TGE Recipes: Pork Chops + Applesauce with Ryan X. Peterson of Drop In

Welcome to TGE Recipes, a place where our favorite bands share the secrets straight from their kitchens. Think your favorite Food Network show except on a purple blog. Today we welcome Ryan X. Peterson of Drop In.

Pork Chops + Applesauce

(serves 2+ leftovers)
Ingredients

Applesauce

• 4 lb jazz apples
• 1 cup honey
• ¼ cup lemon juice

Potatoes

• 1 lb potatoes
• ½ yellow onion
• 1 tbsp. salt
• 1 tbsp. pepper

Pork Chops

• 3 pork chops
• 1 pinch each of cayenne / paprika / pepper / salt for spicing
• 1 tbsp flour

Directions

Applesauce

• Quarter apples. Use a sharp knife for quick quartering, but be careful, please!
• Core pieces, try to get out as many seeds as possible, too.
• Boil apple pieces on high heat for ~20 minutes.
• About 10 minutes in, begin mashing with your fav masher.
• Once decently mashed, let the apples finish boiling.
• Let cool for 5-10 minutes before serving!

Potatoes

• Pare up the potatoes into pieces that are small enough to cook quickly.
• Dice up the onion half and throw into bowl with potatoes.
• Throw on the stovetop and grill up your starches with the salt and pepper.

Pork Chops

• Prepare a plate and put the single tbsp. of flour on it.
• One by one, try to dredge the surface of the pork chop in flour so it covers both sides. Don’t shake it off! We need this stuff.
• Once your chops are floured, place on a grill or if you’re trying to pan fry, you can do that, too.
• Feel free to spice as desired.
• They’ll be ready when they’ve mysteriously changed hues from pink to beige / brown. I’m not really sure why they turn this color, but they do and they taste hella good.

interview/words: Andrew Lopez

Drop In is a punk / hardcore band from San Jose, California. Drop In makes fast, abrasive, and genre-bending hardcore.  Their most recent release, Antifascist Hardcore brims with thrash beatdowns, anti-bigot / anti-nationalist themes, and amplified, reaffirming lyrics that assure you that when you’re feeling out of step, sometimes it isn’t you. Sometimes the world really is against you.

I traveled down the peninsula to San Jose, where Ryan X. and I spoke about food, music, and professional wrestling.

The Grey Estates: Would you call Drop In your first serious musical project?

Ryan: Um, yeah! I had a band a long time ago in college that sucked.

What sucked about it?

It wasn’t the kind of music I wanted to make. It was just with my college friends. There wasn’t anything really bad about it, it was just different.

When did you start cooking seriously?

When I lived in San Francisco. I had like ¾ of a kitchen then. It was usually just stoner food. A lot of sandwiches.

How do you relate music to other things you create, or vice versa?

For me, I’ve always written a lot. I got a degree in Creative Writing in college. I wrote a lot of poetry then, and it’s sort of similar. With music there’s always more of a constraint to work around. When I write poetry, I have to think about how it looks when I write it. When I write lyrics, I have to think about what it sounds like when I actually say it. I could just yell, but it takes a lot of breath out of me, ya know? I have to be able to structure it differently than what I’m used to. It’s similar, but the end result of the creative process is different.

So we’re listening to MF Doom now, what do you usually like listening to while cooking?

Lately pretty much The Eagles, The Grateful Dead, and The Mountain Goats, I guess.

Didn’t they just put out a record? Have you listened to it, yet?

I listened to a couple of tracks, they’re pretty good. But I like listening to their last album. It’s about professional wrestling, which I am low-key / high-key obsessed with.

Yeah, isn’t there a Rock sample in the beginning of No Intent?

That Rock sample is from him wrestling in San Jose. It was either Jeremy (drums) or Cole (guitar) who heard it and they brought it to practice and they were like, “We have to sample this for a song.” And we were like, “OH HELL YEAH WE DO!” It’s hard to hear, but right as the song is about to kick in, The Rock says he’s “Going to whoop their candy ass all over San Jose.” I like that era of The Rock. Early Rock.

I know that hardcore / punk is pretty high energy. If you can have a dish represent that kind of energy, what do you think it would be?

High energy? Something like a sandwich. Something that can be prepared fast but is super heavy. Probably something like a philly cheesesteak! It’s got the cheese and peppers in there.  It’s something that’s fast and over really quickly. You just get it on there, fry it all up, put the cheese on, fling the.. fling the literal mass of food into the bread. It’s very heavy and animated. You can make a whole bunch of them, they’re all the same, boom boom boom boom! Just like hardcore!

Drop In is writing new material to release in the coming months, follow them on Facebook for upcoming shows / tours.