Take a dive into the Beastie Boys cookbook
Beastie Boys Book is one of the rare band autobiographies that’s actually worth reading. That’s mostly because it’s not an autobiography at all: it’s an explosion of stories, remembrances, dick jokes, maps, doodles, and complete nonsense that feels as authentic to the Beastie Boys themselves as any of their albums or songs. The 30-year odyssey of the Beastie Boys was more than just music – it was brotherhood and life.
A major part of life is eating good food. Strangely enough, Beastie Boys Book has that covered as well. With the help of Korean-American food truck entrepreneur Roy Choi, the Beasties put together a mini cookbook hidden within the chapters of Beastie Boys Books entitled ‘Ate O Ate’, a pun on the drum machine of the same name that was elemental to a number of songs in the Beastie Boys canon.
Choi lays out a number of dishes with names that all relate back to the Beastie Boys’ songs and locations, most notably their hometown of New York City. There’s the ‘Egg Man’, which is described as being “egg on egg on egg on egg with egg garnish”. It’s basically as if every kind of breakfast meal based around eggs was combined into a single dish: an omelette with scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and sunny-side-up eggs, all included with an egg yolk garnish.
Since Choi’s expertise is in Mexican food, it’s only appropriate that ‘The Sounds of Science’ section includes a street taco. The ‘Chicken Gizzard Taco’, also colloquially known as ‘Butthole Bites’, is what happens when you mix chicken gizzards with traditional Korean ingredients, through it all in a hash, spice it up with Mexican spices, and put it in a taco. Don’t let the gizzards (or the alternate name) fool you: these ones look delicious.
Sticking with the theme of hash, the ‘Car Thief’ is a pile of meat and potatoes that is sure to satiate even the most ravenous stoner. With little more than potatoes, hamburger meat, onions, cheese, and potatoes, the ‘Car Thief’ turns out to be less hash and more of a deconstructed cheeseburger, with ketchup and mustard ready to finish the deal. It looks so good that you won’t even need a bun.
Now that the healthy options are out of the way, it’s time to dive into the ‘Get It Together’ section, home to a ludicrous monstrosity known as the ‘BBQ Grilled Cheese’. That’s underselling things a little bit: a macaroni-filled grilled cheese sandwich complete with BBQ-sauced pineapple. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a high-minded chef looking to make the perfect stoner food, and if the description isn’t enough to get you, the pictures will definitely get your stomach rumbling.
There aren’t really a lot of “healthy” options provided in ‘Ate O Ate’, but there is some decent variety. If you happen to be a seafood fiend, then check out the ‘Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win’, a bowl of clams complete with a homemade tartar sauce. The preparations are pretty simple, and a nice toasted baguette is recommended to really pull the most out of this saucy dish.
To close things out, Choi goes for a dash of the absurd by showing you how to cook a single potato chip. Not a bag of potato chips, not a nacho plate pull of the. One potato chip. While the ‘One Potato Chip’ might not sound terribly practical, it’s hard to argue against its easy preparation. If you really need to, just multiply the recipe by whatever your heart tells you the right amount should be.
All of the recipes for the meals above are available in Beastie Boys Book.
