For the record

Author: Emily Temple

The holidays are a time for warmth, happiness and family. They are a time for giving and sharing, for helping your grandmother wash the dishes and chasing your cousins around the kitchen table. Not that I don't help my grandmother or chase my cousins (although some of them chase me), but my holidays are defined by something much simpler. Thanksgiving is Frank Zappa or whatever my father is hyped about this second and my mother's sweet potatoes. Christmas is the Chieftains' Bells of Dublin playing in the background and my grandmother's hand-me-down baklava recipe. For me, being home anytime, but especially at the holidays, is all about good music and good food.

It seems like an obvious combination - both music and food are communal pleasures, best enjoyed with a friend or with family. They're both sensual and sexy, and they're the two most effective words to print on event fliers if you want a lot of people to come. Of course, some combinations of the two are better than others. Take Food Safety Music, for example. A project from the Food Science & Technology Department at UC Davis, it is basically a guy singing about food safety to the tune of your favorite rock songs. Don't miss his rendition of Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover", with lyrics like "The problem is all inside the shell, says CDC/ This Vibrio vulnificus can cause mortality/ I'd like to help you eat your seafood safely/ There must be fifty ways to eat your oysters", or the ever painful "Who Left the Food Out", for which the guy fakes a Jamaican accent.

A better example of a successful union of eats and beats is a cookbook that came out earlier this year titles I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands by Kara Zuaro. This little number - a classy holiday gift for any music and/or eating enthusiast - contains favorite on-tour recipes submitted by the likes of My Morning Jacket, Camera Obscura, They Might Be Giants, Devendra Banhart, Grandaddy, Belle & Sebastian, the Hold Steady, the Decemberists, Battles, Voxtrot, the Mountain Goats, Death Cab for Cutie, NOFX, etc. A cookbook by rock stars about their on-the-road recipes may not sound like the most appealing thing in the world, but hang on a second. It turns out that many of these legends actually eat more than just their day-old, burnt-out cigarettes and spoonfuls of cocaine, and some of them seem to be quite handy in the kitchen. The recipes range in complexity (the super secret to Strung Out's Rock 'n Ramen recipe is TWO flavors of Ramen, not just ONE) and edibility. Galen Polivka, bassist for the Hold Steady, suggests a beer-boiled bratwurst. The appropriate beer for this recipe, just FYI, is Miller High Life, which we all know to be "the champagne of beers," not to mention the champagne of Battell To accompany his recipe, Galen announces that "the aural equivalent of a beer and a brat is, without question, classic rock." These are the moments that make this book worth it - accompanying the recipes are quotes, anecdotes and histories to make little fan girls like me giggle.

However, the absolute pinnacle of this cookbook is Devendra Banhart's spastic, exclamation point heavy recipe for Africanitas Ricas, which begins:

"RIGHT ON!!!!!!

here is my favorite recipe for:

AFRICANAS RICAS!

you shall require!

many bananas!
a box of graham crackers!!!
two eggs!!!
SOUR CREAM!!
HONEY!"

The ingredients dispensed with, Devendra moves on to holistic instructions: "...now, chop the beautyful godsends (the bananas) into the size of eight quarters glued together, do this with all the beautyfulll godsends... And STIRRRRRR!!!!... SIR LAWRENCE OF ARABIA!... THEN, put it on the frying pan!!!! let it get GOLDEN!!!"

Can anyone think of a better way to bring cheer to the whole family?