Recipe - Pale-N's (Sugar cookies w/ extras)

...why not? It's a simple cookie...

A friend of mine asked me if I would bake sugar cookies with white chocolate chips and candied ginger to serve at a fundraiser for her dance company, Coriolis.

Certainly! I responded. Now...how do I make them?

Quite simply it turns out...

I started out with this recipe: Easy Sugar Cookies, and tweaked for the following recipe.

Goods:

2.75 c flour

1 tsp baking soda

.5 tsp baking powder

.125 tsp salt

1 c butter (softened)

1.5 c sugar

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla

.125 c candied ginger

.5 c white chocolate (chips or chunks - your call)

Prep:

Chop up your candied ginger into tiny little bits. I use flour to help prevent all the bits from sticking together.

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Action Plan:

1) In a small bowl, mix together your dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, baking powder. Add your bits of ginger and white chocolate into the mix.

2) In a large bowl, cream together your butter and sugar. Add in your egg and vanilla - mix that all together.

3) Gradually add your dry mixture into the wet mixture until everything's combined into one happy ball of cookie dough.

4) Dole out spoonfuls of dough onto ungreased cookie sheets. The cookies will spread as they bake, so be mindful of distance. (I made tiny cookies—less than a teaspoon of dough each—and placed them about 1.5 inches apart.)

5) Bake at 375°F for 7-10 minutes. (I pulled mine out at 7.5 minutes for a very pale color and chewy texture.)

6) Let cool...then enjoy!!!

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream

I watched this documentary recently and found it quite depressing, disturbing, downright scary and pretty convicting. Watch it. After having seen it, I felt somewhat like a mad man running around from here to there with his hands on his head shouting, "What do I do? What do I do?" and generally looking like a crazy person. It made me want to quit my job, buy a bike and start a garden.

But what do I do??? What do we do???

Seems like we're looking at a massive overhaul of our very way of life. And our resources to do so are dwindling every day. Well, that seems like a problem. What can we do???

There's just (obviously) no simple solution, which talking heads in the film (like James Howard Kunstler, whom I found fascinating) just loved to reiterate. Lots of gloom and doom. But it's reality. It's happening, which is why it's so freaking scary.

I just saw a preview for Flow - "the scariest movie in the festival" at Sundance according to WIRED. Can't wait for that one. The End of Suburbia definitely goes in the same category...probably a few notches lower-more on a national than global/humanity scale. But one way or another it appears we're headed for quite a calamity... Woohoo! Bring on the vegan muffins! -_-

The Walkmen on Pitchfork TV - Juan's Basement

Part 1 of 3 - "In The New Year"

Part 2 of 3 - "On The Water"


Part 3 of 3 - "The Rat"

Recipe - Vegan Muffins

I found the original recipe at www.theppk.com.

The goods:

1 c whole wheat flour

1 c all purpose flour

½ c sugar (or ⅓ c agave nectar)

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

½ soy milk + a few drops of lemon juice

¼ c unsweetened applesauce

¼ c canola oil

1 ripe banana - mashed

1 egg replacer = 1 tbsp flax seed meal + 3 tbsp water (simmer to combine to egg consistency)

1 small apple (granny smith) chopped to small bits

1 carrot grated

½ c raisins

¼ c walnuts chopped

Action plan:
Step 1) Preheat oven to 375°F.
Step 2) In a medium to large bowl combine the dry ingredients: whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, sugar (if using agave nectar, add with wet ingredients), baking powder, cinnamon, baking soda, salt.

Step 3) In a separate large bowl mix together the wet ingredients: soy milk + lemon juice, applesauce, oil, banana, egg replacement.

Step 4) Add the grated carrot, chopped apple, raisins and walnuts to the dry ingredients and mix together.

Step 5) Add that mixture into the bowl with the wet ingredients and mix until everything is moist.

Step 6) Grease your muffin tins with canola oil and fill with muffin batter.

Step 7) Bake in oven for approximate times - Mini size: 10 minutes; Standard size: 20 minutes. Make sure to check that muffins are cooked through using a toothpick.

Dosh - "Capture The Flag"

Dosh - "Capture The Flag" from anticon. on Vimeo.

Damien Jurado @ Northstar Bar, Philadelphia, PA - May 30th

Friday night at the Northstar Bar in Philadelphia, Damien Jurado performed like he was deep into working something out. I’ve only ever seen him live once before, and that occasion was actually a forum on Nick Drake so that he didn’t even play any of his own music, but I can imagine pretty well that each of Damien Jurado’s performances is something like it was this night.

After a long wait following the opening act, Damien Jurado finally made his way on stage, grabbed his guitar, quickly settled into the small chair set behind the microphone and got down to business. No introductory babble, no between song banter, no explanatory discourse, no attempt at humor or charm. Merely a mumbled, nearly inaudible “Hi, I’m Damien Jurado from Seattle, Washington,” and song after song of heartfelt, intense and earnest playing.

Often with eyes shut, his size dwarfing his guitar so that it seemed like a ukulele in his arms, singing with passion that one would only seem comfortable unleashing in the privacy of his own bedroom, his absolute sincerity and generosity was moving and even humbling. Frustratingly, half the room was shamelessly chatting, biding time before Jeremy Enigk, and yet Damien Jurado played unbothered, almost as if none of us were there at all. And perhaps this would be a deterrent for some other performers with no active pursuit of engaging the audience, but it’s fitting that a songwriter who creates such honest and raw music would present them with such a completely unassuming approach. Really, I felt like I shouldn’t be watching, but I was so grateful that I was.

Damien Jurado - "what were the chances"
Damien Jurado - "white center"
buy his music from Secretly Canadian

Holy Coloured Dice!

Yes, so I realize this song and this video are both from last year, but I just saw it for the first time, so it's new to me:

Bee You Tea Tea Oh Ennn!!!

The button monster is BACK! It’s been dormant for the last several years, asleep in its pink, plastic suitcase, swathed in blankets and towels, joints greased and cutter close by. Now it has emerged from its long hibernation and it’s itching to button. Oh boy is it itching to button. The little guy ate straight through two issues of W magazine, a GQ and a Spin and here’s a bit of what he came up with:


I don’t know about you, but I’m sure excited.

Is that herringbone? you ask. Oh yes, yes it is. It is indeed.

Band of Horses in Philly or I'm-long-overdue-for-a-concert-review

I first heard The Great Salt Lake by Band of Horses on a lovely mix CD that my good friend gave me. Obsessed, I played it on repeat, turning the volume up at the end to drown myself in the mesmerizing music.

So when they announced their show at the TLA in Philadelphia (oops, I mean The Fillmore), I quickly secured tickets that predictably sold out. I arrived early enough to catch a few songs from opener Tyler Ramsey but I missed Cass McCombs. Though I had never heard Ramsey’s music before, I usually give openers a good listen, eager to give a thumbs up. This time, however, I just couldn’t. He aimed for an ambient, ethereal sound but it came out more like a drone. Some songs started out with promise, but tempo/volume/style shifts a minute into them turned out for the worse. And I can take falsetto only in bits and pieces. Frankly, opening for Band of Horses is no easy task so for that, I applaud him. A for effort.

During the inexplicably long intermission between Ramsey and Band of Horses, I became antsy. Please, roadies, tune those instruments more quickly! But the wait was worth it. As Band of Horses trooped on stage, bearded and hatted, the crowd roared in reverent praise. Hailing from Seattle, the group indeed had a cult following.

Lead Ben Bridwell settled himself at the steel pedal guitar for a crooning first song of Window Blues from their sophomore album Cease To Begin. I got that rush you get the first time you hear a beloved band in concert – and the adrenaline didn’t stop until the house lights turned up post encore. The reverb-filled, vocally-impeccable set included most of the tracks on Cease To Begin including Ode to LRC, Islands On The Coast, and Is There A Ghost. This live performance certainly confirmed that Band of Horses has indeed come of age since the release of its first album. Nevertheless, the biggest crowd pleaser (or maybe it was just the biggest me-pleaser) was The Great Salt Lake from Everything All The Time. Other performances from their first album included Wicked Gil and The Funeral – a song for which my fellow concert go-er astutely speculated Ford paid a lot for to put in its annoying Edge commercial.

I was afraid they wouldn’t play No One’s Gonna Love You, but Band of Horses pulled through in the encore, God bless ‘em. The delay on the guitar in that song gets me every time. The encore also included Our Swords which I did not realize until now was just two basses and drums. Brilliant. Before I wrap up my little review, however, I need to credit Creighton Barrett for some excellent drumming. Perhaps I’m biased – he was the only band member of whom I had a clear line of sight – but he was the most fun to watch with his all-out rocking (even with the brushes!) and wide smile.

The only fault I could poke out is that the show was far too short. Sure, the songs aren’t exactly lengthy, but the night flew by much more quickly than I liked. I would have preferred to hear more from the first album (St. Augustine, please!) but I guess the only remedy would be to see more of them, more often. I know other audience members would agree with me, especially the one in front whose hands were perpetually raised Pentecostal-style at the altar of Band of Horses.