Every so often, in music, you hear about the transformational moments that grab people instantly. The Gamechangers: Sam Phillips had one when Johnny Cash picked “Folsom Prison Blues” in his studio (or at least he did in the movie). Four bars by The Beatles changed music. MJ transformed a generation with “Billie Jean” and a few moves, and Nirvana did it again a few years later. Outkast’s “B.O.B.” killed it, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” had enough angst for thousands, and just a couple years ago, the words Gnarls Barkley were gibberish until the first few bars of “Crazy” grabbed an entire country for weeks. The moment you realize you have something is instant. You don’t need to hear the whole song. When there’s a Gamechanger, you know it fast.
Well, they aren’t MJ, and they aren’t The Beatles, but we might just be in the middle of another game-changing debut, with the Alabama Shakes, whose debut album “Boys and Girls” is out today, and their unique sound that’s part blues, part Grace Potter, part fuzz rock, part Janis Joplin, part Aretha Franklin, part…well, a lot of stuff. The Shakes—a foursome from Athens, Alabama, which is not much more than a Raceway and a Chick-Fil-A off I-65 in North Alabama—are grabbing people, and until today didn’t even have an album out. Born not far from the region that gave us the Shoals sound, Alabama Shakes cut their teeth (and their first LP) in Nashville just last summer. A couple months later they were on Conan. They were Paste magazine’s 2011 New Band of the Year, they’re on the cover of this month’s American Songwriter, and this summer they’ll be at Bonnaroo. That doesn’t happen without a sound that grabs people immediately.
They’ve got a good sound, a mix that works, but the reason for Alabama Shakes’ meteoric rise is all in front-woman Brittany Howard’s gravel of a voice. Howard is what grabs you—from the opening lines of “Hold On,” where her cry of “Bless my heart/bless my soul/didn’t think I’d make it to 22 years old” is both celebratory and pleading. She showcases range (“On Your Way”), emotion (“You Ain’t Alone”), and a timeless tone that sounds like something crackly that would come out of Motown (“I Found You”).
Alabama Shakes are good, but without her, they’re just another Southern group of guitarists trying to climb out of the Nashville slush pile. Howard is their golden goose: even without the voice, how many bands are comprised of three twentysomething white Southern guys and a dynamic African-American woman as the lead? The Alabama Shakes were different from everybody else before she even opened her mouth. When she does open her mouth, say, for instance, in the first few bars of “You Ain’t Alone,” try to compare it to someone who came after 1970. It’s not easy to find a contemporary.
OK, so everybody’s excited about Alabama Shakes, and rightfully so, but there’s always a music darling, isn’t there? What’s the old mantra: Everyone’s got 10 years to write their first album; you see how good they are in the one year it takes to write the second. So we’ll see, as we always do. For now, there’s enough momentum around the Shakes to make me kick myself for not going out to Record Store Day last summer in East Nashville, when they were just a foursome in a backyard playing a few originals. If the few months since are any indication, that would have been a heck of a story to be able to tell.
Notes from Jess on the recipe:
When I first started thinking about what kind of food I would want to eat while listening to the Alabama Shakes, I started by thinking about where the music made me want to be. I decided I wanted to be sitting on the porch at my grandparents’ house on the lake. A hot evening, still light outside, quietly sitting in the porch swing with music playing in the background. Earthy and rustic with a hint of sweetness and heat. That brought me to cornbread with a ginger-lime marmalade. I mean what’s more appropriate than eating cornbread and marmalade at your southern-bred grandparents’ house out in the woods? Add the unexpected tartness of the lime and the satisfying heat from the ginger and you’ve got a match made in Food & Music heaven.
In the recipe, you utilize the lime’s natural pectin by cooking the pith in muslin or a cheese cloth. If you don’t have access to this, you can substitute with a box of pectin from the store. You might want to reduce the sugar amount in the recipe if you go that route though. Overall the marmalade is pretty simple. If you’ve never had a marmalade before, don’t expect it to taste like jelly. It has a delightful bitterness.
As for the cornbread, you can make any cornbread you prefer. Here’s my recipe if you don’t have one of your own:
Heat your oven to 450°F. While the oven is heating, place a greased cast iron skillet or oven-safe pan on the lower middle rack to heat up. In a bowl combine 3/4 cup corn meal, 1/4 cup flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 2 tsp sugar, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1/4 tsp baking soda. Place 1/3 cup hot water in a separate large bowl, slowly whisk in a small about of the dry ingredients. Just enough to make a thick paste about 1/3-1/2 cup. Next add 3/4 cup buttermilk, whisking to combine. Then add 1 large beaten egg, whisking to combine. Add the remaining dry ingredients to the wet and mix well. Finally, whisk in 3 tbs melted butter and 1 tbs melted coconut oil (can substitute vegetable oil). Pour into your hot pan and bake 20-25 minutes or until golden.
So the next time you’re in the mood for some sultry and soulful food and music, give this recipe and the Alabama Shakes a try. The recipe for the marmalade is below. Cheers!
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So the hubs is out of town. This doesn’t happen too often. The majority of the time, if he’s out of town I’m with him. Now, I haven’t prepared a meal for just myself since college, and I’m not one for fast food nor am I too keen on dining out alone. So when it came time to decide what I should do for dinner last night, I had to think about it for a minute. I really didn’t want to make a regular sized meal that would leave me with left overs for days, but after a busy day, I needed something a little more substantial than a green salad or peanut butter and jelly.
Whenever whipping up a meal for one, it’s always a good idea to look and see exactly what you’ve got to work with. In this case, I had all the staples along with sweet peppers, a tiny yukon gold potato, eggs, spinach and a shallot as the paints on my palette (in a manner of speaking). Once analyzing what I had, it seemed a frittata would be the natural progression from there. Why? Because it’s easy to make, easy to prepare as an individual portion and definitely easy to eat. I mean, you can throw just about anything you’ve got into a frittata and I was too tired and too glum to be eating alone to do anything much more extravagant. So frittata I ate.
It was quite a lovely dinner I might add. My dining companion was my dear fluffy friend the cat and I enjoyed my frittata along with some fresh grapes and pears drizzled with honey. For entertainment, I finished up a little paperwork and then indulged in the ever-s0-cliche chick-flick. It was fun. Now…Can I have my husband back please?
You can easily add whatever you like to your frittata. Bacon or cooked sausage, zucchini or salsa, you can’t go wrong with ingredients you love. I even sprinkled a little shaved parmesan over the top for good measure. If you need to make this for more than one person, just add extra ingredients and finish cooking it through by baking it off in the oven instead of flipping. The recipe is below. Cheers!
This is one of those recipes I love that utilizes your ingredients to their full potential (because throwing out foods is a no no in my kitchen). A few red potatoes, a couple handfuls of spinach and some cooked black eyed peas left in the fridge? What to do, what to do…
Spinach wilts fast and cooked peas only need to be reheated, so just add a little extra flavor in the form of garlic and hot sauce and you’re good to go. The potatoes take a little longer to cook, but the effort on your part is minimal. Toss in a little olive oil, vinegar, herbs and spices, roast, stirring once while cooking. Boom! Dinner’s ready. Make this into a He Made/She Made by throwing a little ham on the plate or crisping some bacon to the pan when melting the butter for the peas and spinach.
Mixing leftovers together is the perfect way to use up what you have in the fridge. You don’t have to throw anything away, while breathing new life into last night’s dinner. The recipe is below. Cheers!
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Part II- Cinnamon Apples on Shortbread with Peanut Butter Sauce
After a busy and hot day out and about, you need a meal that’s both light and filling. As a pre- Avett Brothers concert meal, we enjoyed this wonderful little salad. A mixture of fresh local greens and vegetables and a farm fresh egg. The veggies were light and refreshing while the egg gave us the protein we needed to dance the night away (Foodie side note: Avett Brothers cellist Joe Kwon has a blog called Taste On Tour and it’s an awesome read).
We made a light dressing out of our olive oil we brought with us, honey and lemon from the farmer’s market. I also used a little of the tomato wine vinegar we purchased from the market in the poaching liquid. Our eggs came from Haven Hill Farms in Mobile, which we also used the next morning to make breakfast.
These recipes take little effort to whip up. All in all, we made four meals for two people for less than $30. On vacation, I’d say that’s a good deal. And we still ate at all our favorite restaurants, plus a few new ones. So next time you go out of town, why not make a few easy-to-throw-together meals, to keep from breaking the bank and to get an entirely different viewpoint on local food. The recipe is below. Cheers!
And incase you were wondering…the concert was awesome!
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Recipes , Travel
Vacation Food: Part II-Cinnamon Apples on shortbread with peanut butter sauce
The Burris Farm Market is more than a few vegetables and fruits. It also has a bakery and a refrigerated section with a selection of local cheeses, meats and other dairy products along with a section of canned pickled items and my personal favorite—local honey. I knew before I ever got out of the car I’d be leaving with a jar of honey (which I may or may not be currently eating by the spoonful). I’ve mentioned to Scott on more than one occasion that one day if I had the opportunity I’d like to try my hand at beekeeping. But until then I’ll support my habit through other’s products, like the Magli Honey Comapny.
While looking through the vegetables for our roasted veg dinner, I heard a siren call coming from the bakery section in the form of a shortbread cake. The apples were exceedingly beautiful so we decided to put the honey, shortbread and apples to use in the form of a dessert. In the car on the way home, I remembered we had some crunchy peanut butter in our travel bag and I immediately devised a plan to turn the honey and peanut butter into a sauce to drizzle over the top.
I cooked the apples on the stove with a sprinkle of cinnamon, a little lemon juice and honey until tender. Then put it on top of the cake and topped it all off with the peanut butter sauce and boom, easy dessert. All-in-all, it was quite delicious. If you don’t have shortbread cake to smother with your apples, try ice cream instead (though the apples and sauce by themselves would still be delectable).
An easy, fast dessert, made almost entirely from local ingredients. The recipe is below. Cheers!
Check out Part III—Spring Salad with Poached Egg and Honey-Lemon Dressing later today.
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Scott and I just returned from a long awaited vacation to our former home in Baldwin County, Alabama. The beach is one of our favorite places on earth and when we heard one of our favorite bands, The Avett Brothers, were giving a concert in Orange Beach, we immediately started packing our bags. When on vacation, blowing your budget is quite easy to do, especially when you eat out for every meal. Also, eating out at the beach tends to be very unfriendly to vegetarians. The occasional garden salad is your only friend at the seafood shacks. Fortunately, if you are staying in a place with a kitchen or kitchenette, there is another option—prepare some of your own meals. This lets you dictate what you and your family eat a little more, so that you’re not eating jumbo fried shrimp and surf ‘n’ turf every time you venture out.
Now, I love to eat out. Sampling the local fare is both convenient and fun, but after 4-5 days of it, it gets expensive and old. Fixing meals at your hotel or condo makes it easier for both your wallet and your digestive system to recuperate upon returning from a few days in paradise. When we go out of town, we always take along a few of our favorite snack foods—peanut butter, pita, popcorn, granola, etc. But when we know we’re going to have a kitchen to work with, we bring a few easy to travel staples as well (i.e. olive oil, cinnamon, salt, pepper, etc.), that way we can do a little cooking. Baldwin county is laden with farmers’ markets and produce stands, seemingly every 100 yards or so. A simple way to eat local without the restaurant price.
One of our favorite places is the Burris Farm Market, incidentally in its 25th year. A place we frequented while living there, it was one of our first stops. After perusing the produce for a few minutes, we made our choice for dinner: roasted veg. Easy enough, because no one wants to spend hours slaving in the kitchen on vacation, but also not without flavor. It’s really quite simple to make. We bought some Brussels sprouts, carrots, onion and a local tomato wine vinegar from Casa Perdido, which was, in a word, sublime. Chop everything up, mix with our staples and the vinegar and in 20 minutes, we were eating a fabulous/no hassle meal.
If you’ve never cooked sprouts before, fear not, it’s super easy. When roasting they’ll get a little browned and crispy on the outside, but on the inside, so tender and moist. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.
See, cooking out of town is as easy as you make it. Can’t have dinner without dessert. Part II- Cinnamon Apples on shortbread with peanut butter sauce, will be posted later today. The recipe is below. Cheers!
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