

There are two possible responses to Phoenix’s extreme summer heat, after one eliminates the option of staying indoors with fruit-infused mixed drinks poured over copious quantities of ice. Seek shade or seek the underbelly of Phoenix civilization. The latter won’t actually be any cooler, but it doesn’t require wasting a shower or a fancy outfit on the experience of being choked by heat and dust.

So I headed south, in the manner of a migratory bird with a faulty datebook, to see what lay between the Salt River and South Mountain. The intersection of barrio, suburbia, farmland, and the mountain fortifications of the wealthy seems to belong to another world.

The current temperature makes it a no-brainer to start the Daytrotter accompaniment with Canadian dance-punk band Hot Hot Heat (official site). The band started as hardcore, but, y’know, stuff happens. And that applies to development south of the Salt River, too. Buckle up and come along.
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What you are about to experience is a potato salad version of South Carolina’s famous Frogmore Stew.

This sort of high-concept statement is endemic to the local South Carolina music scene, if Paste’s list of 12 South Carolina Bands You Should Listen To Now is any indication. Admittedly, South Carolina bands rarely make these statements about potato salad or even about Frogmore Stew, preferring to stick to topics such as love, death, and the Civil War — but concept albums abound.

Today’s quick threebie tour may therefore seem a little piecemeal (as opposed to peameal, which will be saved for Canada). But piecemeal is a good fit for a dish constructed from handy pantry items. Let’s start at a position not too far out in left field with not-quite-shoegazing Run Dan Run (Bandcamp). Read the rest of this entry »

My passion for lemon is equivalent to other people’s passion for chocolate, so inevitably I was bitten by the Pinterest-borne lemon brownie bug (recipe from Baker Girl). My version has a twist.

Lemon brownies — twist and all — felt like the natural match for my overdue rendezvous with a feature on Jesse Thomas (official site), the husky-voiced  acoustic pop-rock guitarist whom I saw open for Green River Ordinance last month (a thundering experience). Thomas had won me from skepticism to fascination in the course of her short set, which I think counts as a win-win. She is (or was) touring to draw attention to her album War Dancer (buy on iTunes), so we’re going to pay some attention to it. Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s get lemony. Read the rest of this entry »

Shrimp, glorious shrimp!

Since I was meeting a gal-pal for lunch at divey Chinese restaurant Wahsun, it seemed like a good moment to take a closer look at the surrounding neighborhood. Although I’ve been to the Bookmans over there many times, it’s never occurred to me to look around: there’s presumably a dimensional rift that transports a person directly from Christown Spectrum Mall to the Bookmans plaza.

It turns out there’s a haunted strip mall.

These excursions require a little Daytrotter, so let’s start with Minnesota’s One for the Team (official site), a sort of jazzy pre-grunge-ish, maybe-a-little-folk, let’s-bang-on-things group that writes about love gone the ways love goes. Extremes of ups and downs turn out to be apt for this neighborhood tour. Hop in the car with me, and let’s go. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the morning mind screw.

Blackberries seemed inevitable for Oregon, despite my recently having wallowed in them for the Black Keys, where the blackberry sour-cream coffeecake had salted caramel topping. One of the flagship recipes for Oregon blackberries is blackberry roll, which is ordinarily a yeast pastry. Yeast pastries require the sort of advance planning that involves getting up at 4 a.m. to have breakfast at 9 a.m., at which point I’m wailing about starving to death louder than the cat, so they rarely happen in my world.

Then I found Small Things’ recipe for a biscuit-style blackberry roll with a surprise ingredient (recipe). Now we’re cooking with gas… well, with baking powder. And with the surprise ingredient.

One good mind screw deserves another. I went looking for a Portland, Oregon, alternative artist on Reverbnation. When I clicked on Jennifer Batten (official site, Reverbnation page), I assumed I was getting another earnest, sweet-voiced, guitar-strumming gal with heartfelt yet cynical lyrics. No objection: I often like that sort of thing. Instead, it’s a funk/art rock sound with heavy distortion and sampling, like a brunch soundtrack beamed in from Saturn. Preheat the oven to 350 and come check it out. Read the rest of this entry »

Is this burger habit-forming, or is it just a Habit Burger?

@BuildingPHX tweeted about the new Habit Burger at McDowell and Seventh Avenue just as I was trying to find something adventurous to do today. Adventures in Phoenix are harder to come by in June than in March, as in summer our outdoors becomes so hot it is possible to get burns from touching metal door handles. (Protip: Don’t even think about sitting on the tram-stop benches unless you have a kink for the grilled-flesh look.)

So I decided to try something new: not just a new burger, but a new approach of exploring a neighborhood in detail to see what interesting places I might have missed. This process has two utterly arbitrary ground rules: (1) I must try a food or drink; and (2) I must go in one new store, art gallery, or other public place where activities happen.

Also, since I was listening to new-to-me bands on Daytrotter while working on this, I’m going to tout a few bands, albeit without much detail. Is that enough excitement to join me in checking out this little slice of the Phoenix urban landscape? Read the rest of this entry »

Oklahoma! Where the chicken-corn pudding comes sweeping off the plate!

Oklahoma has a state meal, and this isn’t it. The last time I contemplated the heart-attack potential of the state meal – black-eyed peas, chicken fried steak, cornbread, corn on the cob, okra, strawberries, sausage and gravy, barbeque pork, squash, biscuits, grits, pecan pie — I swallowed hard and made pecan pie muffins instead (last seen here with To Have Heroes). I should do this again, and so should you, as they were really good.

Only after my chicken-corn pudding was in the oven did it occur to me that I’d essentially averaged my two dishes from New Mexico (chicken enchiladas and corn pudding, last seen here with Breaking Blue), and I would argue that tackling a radically different pudding paradigm justifies the experiment. I found a band by accident: this very odd incident reminded me of the existence of the Starlight Mints, and it turns out that former mint Allan Vest is working on new projects (official site). We’re going to take a look at what those projects might be. But first, preheat your oven to 350. Read the rest of this entry »

Cincinnati is the city of kinky chili. There’s the 3-way, the 4-way… and for the bold, the 5-way.

There’s also the reputation that this chili gets spicy with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and sometimes chocolate.

Ohio is another state that Paste has already hit in its mission to enlighten the world on local band scenes and empty my bank account (right here). This makes it easy to plunge right in with Walk the Moon (official site) which is in roughly the vein of Young the Giant or the Kaiser Chiefs (and has toured with both). Pull out a big frying pan and check out “Anna Sun,” which is the band’s indie hit. (There’s an album with RCA due out in July.) Read the rest of this entry »

I have found my purpose in life. It is to act as a Crowd Herder at weeknight music shows.

Set one 6’1″ woman in motion, drifting gently from the back of the venue to the front, and everybody who isn’t a professional basketball player will really, really hustle to be in front of her. Next thing you know, that random scattering of people is formed into a nice compact crowd near the stage. Hi, guitar player! Hi, lead vocalist!

On Wednesday night, I was at Martini Ranch to see Green River Ordinance (official site), a guitar-heavy pop-rock band with driving beats, touching lyrics, Americana moments and occasional gospel shadings.

My first encounter with GRO was The Morning Passengers EP (last seen here, with really awful low-fat brownies), which I bought due largely to peer pressure (thereby demonstrating the truth of the NPD Group’s claim that friends’ recommendations are second only to radio for music discovery) and enjoyed so much for its Americana stylings that I later played it at least five times on the way to Bisbee. Read the rest of this entry »

North Carolina is a top producer of yams. It yam what it yam.

The further I get into the 50 states project, the tougher it becomes to find a new dish to tackle. Since I’d hoisted myself on my own poblano pepper trying to copy a favorite restaurant offering for New Mexico, I figured I’d do the same for North Carolina. This left me with a choice of:

1. Slow-roasting pulled pork while running the air conditioner due to outside temperatures being eleventy-one, thus destroying all my eco-friendly credentials; or

2. Eyeing the menu of Raleigh’s Bloomsbury Bistro (here).

Prolonged gazing led to the realization that some food is meant to be restaurant food, due to the number of ingredients, reductions, stuffings, ravioli in flavors not marketed by Buitoni, and items that I can neither identify nor pronounce. Nonetheless, I decided to be inspired by the last item on the list: some sort of pale protein with “smashed potatoes,” haricot verts, a sauce, and maybe a fish theme. To go along with this, Paste helpfully provides 12 North Carolina Bands You Should Listen To Now, though we will limit ourselves to three. First up: Wood Ear (Bandcamp). Is it a mushroom or a musical pun? Read the rest of this entry »

Put it in a bowl with some yogurt, sprinkle with chopped bacon, and call it breakfast trifle.

May’s Run Hundred list of top workout songs startled me by including The Black Keys. Black Keys led ineluctably to baking with blackberries (well, 99-cent blackberry packs at Sprouts may have helped), in a modified mash-up of blackberry sour-cream coffee cake from What’s Cooking America and strawberry sour-cream cornmeal cake from Momtastic.

The really exciting modifications are not the ones that caused the loaf to fall apart — that was the result of the stumbling-around-kitchen-in-haze mistakes. I still need to mop up flour on the stove, blackberry juice on the floor, and a fascinating array of spillage on the counter. But first, preheat the oven to 325 and let’s boogie. Read the rest of this entry »

New York has an official muffin.

It is the apple muffin, although apple trees presumably don’t grow in the Big Apple, unless Brooklyn hipsters have started planting orchards atop their brownstones.

I will leave Googling that as an exercise for the reader.

New York City is, of course, clavicle-deep in hot indie bands. However, since I’d ranted about how God Bless America short-changed Syracuse’s local culture, I felt compelled to dig up indie bands from Syracuse. There are many. It seems 1 in 8 young adult Syracusians plays in a band, mostly alt-rock.

So let’s preheat the oven to 450 and start with the quasi-famous Merit (official site, where you can download the entire Arson Is for Lovers album for free). 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).

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