Album covers looked so much cooler before CDs were invented. Or weirder. BizarreRecords.com aims to document the "strange & wonderful album covers" of the world in scientific categories such as Nordic Adventure and Teen Dance Party. There's no category for food, but check out some of my favorite food-related covers after the jump:
Remy likes hummus. A lot. So much that he made a rap music video to illustrate the greatness of this "paste with some taste." Watch him rhyme while stuffing his face with hummus and pita bread after the jump. Preferably, you'd have a tub of hummus nearby.
Denny's has been "feeding bands and music fans since 1953," but now they are hosting Warped Tour After Parties, running a music blog, adding "rock edge" and dimly lit ambiance to their restaurants late at night, and rolling out menu items designed by real rock stars.
Music blog The Modern Age declares the Denny's All Nighter Menu, featuring dishes created by music groups, possibly "the greatest marketing idea of all time." Does anything sound more delicious, come a drunken and hungry nighttime, than Hearts on a Plate: heart-shaped pancakes covered in strawberry syrup and white chocolate chips, developed by Eagles of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes? Or Taking Back Bacon Burger Fries: fries topped with all the fixings of a cheeseburger, conceived by the band Taking Back Sunday?
The musicians' creations appear alongside late-night menu items like Potachos, (“freshly fried and seasoned kettle chips topped with crumbled sausage, bacon, bell pepper and onion mix, cheese sauce and shredded Cheddar cheese") and Sweet Ride Nachos, ("freshly fried flour tortilla chips tossed in cinnamon sugar, then topped with strawberry topping, raspberry sauce, seasonal fruit, hot fudge, caramel, white chocolate chips and whipped cream"). Oh my.
This list puts Van Halen's "Pound Cake" at No. 1. I'll give them points for effort, but where the heck is R. Kelly's "In the Kitchen"? (Then again, with R. Kells, it often goes beyond simple metaphor.)
Here's a pop quiz from Mental Floss reminding us how much discontinued Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream flavors sound like MySpace band names. Or is it the other way around? Rumor has it Jerry himself only scored an eight out of ten on this tricky test. While "Apple Butter" might make a great autumnal flavor—mmm, cinnamon and roasted apple chunks—it's actually the name of an experimental rock group from Baton Rouge.
The colors may not jibe with your china, but this glass cutting board—heat-resistant up to 535ºF and dishwasher safe—salutes the King of Rock 'n' Roll in only the best way possible. With eggplant side burns. You know you've made it big in the music industry when kitchenware designers give you eggplant for hair. [via Yumsugar]
Our own Serious Eats New York editor Zach Brooks of Midtown Lunch fame was chosen one of Rolling Stone's "10 People Who Escaped the Music Industry." Ever since he left his programming position at Sirius Satellite Radio, we've been fattening him up with chocolate-chip cookies and lobster.
Rapper 50 Cent doesn't like tacos enough to change his name to 79, 89, or 99 Cent. As part of Taco Bell's "Why Pay More?" campaign—where menu items stay under a buck—the fast food chain jokingly implied this in ads, but without his permission first. 50 Cent is now suing for $4 million.
If Van Halen wasn't talkin' 'bout love in their 1978 hit song, maybe they had cheese on the brain? On this plastic container of cheese chunks found by our friend Homesick Texan at a New York market, the band's famous lyrics appear above the barcode. "I've been to the edge, and there I stood and looked down / lost a lot of friends there, baby, I got no time to mess around."
Clearly, the lyrics refer to the edge of the grocery aisle, where they lost their pals after buying feta. The song was known for being very raw; much like this "assorted" pack of uncooked cheese.
Step aside Phish Food, Cherry Garcia, and Dave Matthews Band Magic Brownies. There's another music-inspired Ben & Jerry's flavor on the scene: Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road, made of chocolate ice cream, peanut butter cookie dough, butter "brickle," and white chocolate chunks. Brickle, you ask? Besides the punny allusion to Sir Elton's 1970s album and song, the made-up word refers to a toffee-like brittle.
Sir Elton has visited all 49 states, and the missing 50th is Vermont—but not for long. In honor of his sold-out show on Monday, July 21, the local hippie ice cream heroes created this flavor, available at the Ben & Jerry's Vermont scoop shops between July 18 and July 25. All proceeds will benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
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John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote "Thank You Girl" as a tribute to the droves of ladies who sent love letters and squealed adoringly in the audience. How do you properly thank a lady fan? By invading her kitchen, washing her dishes, and making her a pot of, presumably, soup. After the jump, watch an animated music video of the guys banging on pots and pans.
Kyle McDonald's sequencer named I Eat Beats features a "tangible and edible music interface" controlled by Skittles. I assume M&Ms and other similarly shaped candies would also work, but it's probably best to use a candy that doesn't melt too easily. You can snack while you sequence—just don't eat all the pieces! Watch the sequencer in action after the jump.
I hope this lip-synching woman is someone's grandmother so that her grandkids can see this video and go, "My grandma is awesome!" If the lip-synching isn't enough for you, there are also googly eyed-bananas and a banana-wielding teddy bear at the end to amuse you.
Watch the magic, after the jump.
"White and tender surround the center / Cozy, sitting in the crackling shell."
What are those high-pitched voices singing about? Eggs! Eggs! So many eggs! Smiling eggs! Ninja eggs! Strawberry eggs! Dear god, this song is now permanently stuck in my head!
If you didn't love eggs before, you will after watching this video. Because you won't have a choice. The voices continue to screech, "I love egg!" in your brain long after the video is over.
Experience the hypnotizing power of singing, animated eggs, after the jump.
At first I felt bad that I couldn't understand what the lyrics of this rap were, but then neither could the McDonald's employees on the other end of the intercom. So the customers rapped again. And again. At different speeds. Hopefully after those few tries, the order made sense. ("Extra salt on the frizzle," anyone?)
Watch the video, after the jump. It's not much visually, but it's funny to listen to the song interrupted by questions from the confused employees. [via Indablog]
In the web show Cooking With Rockstars, famous rockstars (including Rufus Wainwright, Robyn Hitchcock, and the Raveonettes) are interviewed about food. Jack Black reveals that his favorite dish to make is the Dorito Burrito: "flour tortilla, cheddar cheese, Dorito chips laid down in the middle, microwave, folded up, crispy, burrito." But only Nacho Cheese Doritos will do; Cool Ranch doesn't work because "that's a mixture of tastes—the cheese on top of the cool ranch is a clashing I don't want to deal with."
Learn more about Jack Black's food preferences (ketchup is good, onions are bad); after the jump.
Editor's note: This week, it's, like, omigawd, totally '80s for our daily In Videos segment. Big hair, breakdancing, and before-they-were-big celebrity commercial appearances to the max. So kick back your fat-laced high tops and take a chill pill. —The Serious Eats Team
If you wanted to make something cool in the '80s, all you had to do was add some rapping. Doesn't matter if you were pushing chicken nuggets, beer, or kid's cereal—make it rhyme and dance and you've got yourself marketing gold!
Check out the commercials after the jump, plus a few bonus videos that were too good to pass up—you don't want to miss watching the Fat Boys enjoying an "all you can eat" at Sbarro in New York City in the mid-'80s.
San Franciscans, get Funk N Chunk to cater your next backyard barbecue and not only will you have bourbon coffee pulled pork, stuffed Niman Ranch steaks, fresh local oysters, corn-on-the-cob, and more to stuff your belly with, but also an endless stream of hip-hop funk from live DJs to help ease the digestion. A funk-less barbecue would just be wrong. [via SFoodie]
British DJ Mr. Scruff must really like pie. Why else would he have made a music video portraying a city of potato-shaped people making pies and carrying them around like the hottest new accessory? Even the animals and robots love pie.
Watch this animated world of pie excess after the jump.
Who needs guitars, keyboards or drums when you can use carrot recorders, celeriac bongos and leek violins? The 11 members of The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra create music from vegetables—sometimes modified, sometimes not—influenced by electronic sounds in contemporary electronic music. It's serious music that sounds better than anything I could play on a real instrument; take a listen or watch this video of their pre-concert preparations and performance:
If you live in Austria you can see The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra perform live tomorrow.
Josh Friedland, proprietor of the über-useful Food Section blog, complied a neat list of 100 songs for food lovers last week for something called "Blogger Radio" on AOL Radio.
It's a neat idea, and one that I've been employing almost since the date that Apple launched its iTunes Music Store. I've made mixes, for instance, to soundtrack a number of dinner parties, cookouts, and early-morning brunch feeds.
I love the "Listening With" features in the New York Times even when they don't have cooking references, but this quote by the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves made me fall in love with her. "Explaining how she likes to cook, she said, "It's the same thing with how I sing. I work with my ear to try to make it feel right, or I just keep changing it until I like the way it tastes."
On NewTeeVee.com, Karina Longworth checks in with a review of new web-based food show Dinner with the Band. The pilot episode features The Cloud Room:
One assumes that a partial goal of the Dinner with the Band gang is to get culinary obsessives hooked on new bands whilst simultaneously introducing indie rock kids to gourmet food. They certainly have the food half of the hybrid worked out—I can’t imagine any Cloud Room fan watching the pilot and not salivating over the Lemon Gruyere Gnocchi — but they’ve got a few kinks to work out on the indie rock end. In the pilot episode, the audio quality of the live performances (which are shot, like the cooking segments, in Mason’s apartment) is not great.
Commenting on the PBJ Special Report, Serious Eater Young mentioned that his friends in the band Chaibaba had recorded a song called "PB & J." We checked it out, and it was inspirational.
So, in honor of National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, Serious Eats has included Chaibaba's song in a special PBJ iMix on iTunes. After the jump ...
Dinner With The Band "shows renowned avant-garde chef Sam Mason as he invites his favorite touring bands to his apartment for an intimate evening of food, conversation and live music."
All that's up on the site right now is a pilot, but it looks pretty interesting and the show should be good if they actually start shooting more episodes. Mason was the pastry chef at NYC's WD-50, but left a few months ago to work on opening his own place.
All-things-NYC blog Gothamist interviews rock star and food columnist Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand:
It seems as though a lot of chefs fancy themselves to be rock stars. Do a lot of rock stars harbor secret desires to become chefs?
There are personality traits common to people in both- disregard for conventional life, a desire to travel, swollen egos, tendency to alcohol and substance abuse. More chefs consciously behave like rock stars than rock stars behave like chefs, but that's because most guys in bands don't think about food much. Eating is something they have to do between the important stuff, similar to pissing or throwing up.
Having said that, because any vagrant can get a job in a kitchen, a lot of rockers have worked in catering at least once in their scabrous lives. Success changes a few of them, though - three or four platinum albums down the line, they think they are connoisseurs of fine cuisine and wine. I'm not under that illusion. I might write about food, but that doesn't mean I know sod all about it.
Mr. Kapranos's Sound Bites columns, which appeared in the UK's Guardian newspaper until August of last year, have recently been collected into a book of the same name
Brooklyn guy-girl two-piece Matt and Kim take playing with their food to new extremes in this cute music video. Stay tuned for the last 30 seconds or so.
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