Rock Out with Your Crock Out
I Like Food coaches you on cooking like a rock star
By Lori Finkel
Published: May 30th, 2007 | 4:56pm
Not all of us are blessed with Rachel Ray’s obnoxiously cute go-out-and-grill-’em incentive to cook. For those of us too busy with, you know, life, we need to be coerced into cooking. And if you’re anything like me, still scrubbing soot from when the stove caught fire, I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands
The irony of the cookbook — explained by author Kara Zuaro, a Brooklyn-based food, music, and travel journalist — is that these touring bands don’t even have the time to make the featured recipes. They’re lucky if they can grab a Hawaiian sweet roll at a 7-Eleven. While Zuaro encourages readers to offer up couches and kitchens for bands on the road, she donates advice on what foods not to make when you’ve partied too much. If you have to ask yourself, “How drunk am I?” then stick to a simple dish like scrambled eggs, she suggests.
The book’s initial excitement is flipping through to see your favorite bands’ favorite foods, which include drinks, scrambles, and quiches from Calexico, Belle & Sebastian, and Tilly and the Wall. Such a clever idea. Should you decide what to make based on the band, or the dish? After digging through I Like Food, you’ll be able to whip up a three-course meal, drinks, desserts, and if all goes well, morning-after breakfast.
My First Kitch Encounter
A few minutes after getting my hands on the book, a co-worker and I decided to forfeit our usual dinner of carrot sticks and hummus and actually make something. The ingredients listed in the recipes range from sugary snack foods found in a preschooler’s lunchbox to a pinch of asafoetida, a resin-like gum native to Iran. And, yes, I did look that up on Wikipedia.
We picked recipes that require commonly found ingredients so we wouldn’t waste what little money we poor college students have. The winners? Heston Rifle’s Baked Barbecue Tofu and for dessert, Catfish Haven’s Strawberry Pop Cake.
The Baked Barbecue Tofu is less glamorous than it sounds. You slather barbecue sauce on slices of tofu and then throw it in the oven. Don’t skimp out on barbecue sauce like we did — pick a sauce based on flavor, not the sticker that says “10 bottles for $10.”
The Strawberry Pop Cake was a hit with our starving roommates. Baking the cake took me back to the afternoon of my second-grade best friend’s food-fight party. My clothes and hair ended up spattered with strawberry Jell-O, strawberry soda, pudding, cake mix, and Cool Whip.
The cake was so delicious that we made it again a week later for the Venus Zine editor-in-chief’s birthday party. The recipe is versatile, so you can change out strawberry Jell-O for raspberry, white cake mix for yellow, and so on.
Mates of Plate
Though I found myself disappointed that the bands didn’t offer as many vegetarian dishes, the book is careful not to alienate, incorporating recipes for the vegan, vegetarian, and the heathen meat eater. Just about every genre is represented, from hip-hop to rockabilly to early ’90s riot grrl rock. A wannabe riot grrl myself, I developed a newfound respect for funk blues bands, based solely on Catfish Haven’s hot pink–colored Strawberry Pop Cake made with two cans of strawberry pop — or soda, as we say in the South.
Each recipe is accompanied by a great quirk or story. Instead of a timer, Justin Angelo Morey from the Black Hollies gauges his “Have Mercy on Me” Lentil Soup with the Bluesbreakers LP, Fleetwood Mac’s Black Magic Woman double LP, and side one of the Beatles’ Revolver. Wrap your mouth around Ben Kweller’s Chocolate Balls, a “super easy recipe” that Kweller says is perfect for holidays, parties, or snacking around the house, or whip up Devendra Banhart’s ecstatically unconventional (would you expect anything less?) recipe for Africanitas Ricas (fried bananas), which suggests that you chop up “the beautiful godsends” into the size of “eight quarters glued together.”
The real godsend is this 256-page cookbook, which would make an awesome gift for pretty much anyone. It would even be a hit with the not-so-music savvy, because hey, everybody’s gotta eat sometime.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands
By Kara Zuaro
page count: 256 pages
List Price: $12.21
Issue #24
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