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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Sometimes a recipe is so resilient that even major screw-ups don’t prevent it from turning out tasty.

Appropriately for a hard-scrabble land of Appalachian make-do, it’s the West Virginia recipe that proved itself a survivor. My goal was to make Perfect Pepperoni Rolls from Chickens in the Road’s recipe. Imperfections turn out to be surprisingly undaunting (and are going to contribute to a really nifty bread loaf tomorrow). So let’s celebrate with A Little Nosh’s Tastetastic Thursday, where most people’s recipes go right.

In a similar feat of lack-of-daunt, the Boston Phoenix’s pick for West Virginia, Logan Venderlic (Bandcamp) turned out to be a perfectly sensible and charming choice, giving an edge to the acoustic folk sound. So let’s dig about in the refrigerator for yeast and start with “Jerkwater Town,” which is about exactly what it says on the tin.
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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 »

Vermont has a split personality.

To the right: colorful leaves and laconic farmers, making goat cheese and cider donuts. Honoring their legacy requires making baked cider donut mini-muffins, derived from Pixelated Crumb (recipe).

To the left, tie-dyed jam bands. This calls for the Boston Phoenix’s 2012 pick for Vermont: the Happy Jawbone Family Band (official site). The Happy Jawbone Family Band sounds exactly like one would expect a band called the Happy Jawbone Family to sound.

I’m typing this with my right hand because my left hand is immobilized in ice, thanks to having smacked my knuckles and the thin-skinned back of my hand into the wall of my 400-degree oven when putting the muffin tin in to bake. Spoiler: preheat the oven to 400. 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 »

There is an etiquette for posting possum recipes on the interwebs. Step 1: post recipe. Step 2: giggle and gasp about how OMG, people actually eat possum. Step 3: do not cook a possum.

Possum’s basically a fatty game meat, prepared essentially the same way as bear, only it’s a lot easier to get the drop on a possum. (Possum in a can is an obvious gag.)

I’m not going to cook a possum, as even the Ultraluxe Kroger has not gone so far as to carry possum; and if it did, possum would cost $13.99/lb. Capitalist Running Dog Safeway, on the other hand, had pork loin roasts marked down to $2.99/lb, making it inevitable that for Tennessee I’d be pulling somebody’s pork.

Much more worthy of gasps is Nashville songwriter Larry Weiss (Twitter, official site, Reverbnation), whom I encountered on Twitter when I was babbling about rhinestones. Larry Weiss wrote the iconic song “Rhinestone Cowboy.” He continues to be a working and prolific songwriter. We’re going to see what he’s been up to. But first, let’s set the oven to 200 degrees and revisit the classic. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a brash bread that wants to be bruschetta.

Old Market Eatery (official site) in Brookings, South Dakota, offers the twin lures of New American food and live music every Friday night. So in honor of its commitment to local music, we’re going to make herb bread.

No, wait, the herb bread is in honor of Old Market Bakery’s Grown-Up Grilled Cheese. The local music featured tends to run toward the jazzy and/or “traditional pop” end that goes down easy with a smooth red wine, which is frankly not my taste. But then Jonathan and Jeremy Hegg (official site) mentioned that they’re releasing an entire album of songs about trains. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Rhode Island is the home of the johnny cake.

Rhode Island is the home of the clam cake.

You can almost predict where this is going, can’t you?

I’m not the first person to think of putting clams in some sort of pancake: Barefoot Kitchen Witch did it four years ago (recipe). I might be the first person to think of making the clam pancake a johnny cake (recipe from The Foodie Grad).

Solving the recipe conundrum left me with the question of whether Rhode Island is large enough to have bands, or if the drummer ends up in Massachusetts. Actually, since the Boston Phoenix has released its 2012 Best New Bands in America, I decided to check out its pick, ambient noise mixer Kareem Abdul Jabbar Jr. (Soundcloud). Do you want to be hypnotized?
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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 »

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 »

Eight is the average number of gigs played by a North Dakota band before it either splits up or moves to Minneapolis.

Hip hop is the dominant local music form, according to Reverbnation. The style is presumably dubbed Frozen North.

Consistent with my new theme of reducing the cuisine of great regional restaurants to home cooking, I took my inspiration from the Hotel Donaldson (menu). The entrée most amenable to simplification is the spring chicken, largely for the appeal of making bright green edamame hummus.

The rapper most amenable to my ear turned out to be Mylez (Reverbnation), for the orchestral good time that he builds into his mixes. Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s get down and dakotan. 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 »

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 »

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 »

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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