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    Name your top 10 kitchen songs

    By | Shine Food – Mon, Aug 11, 2008 8:51 PM EDT

    Singing in the shower is...okay. Pleasant. Mildly, moistly enjoyable.

    But I believe the kitchen is an even better place than the shower for unabashed, full-voiced, superfreaky solo singing. (Or, as the Beastie Boys once put it, for "spazzing out all alone.") Kitchen acoustics are irresistibly flattering, even for those of us with less-than-operatic voices: all that echoey tile.

    Some basic precautions are necessary, of course: When you're wielding a knife, it's better if you're not distracted by the sound of your own (awesome) singing. And I'm one of those people with a teetering stack of crusty CDs in my kitchen, next to an equally besmudged old CD player: "The land of spills," as I like to call it, is no place for a fancy sound system, or, God help us, an iPod.


    If you're with me, let's hear it: What are your top ten songs to cook to?

    Here's my list:

    1. "Foux du FaFa" by Flight of the Conchords. The way they say "boeuf" is funnier than a box full of puppies.

    2. "Use Me" by Bill Withers. So smooth, his voice is clinically proven to improve the consistency of roux.

    3. "Sunday Kind of Love" by Etta James. For those slow-cooking, soup-making weekend afternoons.

    4. "My Tennessee Mountain Home" by Dolly Parton. If there is a single human activity that Dolly Parton doesn't make more enjoyable, I'm sure I don't know what it is. (Okay, I do. But this is a PG-rated blog.)

    5. "The General Specific" by Band of Horses. I actually can't understand a word the guy is singing, but I know better than to let that stop me.

    6. "Take It on the Run" by REO Speedwagon. Because sometimes a recipe calls for a heaping tablespoon of rawk.

    7. "Magic Trick" by M. Ward. You can't not sing along. Don't even not try.

    8. "Seventeen Years" by Ratatat. There are no words to this song, which makes it a good one to chop veggies to.

    9. "Les Poissons" from The Little Mermaid. Because I am a dork.

    10. "I Feel It All" by Feist. "I know more than I did before" is an encouraging consolation whenever a difficult recipe doesn't go off quite right.

    Chime in with your own suggestions. (And if this list sounds like just the thing to bake cornbread to, or if you're curious about trying out this whole singing-with-a-spoon idea, I made it an iMix in the iTunes store: Epicurious Top Songs to Cook To.)


    Siobhan Adcock has worked as a writer and editor for iVillage.com, The Knot, Random House, and HarperCollins, among other media companies. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Cornell University, and has taught creative writing, creative nonfiction, and humor-writing courses. She is the author of a bossy instruction manual called 30 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do Before Turning 30 (Broadway Books, 2003) as well as Hipster Haiku (Broadway Books, 2006), a book of satirical-and very short-poems. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals.


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