You are looking at the source of the best Mexican food in Arizona.

This is the Rio Mirage Café y Cantina (official site) in El Mirage. I found it by accident, having impulsively headed out U.S. Highway 60 in the general direction of Wickenburg (map), figuring I’d decide what to do about the mountain range when I got to it.

What I decided was that the U.S. 60 corridor has enough thrift stores to keep me within the Valley. So this is the tour of El Mirage, Sun City, and environs — the land where there’s simultaneously too much history and not enough.

While I usually accompany these jaunts with Daytrotter selections, this time we’re going for Beatles-A-Rama (this really exists), as my adored local indie alt-rock station runs the Pat Matthews Beatles-A-Rama show every Sunday morning, and since it serves radio’s fundamental purpose of being mildly stimulating yet innocuous, I usually don’t change the station. This is how I got a dose of the Fab Four at their most aggressively boy-bandish, during the early 1960s when nobody was the walrus. 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 »

Since working out left me feeling flat as a pancake, I thought I’d address Run Hundred‘s top workout songs for July by making some pancakes.

These are wild pancakes: wild rice pancakes, to be precise. They’re also pretty wild. I started with a recipe from Taste of Home and ended up having to substitute for a major ingredient that I thought had no substitutes. (No, not the wild rice!)

Equally wild is Matchbox 20′s latest single, “She’s So Mean,” which I think demands explanation, if not outright exegesis, so since it’s on the top 10 list, this is the time, not to mention the place and the moment. Let’s make pancakes! Read the rest of this entry »

The Dark Knight Rises is arguably the coolest exploration of political philosophy that I’m likely to see this decade.

It also works fine as a boom-boom action-adventure movie, too.

Back in 2008, I’d had mixed feelings about The Dark Knight, not least because the comic-book portrayal of Harvey Dent’s horrible injuries seemed out of place in Christopher Nolan’s landscape of dreamlike urban hyper-realism. I read later that Nolan had originally given Dent the more realistic scars I wanted, and test audiences had reacted badly. So I’ll give him that.

My reactions to The Dark Knight Rises went like this:

“That’s stylish.”
“Well, all right, but–”
“That’s such a clich–oh, no it’s not.”
“WTF?”
“Oh, maaaaaan, that was cool!”
“That was even cooler.”
“I really like this movie.”
“I really like this movie.”
“I must write mash notes to this movie in purple prose.”

So of course I want to explain why it’s cool. If I promise to avoid spoilers as much as possible, will you join me? 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 »

There is foliage on my pizza.

There’s also a surprising amount of foliage in the surrounding neighborhood, as opposed to the more common Phoenix landscaping practice of expecting pedestrians to skitter from the skinny shade of one palm tree to the next.

The pizza is at Cave & Ives (official site), of which, more below. The neighborhood is an area called Arcadia Lite, due to its proximity to the darker and heavier… well, no, actually to the wealthier and ritzier Arcadia neighborhood. Both word on the web and architectural evidence suggests that Arcadia Lite is in the midst of a transformation from “middle-class with a side of discount stores” to “ardent gentrification with lashings of hipness.”

As always, the plan is to accompany the tour with selections from Daytrotter, so let’s start with trippy hip-hop troop Shabazz Palaces (official site), because this is exactly the sort of earnest hipster rap that probably has an audience in Arcadia Lite. 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 »

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.
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 »

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 »

I know a dark, secluded place.
A place where no one knows your face.
A glass of wine, a fast embrace.
It’s called Hernando’s Hideaway. Olé!

In Phoenix, it’s called The Nash.

Admittedly, The Nash doesn’t have a liquor license, and any hasty embraces will likely involve posing for a photo with a visiting jazz great. But The Nash is Phoenix’s nearest approach to the sort of underground watering hole that might feature in the livelier works of Dashiell Hammett or Earle Stanley Gardner. There are even men in snappy snap-brim fedoras.

My last prolonged live exposure to jazz involved a mandatory Dave Brubeck concert for some high school or college music appreciation class, an experience that left me with a headache and a lifelong loathing for 5:4 time. However, friends lured me to the Sunday night jazz jam session, which turned out to be quite fabulous, not least because of who showed up.  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 »