That's one band I really miss. The Bumble Bee Girl album totally and completely blew my socks off. It's an instant classic. Damn you Shannon Hoon
I blame Axl Rose Although Hoon did a great job w/assisted vocals on GNR's "The Garden" and "Don't Cry". Speaking of dead vocalists...
Circus of Dead Squirrels Indoor Recess The Pop Culture Massacre and the End of the World Sing-A-Long Songbook
Bootsie – Not sure whether you're asking for more details on the music or the food, so here's the lowdown on both: Alain Toussaint: An under-appreciated, too-often-overlooked master of American music, from soul to gospel to R & B to jazz to pop. Wrote hits like "Workin’ in a Coalmine," "What Do You Want the Girl To Do," and "Yes, We Can." Rarely toured, just stayed in New Orleans playing music until Katrina – now he's hit the road, all to the better for the wider listening audience. "The Bright Mississippi": 2008 salute to the tremendous musical legacy of New Orleans from Toussaint and even more under-appreciated N.O. musicians. As for the oxtail soup: Matt and I had dinner on Saturday night at a great little restaurant in B’more called Chameleon Cafe where we had an unbelievable oxtail soup – rich, flavorful, with a deep brown color and melt-in-your-mouth morsels of meat – so we decided to try to make it ourselves. We got the oxtails right, but we missed the combinations of flavor – then found out the base of the soup was veal stock. So that’s our next culinary experiment – learning how to make veal stock. We'll get back to you on that.... Annette and Matt
Heh, I'm sorry, I should have elaborated. I'm well familiar with Allen Toussaint, but not with this particular album. When you put the pic up, I went and read the review on AMG; and I was hoping that you'd say more about the album and what you liked and didn't like about it. I cook a lot, and I make a pretty good veal stock; I can give you some advice on this score if you want. Be advised, though, that it's a *pain in the butt, all-day task*, and I really mean that. The last time I made it, I started at 8am, and I finished at 1am. Obviously I wasn't working on the stock that whole time -- most of the time it was just simmering on the stove -- but you will put in a few hours of work, and you will have to babysit it for a long time. So you may want to opt for a pre-made veal stock, or even veal DemiGlace Gold, a pre-made demi-glace to which you can add water and mix and simmer (that won't be exactly the same as veal stock, but very close). That may seem like cheating or a poor substitute, but you'd be surprised how many very highly regarded kitchens and chefs go this route regularly. Most commercial kitchens are small, and you simply can't afford to have a burner tied up making and then reducing veal stock every hour of every day.
The veal stock: We may get back to you on this. Matt's determined to make his own. First question: What cut of veal do we need? (It’s still the off-season, so we do have all day to make stock....) Annette
You really don't need veal *meat* -- it's not bad to have, because you can use it to strengthen the flavor (in which case, shoulder meat -- what would be called chuck on an adult cow -- or shank meat is good to have around), but you don't absolutely need it. What you need is veal marrow bones -- cut up long bones (upper leg) or the base of the tail (ox-tail). I wouldn't recommend getting them from a supermarket's butcher counter -- there's a decent chance they won't have them, and there's a decent chance they'll give you adult cow bones and try to tell you they're from veal. But any half-way decent butcher should have them, and they're not that expensive (veal stock is expensive in time, but really not that expensive in ingredients). How much bones you want depends on the size of your stockpot; but remember that whenever you're making stock, it's easy to fix the strength of the flavor -- just add water if it's too strong, or reduce if it's too weak. So the amount of bones almost doesn't matter to the flavor -- it matters to the volume of stock you're going to produce, but you're constrained there by the size of your stockpot as well. I buy enough bones to fill between 1/3 to 1/2 of my stockpot. The butcher might give them to you frozen; that's usually OK. The steps I take to make (brown) veal stock: 1. blanch the bones to clean them (and I mean blanch -- don't put them in a pot with cold water and bring them to a boil, you aren't making stock yet. get the water boiling and then put bones in briefly, one or a few at a time) 2. put the bones in a roasting pan or pans, and smear with tomato paste 3. roast the bones in a preheated oven for a little while 4. put the bones in an empty stockpot. add water *carefully* -- don't just pour it in violently or from a faucet, for the same reason you don't boil the bones while making stock -- you don't want to dislodge bigger particles that will end up making the stock cloudy. fill water up to an inch from the top. 5. bring to a boil, watching very carefully. the *second* it starts to boil, back down to a simmer. 6. find something to do for 12 hours. look in on the stockpot regularly to make sure it's not boiling, but is still simmering. skim off any scum on the top periodically, and add water if the water level drops significantly. 7. get rid of the bones. i fish out the ones i can easily get, then slowly pour the stock through a strainer into another pot to catch/trap the remainder. get rid of the bones, clean and rinse well the pot (don't want soap in your stock), and put the stock back into the stockpot. bring back to a simmer. 8. add the mirepoix -- chopped onions (2 parts), carrots (1 part), celery (1 part). you don't have to make a perfect dice or anything -- just chop. add a bouquet garni -- flat-leaf parsley, thyme, and bay leaves. some cooks add other herbs too. if you want to add meat to strengthen the flavor, do it now. simmer for an hour or two. 9. fish out the bouquet garni, and strain into another pot again to get rid of the mirepoix. transfer back to your stock pot. check the flavor, and decide if it's too strong or weak; add water or reduce accordingly. 10. when you're happy with the flavor of what you have, you want to strain it one more time -- this time through a strainer lined with cheesecloth, to get the largest particles out. you want the stock to be as clear as it can be. 11. take the pot containing the stock and stick it into a cooler that you've filled with ice, or into your bathtub that you've put ice in, or a keg bucket with ice in it, or whatever. it needs to be cooled down before you can put it in the fridge or the freezer. this'll take probably an hour or more. 12. I freeze my stock. I tend to put my reduced veal stock into plastic containers in fixed volumes (2 cups, or 1 quart, each) so that I can just reach into the freezer and grab whatever I need. Label the packages with the date you made the stock. When you unfreeze the stock, bring it to a boil for 30-60 seconds before using it in anything, for safety. You'll notice I never once mentioned salt. DO NOT SALT THE STOCK. When you later make things with the stock, salt *that*; but don't salt stock itself. If you salt the stock, you've set a base salt level for everything you're going to make with it. Think of stock as an ingredient, like carrots are an ingredient -- you don't salt them until when you're making something with them. With the exception of the bit about tomato paste and pre-roasting, and the time periods involved, the procedure is pretty much the same as if you're making chicken stock. In chicken stock, you can pretty much throw the bones and the mirepoix in at the same time, because both release their flavor really quickly. Since veal bones take so much longer, take advantage of that -- use the dead time while the bones are simmering to cut up your mirepoix. You don't *have* to remove the bones before throwing the mirepoix in; I just have historically because my stock pot isn't that big. But throwing the mirepoix in for the last hour or so you're simmering the bones will save you some time.
Annette and Matt -- one other thing I forgot to say. After the stock is cooled in ice, I try to make room for it in the fridge and put it in the fridge overnight. Overnight, the top will become a layer of fat. In the morning, I skim that fat off. *Then* I divide the stock into measured portions and freeze it. Depending on how much you've reduced it, because of the gelatin content in the stock, it may have a jello-ish nature in the morning when you skim off that fat layer; so you may need to warm it back up a tiny bit to get it to liquid before you can divide it into portions.
I don't think I've heard any song of theirs other than "There She Goes". Is most of their stuff like that?
One reviewer likened it to a mix of jangly (Byrds-style, for me) 12-strings and English punk. More good material than that one hit track. Much harder edged than the feel-good cover bands-but that's punk, right. Worth the listen.
Cooking spaghetti and meatballs listening to: Culture crossover. Maybe something Liberace would have done?
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u54hIE1J0Js"]YouTube- Style Council - "You're The Best Thing"[/ame]