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 »

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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The oyster makes me want to roister.

My first encounter with oyster gratin was at Colonial Williamsburg, where I might have insisted on having breakfast at the same restaurant every day because I needed my oyster mush. But I’ve never dared make it, figuring it has to be difficult.

It’s not. It’s oysters with crackers and seasonings. Indeed, to raise the level of difficulty — well, actually because I’m too lazy to haul myself to the grocery — we’re going to make the crackers from scratch.

Maryland’s a weird sort of challenge for the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project, as it’s the home of plenty of bands that every hipster knows (e.g., Animal Collective, Good Charlotte) and it feels like cheating to write about one. We need something obscure. We need a member of the Wham City collective. We need Dan Deacon (official site). This’ll drive you crackers. Read the rest of this entry »

This salmon needs a cure.

Not The Cure. A cure. Stop #2 on the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project (#5 on the Life List) is Alaska, where the Boston Phoenix’s pick is experimental electronic band Pretty Birds That Kill (Bandcamp page).

Alaska is a rough-and-ready state where tough women cure their own salmon. Since my fondness for lox is greater than my budget for lox — a situation that results in a lox-out — I thought I’d take some $1.99/lb salmon chunks from Pro’s Ranch Market and see if I couldn’t cure my own salmon at home. Salon.com helpfully provided instructions for curing gravlax, so let’s see if the cure is worse than prevention. 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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This seductive Persian shrimp is a monument to changed plans. Not only did I change my mind against making the version with peaches (it’ll appear later), but shrimp had been intended for a band with a shrimp theme, until I realized I wanted to do something quieter and less crowded than the surrounding mini-festival.

At the Lost Leaf (home of $4 exotic beers), I found The Lonesome Heroes (web site) playing a no-cover show. I like alt-country reasonably well; I like beer reasonably well; and I like an evening out for $5 more than reasonably well. So if you’re looking for a connection between the dish and the band… um… it’s a very affordable dish for starving indie musicians to prepare, at least if they get a deal on frozen shrimp. Shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Nemor is a Texan who moved to Iceland to play professional basketball, rediscovered his love of the saxophone, and now writes and performs classic R&B in Norway. He is… The Most Interesting Man in the World.

He’s certainly the person whose music immediately inspired me to think “I must invent Norwegian-soul food fusion!” So I did. The results are a barbecue-style catfish (fish is very Scandihoovian) with yam chips.

For Nemor, inspiration comes in the form of a partnership with singer Kenya Emil. As Kenya and Nemor (official site), they have an EP, This Is Real, with an album threatened in the future. We’re going to explore the three main tracks of the EP while we make barbecue sauce. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week’s adventures in potato pancakes had left me with a surfeit of little red potatoes. This week’s adventures in grocery shopping had left me with a pack of mild white fish that I bought solely because it was 50% off.

By a process of reasoning to be detailed below, this led to the entirely obvious decision to invent Irish-Italian fusion cuisine, starting with Mild White Fish Puttanesca.

My original plan was to accompany this with Celtic punk rock, as I’ve been known to like that sort of thing. However, every band I tried on Thursday night seemed to be attempting Celtic metalcore… until I stumbled onto the ultimate fusion band. Can you say “Celtic-Slavic-Klezmer-Cajun fusion”?

Yeah, it is kind of a mouthful. The band is Zydepunks (listen). Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I was determined to tackle new Irish cuisine.

I ended up inventing Jewish food.

I guess it’s not just the corned beef that the two ethnic cuisines have in common.

Having stumbled down the path of the unpredictable, I feel no responsibility to provide a nice Celtic-influenced rock band or such. Instead, it’s time for Beth Ditto because I’m still in the mood for electronica and I need a sultry chick to enliven my shattered nerves. Ditto — ordinarily the lead singer of Gossip — has a new four-song EP out, and if you want to know what I’m talking about, you need to just go buy it. Really truly. Impulse purchases of this nature are what iTunes is for. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, one does things just for the halibut.

Associating any sort of food with International Women’s Day proved problematic. Salad implies we’re all dieting. Sweets imply we’re all indulging. If it’s too labor-intensive, I’m favoring devotion to housework. If it’s too quick-and-easy, I’m implying that working women don’t waste time in the kitchen.

The halibut.

Today is marked by my discovery of folk singer Peggy Seeger, whose life story strongly suggests that she knew when to say, “Aw, the halibut!” She’s the writer and performer of the perfect song for an International Women’s Day dedicated to equal access to education, training and science and technology. Read the rest of this entry »

I swear, I’m going to start adding colorful vegetables to main dishes simply to make them photograph better.

You’re lucky I kept my fork off this dinner long enough to aim the camera. It was the deliriously delightful result of deploying my new toy, which you’ll see below. This object is not a fishing pole. The tilapia comes from Fry’s, where I was sure I’d bought catfish nuggets, but it seems not.

In honor of having a new goodie to play with, we’re going to do one last round of Christmas music (for a total of two rounds, which is pretty restrained, if you think about it). Hie thee to Indie Rock Cafe’s playlist of Christmas songs. The player will run continuously once you start it, and I kind of started in the middle, so… Read the rest of this entry »

There are things more delightfully incongruous than a tuna steak poaching in wheat beer.

One such thing is Diane Birch’s new EP, The Velveteen Age (listening party through December 13), in which the bluesy-voiced singer collaborates with the psychedelic-influenced, progressive Phenomenal Handclap Band on covers of 1980s pre-grunge alternative songs.

If you think in terms of Janis Joplin singing Echo and the Bunnymen, you have roughly the idea. We’re going to accompany this with a nice pan-Asian noodle dish that deploys that hunk of tuna. 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 »

There’s something fishy going on here. Tonight’s theme was “I have to make something for dinner” combined with “there must be a way to consume leafy greens without making a salad.”

Since dinner was tossed together in a state of distraction, I need something distracting. A mesmerizing candidate is A Fine Frenzy (listen), which I discovered in Amazon’s $5 album sale. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, we have bananas! To my relief in tackling today’s World Cup Food Challenge, the utterly incompatible cuisines of Côte d’Ivoire and Brazil have one food in common: fried bananas. It’s kismet.

Portugal and North Korea are equally difficult to combine, and my solution turned out somewhat fishy. For New Zealand versus Slovakia, I had planned a complicated but somehow uninspired salad. The prospect of making it could not compete with the presence of the luscious red grapes, so that project was consigned to the land of regrets. And for regrets, there is no more appropriate musical match than Portuguese fado, represented tonight by one of it mainstream stars, Mariza (listen). Read the rest of this entry »

If I make a “lettuce entertain you” joke, I deserve to have someone roll up a sausage and hit me with it, so let’s just reflect on the fact that these prefab salad greens have been in the refrigerator for five days without rotting, giving me the suspicion that they’re secretly cellulose (an excellent source of fiber!). These are about to become something other than a salad. And the opening band on a four-band bill is funky cats Lettuce. Let’s roll on over to MySpace Music and check it out. Read the rest of this entry »

Bet you never knew black-eye peas were brought to the American South by Sephardic Jewish immigrants who settled in Georgia and were accustomed to serving the dish for Rosh Hashanah. (Yes, Wikipedia and I have been playing footsie under the dining table again.) I guess this makes them “soul food” in more ways than one.

These black-eye peas are about to become a side dish in a nice Southern fish fry, and in keeping with the soul food theme, we’re going to take a listen to some of the projects co-written or produced by Tennessee’s Sal Oliveri, whose background runs heavily toward Christian pop. Read the rest of this entry »