Santa Monica Farmers Market

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Have a guitar? Like to warble Velvet Underground tunes in a voice huskier than an ear of corn? Play blues solos through an amp the size of a cereal box? If your idea of a good gig is creating a soundtrack for the ogling of vegetables and grass-fed beef, you may want to apply for the honor of providing musical entertainment at the Santa Monica Sunday Farmers Market.

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A. Scattergood

Jamie Oliver on a mission ... to find lost Joy Division tapes.

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Update: 2/15/12 3:00 p.m. We should have known this was as bogus as the prospect of a goat on a leash getting down (in the video) to a band bolstered by the drumming talents of a man known to cheerily carve and cook domesticated beasts. NME was wrong and so were we. The treasures used to reside in the vault of a bank that once occupied the same site as the Manchester restaurant. Whoah.

Perhaps it's fitting that master tapes of Joy Division and New Order recordings would surface in the basement of a Manchester restaurant owned by Jamie Oliver, the once-Naked Chef and former drummer of the late and probably unlamented Brit-pop band Scarlet Division. We imagine Oliver himself dug up the tapes with his own bare, dirt-encrusted fingers. According to NME, the basement stash, which also included a pirate-like triumvirate of guns, gold and jewelry, is estimated to be worth £1.1 million. The whole find reportedly was handed off to the Treasury.

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caryatidxx/flickr

Ingredient No. 1 in Tacos "Culver City"

​Last week, Good. Food. Stories. compiled a few highlights from the early '90s alt-teen mag Sassy's Eat This column. The highlights? Evan Dando's "Morning Noonan Knight" chocolate sauce for ice cream and Kim Gordon's recipe for tuna fish tacos "Culver City." The husky-voiced Sonic Youth bassist developed the latter when she was a student at the Otis Art Institute (now known as the Otis College of Art and Design) in the early '70s.

Hinging on a can of "white, dolphin-safe" tuna, a "glob" of mayonnaise and "as-fresh-as-you-can-find" corn tortillas, the recipe is rudimentary, and yet the sort of satisfying, low-cost, low-effort concoction many of us associate with student days. For some, it's egg sandwiches on hot dog buns; for others, it's Hamburger Helper without the hamburger. We're not making that up. A college housemate prepared it on many occasions, filling our shotgun flat with noxious, powdery fumes. In light of such crimes against lunch, Gordon's tacos seem positively refined.

LidoLido in the "Chop It Up" video

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If you're looking for a Justin Bieber clone who can rap with all the finesse and complexity of a fourth-grader, LidoLido is your boy and "Chop It Up" is your song. The Norwegian teen "hip-hop" "star" (we use both of those words loosely) has channeled his love of "the entire American lifestyle" including "the food, basketball, the language" into this oddball, one-take music video set entirely in a kitchen. [Video after the jump.]

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Courtesy of KCRW

Chef Jonathan Waxman

​The latest chef to step behind the virtual turntable at KCRW is Jonathan Waxman, who returns to his Southern California roots in his set for the radio station's Guest DJ Project.

Waxman, the chef/owner of Barbuto in New York City and author Italian My Way, has a short but diverse list that includes the harmonies of The Beach Boys ("God Only Knows") and the funk of Marvin Gaye ("Sexual Healing"). Asked if the sensuality of a song plays into his cooking style, he told KCRW, "100%. I think that cooking and music are so synonymous. I always say as a musician you do things repetitively. Cooking is exactly the same thing. You're giving something to people and I always felt that Marvin Gaye sort of gave himself to his audience - to me! I felt that he personally touched me when he sang that song. There's a lot of things about religion, there's a lot of things about sex, obviously, and he sort of helped me think about life in a really sort of germane way."

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Bazillion Points

EYEHATEGOD's "bloody" beans and rice.

​In May, we wrote about metal cooking shows, noting that playing metal required precision and well-seasoned chops, much like cooking. Today, we're examining the metal-kitchen pipeline further, sorting through a 2009 cookbook we just received from Bazillion Points Books in Brooklyn, New York: Hellbent For Cooking, a carefully curated collection of 101 recipes offered by metal bands from 32 countries.

While well-known heroes like Thin Lizzy, Judas Priest, and Sepultura headline the affair, many hail from lands as far-flung as the Philippines, Israel, and Cyprus and sing in languages the others could not begin to decipher. Yet whether major or minor, sludgy or speedy, domestic or imported, vegan or carnivorous, what these bands have in common is metal -- an art form, an attitude, a lifestyle. It's not just a gimmick in the cookbook context; it comes screaming through the recipes.

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​Seven months ago, we wrote about Hot Knives and the duo's scientific approach to pairing music and beer. The two local chloggers (chefs + bloggers) stuck to craft beers, which prompted Jonathan Gold to chime in with a comment: "I like craft beers and handmade bitters as much as the next guy, but any music that is not at its best with a sweaty longneck Bud is music you shouldn't be listening to."

Gold may have a point, but the new website Drinkify begs to differ. Created by Matthew Ogle, Hannah Donovan, and Lindsay Eyink as part of Echo Nest's recent "hack day," Drinkify uses drink recipes with bands both major and miniature. In just three days, the site racked up five million clicks, a figure that will billow and swell like a Neil Young guitar solo in the weeks to come.

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Even with the world being a brutal, violent place and people generally malevolent and scummy, peace will always get more of a chance than wrinkly green nubs from the freezer. On his latest album, Give Peas A Chance, famous children's musician Tom Chapin (brother of Harry, father of semi-locals Lily and Abigail, a.k.a. The Chapin Sisters) lends his voice, guitar and storytelling acumen to the advocacy of good food, not least of which is the oft-maligned pea.

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Courtesy of KCRW

KCRW deejay Anne Litt (left) and chef Cat Cora (right).

​Iron Chef Cat Cora joins the ranks of Kerry Simon, Rick Bayless and Adam Richman to reveal some of her favorite tunes for KCRW's Guest DJ Project.

The Mississippi-born Cora segues from country to classic soul but says all her song picks represent major milestones in her life, most notably her wedding to wife Jennifer. So what instrument would Cora play if she was in a band? The answer should surprise no one.

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When the reunited '90s band Cibo Matto heads to the Hollywood Bowl on June 26th, bloggers and writers will embrace the opportunity to indulge in shitty food puns. With songs like "Sugar Water," "Birthday Cake," and "Know Your Chicken," the band's set-list always resembled the menu of a surrealist buffet, so you can't really blame them. Of course, back in their heyday, that didn't stop principals Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori from gamely pushing back every time music journalists labelled them as food fetishists or a cutesy cultural phenomenon. In a 1996 Los Angeles Times profile, Honda essentially told those folks to put a sock in it:

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