We are about to get sauced. Cranberry sauced, that is.

Making cranberry sauce is a quick-and-easy way to impress the multitudes, plus you get to add booze. I see no downside here.

My actual downsides are roughly the size of a barn this weekend, as the car repair place disassembled my vehicle before realizing that its computer had been mistaken about the most important widget being in stock. Apparently whatever-it-is cannot be replaced by wadding up large quantities of dollar bills and stuffing them into the engine. So I’m without a car for the entire weekend, which means no flea market or unusual music-venue adventures.

But thanks to the magic of the interwebs, you and I are going to visit somebody else’s unusual music venue. We’re about to encounter the Rabbit’s Foot Ramble, which is filmed at Barber’s Shop Automotive in Sacramento, California. All of the words in that sentence, no matter how seemingly incongruous, are there on purpose. Trust me. More to the point, trust Macro Contrarian, who introduced me to the Ramble and to Mike Blanchard and the Californios (Facebook). Read the rest of this entry »

The urban equivalent of eating seasonally is eating with the produce section of the 99 Cents Only. A big bag of pears for 99 cents was too good a deal to resist, with the result that I have a lot of pears waiting to be eaten or possibly used in still life paintings.

This situation called for pear muffins. The calorie count of muffins in turn called for tackling a little something from the Run Hundred Top Workout Songs for September list, which oddly included Carrie Underwood’s recent hit, “Blown Away.” The dark tone of the song goes with the darker and richer flavoring I want to achieve with this particular muffin, so I think we have a match.

The version on the workout song list is the original, but a quick survey of Youtube determines that there are remixes. Remixes! And remix-style covers! This requires investigation.

Preheat the oven to 425, grab a pear (or grow a pear), and let’s start with Underwood’s original version for reference. 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 »

If we’re in Delaware, it must be time for crab puffs, right?

I’d girded my loins to tackle deep-frying… and then I priced crab. If one’s going to try a new and scary cooking technique, one doesn’t start with the most expensive available ingredient other than maybe foie gras, caviar, or pistachios. Meanwhile, frozen crab puffs were on sale at Kroger for $5.99 a four-pack.

So I went looking for another traditional Delaware dish and found corn pudding (Taste of Home recipe). My band pick to match is New Sweden (official site), whose sound is Americana, complete with mandolin, pump organ, viola, and banjo). The easiest way to get into New Sweden’s music is to go to its Reverbnation page (here) and press Play All. So please do. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

There exists a fusion genre of country rap, sometimes called “hopry.” The potential of this music to thoroughly cheese off dedicated rock fans delights me.

So does my turkey-mushroom pesto, which is one of those “well, let’s throw ingredients around and see what works” recipes that… works.

Thanks to Wikipedia’s willingness to nuzzle up and nibble my ear, I’m equipped with a selection of hopry acts. So if one doesn’t please, the rest may be worth trying. Shall we marinate a mighty mushroom as we ponder how Bubba Sparxxx is a country boy but a playa too? Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

These are shy forest meatballs. In solidarity with the nation’s weather, they are peeking from beneath a snowlike drift of parmesan.

The peas may or may not be in on the plot.

Although I tried a new pasta-cooking technique, the meatballs are the real excitement, as they’re the latest phase in my efforts to render ground turkey recognizable as food. Since the meal represents unexpected twists on the traditional, it’s as good a day as any to check out the AOL listening party for The Civil Wars’ debut album Barton Hollow (MySpace is here for when the full CD stream goes away). Read the rest of this entry »

Suddenly on Saturday morning, I came down with the urge to make chicken corn chowder.

It’s kinda purty, isn’t it?

This down-home spirit calls for country, a genre about which I fundamentally know nothing. So I can’t tell if Stealing Angels (listen) is good, but I can recount that the first track made me laugh so hard that I let the player keep running and couldn’t help enjoying what I heard. Read the rest of this entry »

Making banana bread had been on my to-do list, but this requires four bananas that are oozing past their use-by date, and I had but a single superannuated banana. This is good news for Musa acuminata that don’t like playing second banana.

So I made banana-nut corn muffins. In the vein of unlikely combos, today’s band came from this tweet; while the source may have a rep for preferring heavy metal, I have no trouble believing he’s heard and remembered Over the Rhine (listen — or not, as vids are about to happen), which is touring in support of its eleventh album, The Long Surrender, to be released on 1/11/11. People who know music well often know a great deal of music. Let’s start by checking out the song referred to. Read the rest of this entry »

These muffins involve an improbable combination of ingredients that should never have worked. This leaves me no choice but to recap the middle act from last Wednesday’s show, Tim Fite (listen). Tim Fite is what would happen if John Waters and Bullwinkle the Moose had settled down in Yoknapatawpha County and produced a son, and that son had moved to Brooklyn because he had a dream to make music.

Read the rest of this entry »

Grape pie looks a tad sanguinary.

Last night’s show headlined by Azure Ray (listen) somehow put me in mind of grape pie, which is odd, as I’ve never had grape pie. But I’d also never heard Azure Ray before. Before making the group’s current album, Drawing Down the Moon, Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink had spent seven years working on separate projects. With that kind of wait, it’s not surprising that the fans gathered at the Rhythm Room were the oldest I’ve seen there since a show that involved the reunion of a blues band from the 1980s. Not in walkers, mind you–but the drinking side of the house picked up bodies faster than the non-drinking side. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a classic cookie you remember from your childhood, but you’ve never experienced it quite like this before.

Tonight’s topic is a classic song that (if you’re American) you remember from your childhood, but before we get to the twist, let’s start with a fairly vanilla version as a point of comparison. Here’s America the Beautiful as performed by Willie Nelson and scores of others. You don’t have to listen to the whole thing — just get past Clint Eastwood’s rap and through one verse and chorus. While you’re at it, set your oven to preheat to 350, get a stick of butter softened, and check out The Joy of Baking’s recipe for thumbprint cookies, which we’re going to use as our culinary reference point. Read the rest of this entry »

Green River Ordinance’s Twitter profile states: “We like brownies.” Therefore, when it became apparent that the planned buffalo had roamed, brownies were the obvious dish to accompany the band’s new acoustic EP, The Morning Passengers.

This creates a problem. I’ve been trying to stick to healthful recipes (quick: what’s a five-letter word that incorporates both lettuce and sad?). So we’re going to try low-fat brownies. And since GRO recently fled its major label to go indie, it’s appropriate that these be rocky road brownies. So let’s lis-

Here we have a problem. If you go to the band’s MySpace, it’s still promoting the last album, Out of My Hands, in which GRO sounds like Rob Thomas with a Texas twang (in a very good way). Go to its Kickstarter site, and you’ll find a link to Noisetrade for… its prior EP, Wait a Minute (less Rob Thomas, more twang), in which the second track is about wanting to be famous and perhaps being a bit disillusioned about it (released on the day the band left its label–cue irony alert). For The Morning Passengers, your options are buying it on iTunes or taking my word for it. And it’s fairly noticeably different from what came before. Read the rest of this entry »

Talk of Williamsburg got me thinking about colonial food, mostly about a vaguely yet fondly remembered muffin that might have been corn, or ginger, or something else. Using the patent-pending Eilonwy Cooking Research Method (read a lot, wander off, cook something), I ended up with Colonial Chicken. This calls for an Americana band. My blind-luck choice was Chad Bault & The Trucking Company (listen). Appropriately, it seems to be playing mostly food festivals. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitting cherries without a cherry pitter is a sanguinary process.

Looking for music led me to Metacritic’s list of recent and upcoming and releases, from which I chose a band based on… um… well… it has a cool name. Its style is Americana, a.k.a., “country that will not cause you to lose your NPR membership or your indie cred.” So we’re going to listen to Red Wanting Blue (listen), which has a new album, These Magnificent Miles. Read the rest of this entry »

Technically, a cranberry is not a bean. It is, however, picked. And like Chuck Melchin, the singer/songwriter/guitarist whose leadership defines The Bean Pickers Union (listen), it is often found in the environs of Boston.

Melchin’s relationship with Sangria is unknown. These craisins are soaked in it. And cranberries like their bogs mildly acidic, just as Melchin often likes his lyrics. Read the rest of this entry »

These are heavy metal biscuits.

Note the irony of eating them on a flowered plate. That’s like finding out a source one appreciates for metal savvy listens to the Dave Matthews Band. Piquant.

My original pick for a metal band turned out to be punk (the punks!) which led me to research whether there is metal-punk fusion.

Answer: yes. There are half a dozen varieties, and the one I could not resist calls itself mathcore. A name like “mathcore” is an invitation to geek out (“le geek, c’est chic!”), so let’s prepare to begin to get started by queuing up Behold… the Arctopus. Presumably an arctopus is what you get when you draw cephalopods by the vector method.
Read the rest of this entry »

Given the reputation onions have for wanting their layers gradually peeled away, I should be doing classic stripper songs with this one.

While over at The Kitchn looking for something exciting to do with excess deli roast beef, I chanced on the idea of pairing it with onion marmalade, which is the future of that very onion.

I’m also going to try out the Chowhound hypothesis that dump cake can be revamped as dump cornbread. And with novelty food, it makes sense to tackle novelty music. Read the rest of this entry »