Everyone was all abuzz talking about their top 5, 10, 15 albums of the year, decade, etc….I’m gonna blog about my 5 favorite recipes of the past year. And I’ll even include recipes for ya! In no particular order, and without pictures since we seem to have lost the camera… ahem…

Apple Pie

My apple pie is intense. I usually end up crying in the kitchen, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that I over stuff my pies with yummy filling, and that is the reason my top crust never fits…

Crust

3/4 c. Crisco
1 tbl. Milk
1/4 c. Boiling water
1 tsp. Salt
2 c. Flour

Pour boiling water over crisco & milk.  Combine with a fork until the consistency of whipped cream. Add flour & salt. Mix until crumbly. Form into 2 cakes and roll out between 2 sheets of wax paper. Makes 2 crusts. If you’re me, and you make DEEP dish pies, make an additional 1/2 recipe of the crust to prevent kitchen tears. It’s best to chill your dough 20 minutes.

Filling

6 apples peeled, cored, sliced (I use Granny Smith’s for the tartness)

1/2 c brown sugar (I don’t measure this exactly, its more of a color thing)

1 tbsp cinnamon

1/2 nutmeg

1/4c of butter sliced into little pats

Peel, core and slice your apples thinly. Set in bowl and top with the sugar mixture, cover with a towel. Place bottom crust in the pie plate, top with apples and juices. Place the butter in all the nooks and crannies of the apple layers. Top with remaining crust. I use a small cookie cutter on the top crust so the heat can escape. Bake 425 for 10 minutes, and 375 for 3o or until golden brown.

Goofy Rolls

Shortening (the size of an egg)

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

1-2 yeast cakes broken up in 1 cup of luke warm water

Then sift together:

1 cup flour

1 tsp. ea. baking powder and salt

Add 1 cup lukewarm water

4 cups flour

Mix and knead together then let rise once, punch down and let rise a second time until doubled in size.  Mike into rolls and set in individual muffin tins and allow to rise once again.

Bake at 350 degrees 20 to 25 minutes. I served them with honey butter, but they were even better all week long as breakfast biscuits with bacon.

Carnitas with Green Sauce

4 lb pork shoulder

2-3 dried chilis

1tsp salt

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp corriander

1/4 tsp cinnamon

2 bay leaves

2 c chicken broth

Place bay leaves and chilis in a slow cooker. Combine all dry ingredients in bowl. Rub all over the pork shoulder.  Gently place shoulder in slow cooker and cover gently using a baster with the chicken broth. Cook on low for 18-24 hours, turning gently every few hours. Meat should fall off the bone. Don’t be surprised to find loved ones eating fat soaked meat directly from the crock pot. I wasn’t.

Green sauce:

olive oil

1 large onion minced

5-6 cloves of garlic, minced

2 green peppers chopped

2 jalapenos seeded and membranes removed if desired – I always leave mine in, live a little.

1 1/2 lb tomatillos, husked and quartered

cilantro – I usually use an entire bunch, but I have a cilantro thing.

1 1/2 tsp Kosher salt

1/4 tsp black pepper

1 tbsp cumin

4 c chicken broth

1tbsp sugar or to taste

Sautee onion garlic in olive oil until they smell amazing. In food processor combine green peppers, tomatillos, jalapeno and cilantro. Add chicken broth if necessary to make the blending easier. Process until it’s smooth. Put your tomatillo sauce in a slow cooker with your sauteed onions and garlic and cook on low with the remaining chicken broth all day. Or, if you’re in a hurry, combine all ingredients in a sauce pan and simmer for 20.

Sausage, Red Bean and Kale Soup

1 pkg dry red beans

1 large bunch of kale, washed, stems chopped and ripped

1 pound sausage

1 cup of shallots

4 cups of beef broth

hot sauce

Soak beans overnight, drain and rinse. Cook beans in 4 cups of water. Boil until soft, do not drain. Brown sausage and shallots in a pan, add to bean mixture with broth. Simmer on stove for 30 minutes, adding the kale for the final 10 minutes. Serve with fresh parmesan and crusty bread.

Sausage, lentil and squash salad

3/4 cup dry lentils

1 lb sausage

2 lbs butternut squash, sliced into small pieces

fresh basil

crumbled goat cheese

Soak lentils for 30 minutes before boiling until soft. Drain. In saucepan brown sausage, drain add to boil with lentils. Roast squash for 30 minutes, add to sausage and lentil mixture. Top with crumbled goat cheese and freshly shredded basil. This salad is amazing warm or cold, works great for a meal on the go in Tupperware.

There. Will. Be. Food.

Christmas Breakfast

Mimosas

Jewish Apple Bread

Ham and Cheese Croissant Rolls

Mafoo’s Scrambled Eggs

Christmas Dinner

Crab-stuffed mushrooms with Gruyere

Cheese plate – Gorgonzola, Garlic crusted Goat, Roquefort

Crackers

Goofy Rolls – my Great Grandmother’s recipe from Nova Scotia

Cilantro Herb Stuffing – apples, sausage, garlic, and fennel

Carmelized Carrots – hazlenut sage glaze

Potatoes Au Gratin

Sweet Potato Casserole – (NONE of that marshmallow shit either, mine has eggs, brown sugar and pecans)

Roasted Squashes with Rosemary

Sauteed Kale

Cranberry Sauce- whole berry

Roasted Cornish Game Hens (in an sweet garlic apricot glaze)

Christmas Dessert

Apple Pie (simple, but my apple pie is EPIC, and usually involves a slew of profanities when I roll out my crust)

Cinnamon Glass Cookies

Sherry Cake – Matt’s mother’s recipe

Beer – choosing tomorrow

Egg Nog – very spiked

Friends,

I’ve been remiss in updating you all on some amazing concerts coming up, many of which are FREE, and most of which I at least have access to comps or discounted tickets, never hesitate to ask me. For what it’s worth, if you have family in town, the Guggenheim show is perfect for family and children, and is my favorite holiday concert, and I do a lot of them!  I’ve heard from many friends that within minutes all the holiday woes and stresses melt away.

December 9
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians, Triple Quartet
Axiom Ensemble
Jeff Millarsky
8pm Alice Tully Hall, FREE

December 12
Handel: Messiah
Trinity Wall St
Trinity Baroque Orchestra
3:00 pm
Tickets

December 13
Handel: Messiah
Trinity Wall St
Trinity Baroque Orchestra
7:30 pm
Tickets

December 14
Composers Ensemble: Fancy That
Music of Dmitri Tymoczko and Paul Lansky
Princeton University Department of Music
Taplin Auditorium
8:00 pm FREE

December 15
Clarion Music Ensemble
Steven Fox, director
A Bach Christmas
Selections from The Christmas Oratorio, and Cantatas 16 and 133
8:00pm
Tickets

December 19
Vox Christmas Spectacular
Vox Vocal Ensemble
Grahm Ashton Brass Ensemble
George Steel, director
Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright Rotunda
6:30 pm
FREE

December 20
Vox Christmas Spectacular
Vox Vocal Ensemble
Grahm Ashton Brass Ensemble
George Steel, director
Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright Rotunda
6:30 pm
FREE

Yesterday was a very, very awesome day. Newspeak’s debut album, Sweet Light Crude dropped on New Amsterdam records. Head to our site and hear the entire thing streaming! Or, head to New Amsterdam’s site to download the very awesome B & E (with aggravated assault) by Oscar Bettison for FREE.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, our video single Sweet Light Crude. Special warm fuzzies to everyone’s favorite video crew Satan’s Pearl Horses.

I first met Jonny Rodgers in 2006 when I busted out a Line 6 and covered Bjork’s Desiring Constellations at Yale. We met again this spring under similar circumstances, this time he was doing the looping covers… We’ve been e-mailing back and forth, trading ideas, albums. He e-mailed me yesterday out of the blue, right when I was thinking about ditching a creative project that I’ve been working on, perfect timing!

Below is what Jonny does, georgeous singing, tuned wine glasses and guitar playing that seeps into every crack of your being like liquid gold….

Victoire’s debut album Cathedral City has dropped people, and I’m here to share the video featuring the lovely ladies and myself!

video by Stephen Taylor

I’ve always liked calling TLDV1 The Lil Death, and now finaly, I feel justified in calling it just so. Over the next week we’ll  be bringing mini portions of the opera to audiences in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Bloomington and Detroit. We’ll be presenting a hybrid show of selections from the opera interspersed with our zany remixes and mash-ups. Joining us is Missy Mazzoli’s  all-star all-female ensemble Victoire who will be presenting portions from their upcoming album Cathedral City, which I had the privilege of singing on as well. (check out their free download over on New Amsterdam’s page.)

Here’s our itinerary:

I am so proud of that picture. That’s yoga right there folks!! So TLDV1 got a few more write ups over the past few days, and I’m going to do the unthinkable and link to all of them- despite the fact that one is AWFUL. But we’ll talk about that later.

Time Out New York

Great theater review from Helen Shaw. TONY has been ridiculously supportive of TLDV1, including inviting us to perform on The Volume, and now linking to our video as their brain stealer of the week! Shaw had issues with the staging at times, which is bound to be tricky with a two person opera, but she did say that “in singing the music itself—unabashedly boppy, baroquely multireferential, then suddenly sentimental—the rapturous pair manage to save themselves.”

So, fine, these kids are all still figuring everything out. But that actually turns out to be the best argument for spending your time with them. Marks himself is a founding member of the new-music Alarm Will Sound crew, and has recently been working with the Dirty Projectors to arrange their piece The Getty Address for the stage. That is to say: he’s got skills across a pleasing range of disciplines. Here, even when I was confronted with moments or gestures that I found awkward or too call-attention-y, I respected his overall compositional attack.

Equally impressive is his co-vocalist Mellissa Hughes. I saw her sing in Louis Andriessen’s De Staat at Carnegie’s new music space a couple months back, and with the Signal ensemble at this year’s Bang On A Can festival, but those were both stand-and-deliver performances behind sheet music. So I actually wasn’t prepared for the strength of her physical performance in The Little Death. When she gutted out the the familiar tune “He Touched Me” while wearing a virginal wedding dress and sashaying toward Boy, Hughes came across as confused in the most delectable of ways. But when she turned it into a degraded, Madonna-at-the-1984-VMAs pole dance, everyone in the tiny St. Mark’s Church gym seemed under her crypto-erotic-religious spell. Developmental hiccups aside, I can always make time for that.

Awl author Seth Colter Walls had issues with the performance, he straight argues against calling it an opera in the second paragraph, but he appreciates the bold statements Matt’s made in his composition and is willing to wade through some of the “developmental hiccups” that accompany a work-in-progress.

Village Voice

Part of me doesn’t want to link to this at all, because critic James Hannaham HATED it. But he spent maybe 200 words attempting to trash something that he clearly doesn’t have the taste buds for, nor attempted to appreciate before slamming it with references that make absolutely zero sense. I’ll post the full review here for shits and giggles:

The Little Death: Vol. 1, at the Incubator Arts Project, takes the opposite approach, flaunting conventional values against an unconventional background. Composer Matt Marks, who writes what he calls “emotionally manipulative pop songs,” has staged a song cycle he describes as a “post-Christian nihilist pop opera.” On a set cleverly dressed to resemble a Midwestern high school gym, Marks and Mellissa Hughes, a talented singer, gesture their quasi–Robert Wilson way through Marks’s repetitive techno score, which sounds like MGMT’s outtakes with Annie Clark on vocals, played on a broken boombox at full volume. The barest plot emerges, of Christian chastity besmirched by sex, followed by piety, unresolved. The best moment is when the performers reveal a stained-glass window, a surprising reminder that, despite its avant-garde credentials, the theater space is still in a church. Too cool to be Christian, too Christian to be cool, the show hovers in the place between irony and sincerity, which, it turns out, is called blah.

Me thinks I spy a hardcore CATS fan. This is not a musical, or a song cycle, it’s an opera. A musical idea threaded through with a narrative. It is a piece of theater, albeit one wrought with staging and plot challenges. Despite the fact that this is a theater review, he doesn’t really trash the production, but he does dig into the space  “The best moment is when the performers reveal a stained-glass window, a surprising reminder that, despite its avant-garde credentials, the theater space is still in a church.” He spends the majority of his rant trashing Matt’s music, and comparing it to MGMT, and comparing my vocals to St. Vincent. Well, that just doesn’t even make sense. Like, at ALL. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one.

In general all of our music reviews have been glowing, the theater reviews take some issue with the plot, but most are quick to realize that we’re only presenting half of the story. There’s been so much talk about is it an opera, is it a musical, it has no story… it drives me crazy. Most of the opera I’ve performed in, and I’ve definitely done my corsetted share, is based on this same boy-meets-girl premise, and all of the action takes place in the Act 2 summary printed in your program, mmm-kay?  I think people struggle with the electronics, and with the multi-style vocals used to portray the narrative. This is not a stand and deliver Sondheim musical theater technique, this is not a “park and bark” bel canto technique. Matt’s music requires a musical vocal vulnerability, he wants pure straight tone, Aretha Franklin Gospel belting, heavy metal Meatloaf-esque grit and edge, and requires me to sing so low at one point he actually wrote it out in bass clef. It’s all very “pastiche-y” Handel would be proud, and quite possibly even Tarantino.

My .02

We opened at the Incubator Arts Project on Thursday night, still just wading into our first week of performances but the response so far has been really positive and the experience has been great. I thought I would post a round up of some of the press we’ve received over the last week.

Time Out New York’s The Volume

Live performance of He Touched Me!

WNYC’s Soundcheck

Steve Smith names Matt Marks’ album The Little Death: Vol. 1 on of his best of 2010!

Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone

What had been a great collection of smart, sometimes silly, pop songs in the guise of a gently confusing pop opera has evolved into a smartly stage, well focused piece of musical theater.

While Marks’ excellent music provided the building blocks, director Rafael Gallegos has built a solid foundation and has cemented the building block  together to form an elegant theatrical environment for the Marks’ eerie love story.

Backstage

As a performer, Marks dives pelvis-first into the rock-star physicality of his part and exhibits a capable vocal range, even if he and Hughes are occasionally drowned out by the throbbing music. Thanks to her own strong vocals, Hughes is able to navigate the jumpiness of the music well, and her dirty, thrusting rendition of “He Touched Me,” in a wedding dress, is quite raucous and absurd, like something out of a Kate Bush music video.

NY Times!!

Saturated with sampled timbres and driven by sputtering hip-hop break beats, Mr. Marks’s music is bright and sentimental, at times even cloying in a manner meant to evoke anodyne commercial Christian pop. But Mr. Marks’s crafty juxtapositions, clashes and transformations add to the opera’s overall sense of ambiguity; in moments when he underscores sexual urges scarcely hidden within his squeaky-clean borrowed sources, substantial heat results.

A versatile soprano who excels in both standard classical repertory and modern works, Ms. Hughes sounded idiomatic and perky in indie-pop songs, and brought convincingly soulful grit to gospel numbers.

The Big City

The direction by Rafael Gallegos is really fine and adds a great deal to something that is already interesting, involving and satisfying. Just listening to the CD leaves some odd narrative gaps that the mind tries to fill in, and Gallegos has worked out a fascinating and effective sense of temporal narrative. The events that the songs portray, including the opening shooting, have an overall order, even with what is one big flashback (and of course young men have a tendency to try and kill what they can’t possess), and having things unfold through time, both forward and backward, brings out more of the complex nature of the characters, who, despite their generic names, are holding real internal contradictions together, and touching on them alternately and simultaneously. It’s one of the better and more relevant Off-Broadway musicals out there right now, not preachy at all and completely entertaining.

It’s been an amazing week, and we have two performances left so use that discount code TLDV1 to snag your $12 tix for tonight or tomorrow. Next week’s performances run from Wednesday through Saturday.

And because I love you.. check out the official FULL I Don’t Have Any Fun Video by our awesome video crew Satan’s Pearl Horses

Go Get Your Tickets NOW!!!! The discount code TLDV1 gets you $12 tickets for the first weekend of shows only, and if you really want to see the full video premiere of I Don’t Have Any Fun, then you’re just gonna have to buy tickets to opening night and stay for the badical after party where Satan’s Pearl Horses will screen it! For more info please see thelittledeathvol1.com