Bands with Pans: Leda
Bands With Pans is a series in which we shop for meal ingredients with a Brooklyn-based band or artist on a $20 budget. Next we tag along for the cooking, chatting and—duh—eating. This installment, we bug feminist rock maestros Leda.
My brave photographer and I meet Leda’s guitarist/singer Amy Klein and cellist Heidi Vanderlee at a near literal battlefield. It’s 7 p.m. on Sunday at Brooklyn’s Trader Joe’s and carnage is everywhere.
Gloria Estefan’s “Turn The Beat Around” mocks the stripped produce aisles as we vainly search for decent fresh tomatoes. Adults laser-tag past us, frantic to finish their shopping lists before another week starts. Amy, however, doesn’t let the surrounding frenzy tense her muscles. Her gaze is up, pointed at the ornate ceiling. “[This] used to be a bank,” she says. “Like, an old school bank. Sometimes you just wanna look up at the ceiling while you’re shopping.”
We all take a cue from Amy’s cool. “That’s why I’m following you so closely,” Heidi says to her.
We’re making a low-key, creamy stir-fry around heaps of Israeli couscous—a substitute reluctantly accepted once I told Amy we couldn’t use the farro she purchased ahead of time. “What is a farro?” Amy asks. “Except for an Egyptian king? …I’ll Google it! (reading from Wikipedia) ‘…grains from certain wheat species… the exact definition is debated.’ Dude! Trippy! So no one can agree on what it is?” But we could all agree on couscous.