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 Pennsylvania Dutch are a people whose first instinct, when making a cake, is to stick it in a pie crust. Our agrarian ancestors must have burned a lot more calories than the typical office-worker.

Shoofly pie presented both an irresistible challenge and several immovable objections. I don’t like pie crust. I can live without molasses. A cakey, gooey, molasses-flavored dessert excited no excitement. And yet… cakey. Gooey. Recklessly, I took epicurious’ recipe for coffee shoofly pie (recipe) and modified it to be a crustless orange-honey flavored pudding. And it worked.

Finding Pennsylvania bands was much easier, thanks to Paste’s dedication to emptying my bank account, which in this case stretched to 11 must-hear bands (hear them here). As always, we’re going to explore three of them. So preheat the oven to 350 and let’s start with the electro-pop sounds of duo City Rain (Bandcamp).

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Then there are the days when it’s questionable whether I know how to cook. As a result, this post may have some NSFW moments. Click cautiously.

Run Hundred‘s top workout songs for June included the Men in Black 3 theme, “Back in Time,” which is working extremely well for me as a summer confection that I enjoy on the radio now but won’t remember by Thanksgiving. This seemed to call for a 1960s recipe, updated. Since the song is a mish-mash mash-up, I wanted a casserole.

After enough tiptoeing around the web that I was really, really hungry, I realized that Nibble Me This’ baked eggs Napoleon (recipe), which I’d Pinned as a recipe to try, had the right 1960s feel of haute cuisine fanciness laminated onto simple pantry ingredients. Plus, it would easily lend itself to modifications. So preheat the oven… no, wait, the oven preheating thing causes an unstable time loop… 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 »

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 »

These are scones of anarchy.

Scones of anarchy were invented to accompany the new single from Calling All Astronauts (official site), a London indie band whose dark electro punk sound is roughly what would happen if Sisters of Mercy had a life-changing fling with the Sex Pistols, followed by a hot rebound relationship with Nine Inch Nails.

If London is calling (yes, I know, Clash), it’s time for New British cuisine. But New British restaurants exhibit stereotypical English reticence. Where a comparable American menu would gush and bubble about “farm-raised,” “grilled on a bed of fresh rampions,” and “raspberry-leek reduction,” its London cousin murmurs a stiff-lipped “hake with leeks” and moves on.

Stymied, I did the American thing and simple-mindedly (as opposed to Simple Plannedly) associated “English” with “afternoon tea,” settling on a multi-cultural and violently spicy scone that started from the Joy of Baking’s gingerbread scones (recipe) but mostly rebelled against dictates of mass baking culture. Are you ready to hear something new? 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 »