A Braised Kale and Chickpea Sandwich Intervention Smoothed Out by Flora, Snoskred and FIDLAR
I made the mistake of espousing to my friends a while back that spinach is the only green for me. I said I didn’t care what nutrients I may be missing out on, I wasn’t ever turning my back on spinach. This led some of my more serious green loving friends to begin holding interventions. At first, the “interventions” were funny in the same way a dude falling off his skateboard and tearing up his face is. They presented the case for mustard greens or dandelion greens or broccoli raabe (by far their best presentation), I told them to make me a smoothie and subsequently spit it out at various levels of completeness. We shared a laugh and moved on to other things. But at some point these interventions became a pain in the ass. I began dreading my return home from work. I would walk into my apartment, find everyone sitting in a circle with a plate of greens and it took all I had not to flip out. The laughing wasn’t there, the smoothie spitting was done just a little too forcefully. After our evening with romaine lettuce it seemed that everyone got the point as the interventions sort of died off.
But last week I entered the apartment and found Dack sitting at my kitchen table with a big bowl of kale. He was the only one there. I moved to my bedroom to change clothes and told him to make me a smoothie. I returned to a mixture of kale, water, banana and blueberry. It wasn’t bad, I didn’t need to spit it out, but it was much chunkier than spinach smoothies. I told Dack kale wasn’t the green for me and changed the subject to dinner. Dack forged ahead saying that kale wasn’t a dish best served as a smoothie. He suggested I try a kale sandwich instead. I laughed it away. But he wasn’t joking. Dack proceeded to put together a Braised Kale and Chickpea Sandwich with Sumac Onions. I took a bite and was immediately won over. Now kale won’t replace spinach as my green of choice, but it will be expanding out of the reserved for soup zone that it currently resides in.
The sandwich I ate was pretty close to the original recipe. The only changes were that instead of mayo, I spread an olive hummus on the bread (olives, garbanzo beans, olive oil and salt). I also didn’t have any pizza bianca bread so we enjoyed our sandwiches on regular bakery buns.
I salvaged Flora’s “It’s a Lie” from my spam folder this weekend and was glad I did. The track is the first one to be released from Flora’s upcoming album. In it, the Israeli artist uses her beautiful voice as a floatation device that masterfully maneuvers through waves of hypnotic, airy instrumentation. F*** if she isn’t a much hipper version of something my mom might listen to. You can catch her around New York the next few days as she follows up her CMJ appearance with three other shows. On the Tuesday she will be at Fontana’s Bar, Wednesday’s appearance is at Pianos and Friday is at Lit Lounge. You can name your price for some tracks from Flora at her bandcamp page.
Snoskred is a Norwegian band on the indie label Sad Songs for Happy People Records/Riot Factory. Their debut album Whiteout will be released this Friday (October 26th). “Come Closer” is their second single from the album. It evokes images of a sonic attack, sort of like a flock of angry blue jays repeatedly pecking a gangly male figure as his girl screams in the distance. You can hear the sounds, the pleas, but you can’t get at them, they are just too far away. For music snobs, that can be interpreted as noisy guitars, seductive synths, pounding drums, rumbling basses all caressing dreamy indie rock blossoms of shoegaze forget-me-nots.
I’m loving Fidlar right now. First they’ve got a new EP (coming in a food flavored song post shortly) that is being offered free. Second they’ve got some awesome singles to their name including the new one with Kate Nash “Awkward.” I could really see this becoming the anthem for high school nerds everywhere. Hell, I could see this becoming the anthem for teachers of those nerds, you know the ones I’m talking about. Instead of interacting with other teachers in the lunch lounge they spend their lunch breaks watching Marzano videos and stupid stuff like that.
Food Flavored Song of the Day: Carnivore Girls by FIDLAR « Write.Click.Cook.Listen says:
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