It wasn’t love at first listen when my friend Todd gave me a CD with a dozen or two tracks that mostly contained distorted guitars and screaming voices. But the excitement of seeing some of those bands play in basements and barns to a bunch of sweaty, happy listeners was enough to keep me interested while I decided whether the music was something that I could get behind.

One example: The Assistant’s record release show for “We’ll Make the Roads by Walking”. The show was way back in 2003. May 1st. Not that I remember the date all that well. I just know where to look to help jog my memory.

The drive up to Old Bridge from Manasquan was one of the easier ones, since I was driving with someone who knew the route. Later, on other occasions when I’d be going to shows in Old Bridge, I would always make sure to leave 30 minutes extra for the expected time lost navigating the combination highway/country-road system that most of New Jersey is filled with.

I had never been to Todd’s barn before (not my friend Todd, but Todd from The Assistant), but I was expecting something rural. With high ceilings. And red paint on the outside. On this final expectation, I was not let down. It was indeed red on the outside.

But it was almost definitely not rural. It was behind a generally suburban house, with a nice backyard and an above-ground pool above it.

And it was most definitely not high-ceilinged. It was basically — no disrespect intended — a glorified shed.

All this is to say that a lot about this show was pretty normal. But the good feelings this gathering engendered… those are not something found at just any old concert.

To encounter these good feelings, we need only enter the kitchen of the house where the show was taking place. Milling about were smiling faces, and below all of their noses were platters filled with pastas, salads, chips, and a few other vegan/vegetarian delicacies. But of particular interest to my 17-year-old self was a baking pan with a layer of some brown, gooey-looking, chunky blobs of weirdness that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. I wasn’t really hungry at the time, so I wasn’t hunting for food. I was hunting for understanding. An understanding of what food group those blobs fell into.

Overhearing some word-drops like “peanut butter” and “oatmeal”, I decided to get adventurous. This being my first quasi-potluck, I wasn’t sure of etiquette — was I allowed to eat if I hadn’t brought any food myself? — but after asking one of the few people there I knew by name, I found out that it was highly encouraged to eat as much food as I desired. Later in life I would come to the conclusion that this was because people liked having their food eaten by others and then to be complemented and thanked for the hard work and thought that went into the meal. Personal experience.

I reached my hand into the baking pan and peeled off one of those globs. It was a weird feeling. “Peeling” something like this. Something with a weird consistency. Let me try to explain it. It was like a small blob of dough, but brown and somewhat rugged on the outside. It didn’t stick to your fingers, so it was sort of like dough coated in flour, but instead of flour, it was greasy. It didn’t fall apart, or flake. But you could tear it in half, sort of like dough.

And when I bit into it, it was soft. And the inside was flaky, a texture unexpected from the greasy, malleable outer shell. It was also a much lighter shade of the shiny-brown-black of the outside.

Turns out, these were Leigh Sabol’s (the singer and keyboardist in The Assistant) “No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies”. And after my first bite, I couldn’t stop. There were 4 layers of them in that baking pan, and I probably ate at least a full layer myself. After sheepishly requesting the recipe a few years later, I began making them a few times yearly. Any more than that and I would be a diabetic test case by now. Maybe if I show you the recipe, you’ll understand why. Why they’re so good, and why they’ll kill you if you’re not careful.

No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookie Recipe

Ingredients

1. Quick Rolling Oats (3 cups)
2. Creamy Peanut Butter (2/3 cup)
3. Vegan Margarine (1 stick)
4. Soy Milk (½ cup)
5. Sugar (2 cups)
6. Cocoa Powder (½ cup)
7. Vanilla Extract (1 tsp)

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, mix oats and peanut butter until combined. This will be a royal pain in the arse until you realize that you don’t have to go nuts here. Later, hot liquid will be mixed in with this and will make mixing everything much easier. Promise!
2. On stove, melt margarine, soy milk, sugar, and cocoa powder until it is one bubbly liquid mass
3. Dump melted liquid onto peanut butter & oats mixture
4. Add vanilla
5. Stir it all up!
6. Scoop it onto foil or wax paper in chunks the size you want the cookies to be.
7. Let cool for about 2 hours. Refrigerate for harder cookies.

I suppose, if you're interested, I could share with you some of my favorite tracks from The Assistant's catalog. They were, after all, the reason I was there, and the source for this amazing recipe.

You may not realize what you're getting into. But if you do get into it, do me a favor, and listen through to the end of the song. You may find something in there you can enjoy. And if you see me, let me know if you want to see the booklets that come with the CDs. They tell you where the songs came from, what they mean to the songwriters, and the lyrics, too. It's all quite an experience. I didn't include the song here that I based by college application essay on. That one I'll share personally with anybody who wants to know. Now, enjoy:

04_Tom_Hanks_Has_a_Huge_Beard.m4a

(download)

Click here to download:

04_Tom_Hanks_Has_a_Huge_Beard.m4a (6.51 MB)

08_Isabelle_Hates_Charlie.m4a

(download)

Click here to download:

08_Isabelle_Hates_Charlie.m4a (3.08 MB)

03_I_Don't_Believe.m4a

(download)

Click here to download:

03_I_Don't_Believe.m4a (5.2 MB)

I look pretty happy in that photo, yeah? Let’s get chronological.

2001…

Back in the early ‘aughts, I was in high school. My musical interests were limited. I listened to my stand-bys, especially Michael Jackson. Green Day’s Dookie, Blink-182’s Enema of the State and Take off Your Pants and Jacket, Get Up Kids Something to Write Home About, various Ataris songs. I was satisfied with what I had, because my real passion computer gaming. Especially Counter-Strike. My concert experience was a bunch of classical guitar concerts when I was too young to remember things (my dad was a pro guitarist) and a solitary Hall and Oates concert my friend’s family brought me to on a whim (I enjoyed it).

Then girls.

2002…

I spent some time crushing pretty hard for one particular woman a year older than I. The feeling was not reciprocal, as was the case many times before and after. But when she showed me her Microphones and Outsmarting Simon posters and pictures (we shared digital photography as a hobby), I was intrigued, both at the prospect of finding new music and at the prospect of finding a new interest for us to share.

2003…

I found the Microphones through file-sharing, and their songs were sonically displeasing. Too weird.

Surprisingly, Outsmarting Simon I did not find through file sharing. A search produced their mp3.com page, which looked exactly like the one in that link there, except without the attribution to “Triple Crown Records,” which they had not signed to yet. Listening to these songs, I didn’t exactly fall in love, but I wasn’t turned off either.

I continued on to their website.

Who knows what possessed me, but I used my recently established PayPal account to purchase an actual CD of their recently released “Silent, Sober, & Sound” album1. It felt like a good thing to do, and it was a chance to make an online impulse purchase, which is quite a draw if you’ve ever felt it.

This timeframe of this purchase coincided with my purchase of a 1st-generation iPod. I was still a Windows user back then, but I did my research, finding out that XPlay would give me a way to get music onto the iPod without a Mac or iTunes. I bought it for its looks mainly, since I thought Apple products were famous for their “graphic editing” capabilities, not at all for their ease of use. That thing was pretty, but holy shit did it get scratched easily.

One day, a not-so-close friend of mine came up to me during that weird period in between lunch and next period where the teachers had nowhere to put us all but the auditorium while the other kids had lunch. He did that thing that people you’re not really friends with but who covet something of yours sometimes do, which is to act very friendly to you and then complement you in an attempt to gain access to that thing they covet. Todd said “I heard you had one of those iPods, can I see it?” We weren’t supposed to listen to music during that “recess” in the auditorium, but I lent him my iPod anyways.

At the end of that time-sink, he came back to me and returned the iPod, and he said “You like Outsmarting Simon?” to which I said “Sorta, Kristin told me about them, I haven’t listened to them enough to know if I like them yet” and Todd said “they’re good, I heard of them before but this is the first time I listened, I like that song ” and I promptly forgot (8 years later) the song he liked.

After that day, Todd became my friend.

He made me a mixtape, a mix CD, and written on it was “The Todd Schmeling EP”. There was a song listing on a piece of paper, but I don’t think any of the songs had explanations next to them. I don’t remember which was my first mixtape with explanations, but it was probably later in life. The songs spoke for themselves… one could say they “screamed” for themselves, as plenty of screamy bands were featured on the mix.

One day, the day before a major English Honors project was due (I was creating a glass-bound T.S. Eliot poetry report and collection), Todd asked if I wanted to go with him to a show. It was January 19th, 2003 (proof). He really wanted to see this band The Pine, from Bakersfield CA. Or maybe he just wanted to pick up their record for a friend. They had just released their second LP, and on this tour they were selling a very limited edition one encased in silk-screened, hand-sewn fabric2.

This was the first time I’d ever been to a show. Or invited to a show. I didn’t even know what a “show” was. I thought they were called “concerts.” I had to ask Todd if there would be moshing at this show, since I didn’t think I would like that. He said that no, people usually just stand there and listen and bop their heads or clap their hands. There would be no pressure there3 to be anything but myself.

That show was in a cold, dark basement in New Brunswick, NJ, and it was loud, and we didn’t even stay for the Pine’s whole set. Todd got a ticket on the way home for going 80 in the left lane with nobody else on Route 18 but us (speed limit 65). I felt bad, but I don’t think I gave him any money to help pay the ticket. We were in his mom’s purple minivan. Earlier on the drive home, before Route 18 turns into a freeway, Todd was drifting off at the wheel and I had to yell at him to snap him out of it before we crashed into a pickup in front of us at a red light. First near-crash experience. Not the last.

One show we went to later on was a show at M&M hall. We went to see one of Todd’s absolute favorite bands, The Assistant. They were opening up for another band who were playing their final show, Penfold. Neither of us knew Penfold very much, though I had read somewhere that they influenced Outsmarting Simon. In fact, I noticed PJ from OS watching the show on the other side of the room. Funny story for another time, but despite being the 4th car/van in the parking lot (we knew the show would be pretty packed for Penfold), we did not get to see the Assistant. It was fun watching Penfold, but I did so from the back of the hall, standing on a chair, watching people go insane singing along to the catchy tunes. A happy point came when their lead singer, Brian Carley, asked the crowd who came the farthest to see them (sounds kinda cocky when you write it out like that…). Turned out that a couple from Japan had flown out to see their last show. How cool is that?

2004…

So began a long love for basement shows. They became one of the main reasons I chose to go to Rutgers. They became the reason I began hosting shows with my best friends at the Abdab.

2005…

They became a way I got to know the boys from Outsmarting Simon more. Which is how we ended up hosting shows for them. Which is how, to our surprise, we ended up preparing for a show by some unknown band called “Elf Pond.” Just a week or two before the show was to go on, we found out via some enthusiastic hinting that perhaps Elf Pond (which had no mentions anywhere on the internet) was an anagram for some other band we may know a little better.

Could it be Penfold?

Yes. It was Penfold. So we realized we had to prepare a little more. Make sure we had our soundproofing panels ready and in place (we had been cited for a noise violation early in our show-presenting tenure). Make more food than usual. Stock up on beer (hard to do when none of your roommates are 21 yet).

2006…

Those two kids from Japan did not know about the secret show, but as it happens, the show was partly an experiment to see if Penfold was ready to play an actual reunion show, something they had been considering. That show was a blast4, despite getting crushed against the stage multiple times. I didn’t drink at all, either, which was probably one of the last shows I attended where I had an incredible time without a drop of alcohol. Sad realization. Interests change.

2010

That secret show went off beautifully, with the slight exception that there was another show going on down the street whose audience may have appreciated being able to see both line-ups. Years later, a friend and I created a website about the night of Penfold’s secret show.

2011

Fall of this year, Penfold announces a reunion show, and a not-so-secret Elf Pond pre-show the day before. I show up with my friend and old Abdab-roommate Greg, meeting up with a few close friends to enjoy the show. PJ, the singer from Outsmarting Simon who helped me feel included in the New Brunswick music scene when I arrived at college, was reuniting his other band, Marigold, so it would be a fun night with some great music. And I wasn’t disappointed. Which is why you can see a happy Nano in this photo (taken by Penfold’s friend and the older brother of my great friend Anthony, John Cafaro).

I wonder who that happy fellow singing next to me is.

When I was living in Venezuela, I spent a lot of time with my extended family. Especially my grandmother, the exciting, loving “Bita.” One night, while I was in the car with Bita and some other relatives, I made some comment, the content of which I forget, but which I prefaced with the descriptor “in my youth…”.

The entire car erupted in laughter. My godmother managed to ask — in between gasping for breaths — just how old I thought I was. I told them I realized I was in the company of people decades older than me, but that it wasn’t as if I had just graduated high school and college the day before. I was 24 at the time.

Now I’m 25 (26 creeping closer), even further removed from the days of “my youth,” if you’ll humor me, and I like to reflect on some of those days, especially the most positive of them. Many of those positive days coincided with shows put on at my old house/venue, “The Abdab.”

The music we heard there was great. But like so many things human, it was the community that gathered around the place that made it so memorable. Every few weeks or so, for 2 years, my roommates and I had the pleasure of hosting bands from around the world and the locals who embraced and supported their art.

One of the people who influenced us to share our basement with the community was PJ Bond. We enjoyed his stories of amazing house shows he had been to and thrown, and as stories usually go, they portrayed the New Brunswick scene the way we wanted to see it: idealistic, beautiful, fun.

We especially latched onto the idea that food is a great way to get people in a good mood. Pot-luck style, that was the way to go. Who doesn’t smile when they arrive at a show and find out there’s free food there? My mouth waters at the thought of it.

So when we had our first show, we thought real hard about what to make. The easy way out was the universal punk pasta. Put tons of pasta in a bowl, heat up a ton of tomato sauce in another bowl, and if you’re feeling saucy, put out some shredded parm. Can’t really go wrong (except that the pasta dries out if you don’t keep it covered, which is a problem with punks coming in and out of your dining room / mess hall).

Someone smart made a good call though. We had recently experimented with some recipes pulled from roommate Zach’s amazing vegetarian cookbook Moosewood Restaurant New Classics. The cookbook is from some vegetarian restaurant out in the midwest I think (look it up kids). And almost all the recipes were way bigger and more intricate than a few curious-but-not-so-serious college sophomores to cook very often.

One of those recipes became the basis of what would become known as Abdab Chili. I’m not going to rip the recipe from the cookbook — I don’t have the book, and the recipe, like all good recipes, has evolved from its prototype into the monster it is today.

The Abdab Chili monster became a staple at our shows. A huge vat of it with bowls of shredded cheese, sour cream, and sometimes some chopped sweet onions could invariably be found on our dining room table while music blared below. Punks would fill styrofoam bowls of it, ask us if those meat-looking things were meat or veggie-protein-crumbles (they were always the latter, or sometimes our home-seared tofu crumbles) and then criticize our use of non-environmentally-friendly bowls. It was tons of fun. If I made my home-fried tortilla chips and put them out there, people would dip straight into the vat of chili for a nice corn-fueled scoop of deliciousness, wiping the dripping tomato sauce off of their smile with their bare arms.

I can’t share Abdab Chili on the internet, because I haven’t yet started a company that sells digital food sent and assembled via 3-D printers that are fed edible ingredients and use meat lasers to cut… so the best I can do is share a recipe. When you cook it (preferably with a partner to talk to and a beverage in hand), do it with the best, most idealistic intentions. Share it, make a mess, and clean up later. Celebrate.

There used to be potatoes in it, and the ratios are probably all wrong, but here goes:

Abdab Chili

Ingredients

1. 4 medium-size cans of Diced Tomato
2. 2 tiny cans of Tomato Paste (thickener; use more or less as desired)
3. 1 huge onion (or 2 medium, who cares? add more for more yum)
4. Two-tree garlic cloves. Again, your choice how many.
5. 2 squash/zucchini (your choice. not butternut, unless you want to try it out! I’m talking about yellow/green guys)
6. 2 normal bell-size peppers, whatever kind you want. Remember, spicy peppers will make your chili spicier
7. 2 packs of ground TVP (I have used this smartground stuff to great effect, but this is up to you! use whatever “meat” you want)
8. A bunch (like, 3tbsp?) of ground coriander
9. A bunch (like, 2tbsp?) of ground cumin
10. One more bunch (like, 3tbsp?) of chili powder
11. Salt to taste, my friend. I use n number of pinches

Directions (Abdab-style)

1. This is chili, so chop the veggies to whatever size you like to bite into. Everything will shrink a little and get soft, so, you know, something to think about.
2. Sauté onions and garlic in oil. I’m an oil lover, so I basically deep fry them. I do this in the same vat that I’ll be cooking the chili in. IMPORTANT: do not burn garlic. I suggest waiting a few minutes before adding it in.
3. Once onions are golden-brown and your kitchen starts getting compliments on how it smells so good, add a little more oil (if you feel like it) and then throw in the peppers.
4. Let the peppers soften and maybe even char a little (a few minutes) before adding the chopped squash.
5. Once you start getting scared that everything’s starting to burn (5 minutes perhaps?), add in those spices! STIR! YUM! Ok, so it’s starting to smell a little more serious, and less onion-aromatic.
6. Throw that “meat” in there. If you are using real ground meat, I hope you already cooked it in a separate pan. We’re just warming it up here, before…
7. Tossing in ALL the tomato cans. Remember, remove the actual metal cans from the chili before serving. Suggestion: open cans, pour contents into chili, then recycle the cans.
8. Cook on low-medium for about forever (at least until that huge vat starts bubbling mildly), then reduce to low/simmer and let it reduce a tiny bit. Start serving it whenever you feel like it. It’s going to look watery when it’s super-hot on the stove, so don’t be afraid to serve it, it’ll congeal or something once it cools down, and it’ll look more like “chili” then.