“The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging, and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for morality,” Anthony Bourdain writes in Kitchen Confidential, his impassioned in-the-kitchen memoir. He adopts (at least) two Halloween-worthy personas in these lines: a pirate and a rock star. And it’s the latter he’s most concerned about in a recent issue of SPIN, in which he remembers the “shameful, embarrassing” year that was 1977. It was the year hip hop and punk rock exploded, and Bourdain experienced it as 21-year-old culinary student wandering through the grime and garbage of New York City (whose odor he pontificates upon in the same way you wish he’d instead describe the smells of fresh-baked bread). Though musicians and cooks seem unlikely bedfellows, Bourdain reminisces upon their common ground, which included sharing “the same hours and many of the same proclivities” (in other words, they both enjoyed baking something, and it wasn’t cookies).

Away from the steak-frites and saucepans, Bourdain exchanged food for tickets to gigs at such seminal downtown NYC venues as CBGB (arguably the birthplace of punk acts like the Ramones, Talking Heads and Television, among others), whose legendarily gnarly toilet was nothing to eat off of. Still, Bourdain lived to reflect upon 1977, a time when for him, food was love, music was love, and in them both lay salvation. With this in mind, welcome to Simon Says, where the culinary collides with the world outside the kitchen.

After helming cult hit Wet Hot American Summer, David Wain made summer camp cool again. And with the 2005 Comedy Central series “Stella,” he brought then-floundering sketch comedy to new levels of hilarity. Now Wain is making like other funnymen (Will Ferrell, Michael Cera), penning skits for internet-savants on My Damn Channel, an artist-created and controlled site for video content. His “Wainy Day” episodes follows along as Wain plays a laughably eager would-be-paramour attempting to score some dates. Would Wain have better results if he made his favorite recipe, Grandma Pearl’s Sautéed Saltines, for the ladies? We asked him about it.

Grandma Pearl's Sautéed Saltines:

1 tub farmers cheese
1 tub cottage cheese
1 large chopped onion
1 egg
Salt and pepper
Mix these together
Make sandwiches of the mixture and two saltines
Dip sandwiches in a mixture of 2 eggs and 1/2 cup milk
Sauté in butter on both sides.
Refrigerate then serve.

Simon Says: Who is Grandma Pearl?
David Wain: She is my actual grandmother, deceased long ago. She lived in West Palm Beach, FL, and she made these little things, Sautéed Saltines, every time we visited her. She was born in Russia, so maybe she learned to make them there. Or she may have invented them – she was a crafty lady.

SS: Tell me about her Sautéed Saltines.
DW: When I told people I’d be talking to FoodNetwork.com and read the recipe to them, everyone was so grossed out. But Grandma Pearl’s Sautéed Saltines taste really amazing. I’d eat a thousand of them when I went to visit her, and if not, I’d be depressed all day. They’re just so soggy addictive. You’ll never understand.

SS: Well, they do sound kind of unpalatable.
DW: They’re kind of like anything cooked in butter. They have a tiny bite to them and they’re sweet, maybe because of the cheese. It’s one of those perfect bites.

SS: Your My Damn Channel trials are concerned with your ill-fated dating life. Thought about using this recipe to score some dates?
DW: That’s a great idea. From my mouth to your ear, that just might happen.

Watch as David Wain travels across the country for his latest love interest. The episode features Superbad’s Jonah Hill.

Allston, MA’s electropop enthusiasts Freezepop, whose deliriously squiggly chords in anthems about just wanting to rock landed them a song in popular PlayStation/xBox games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, know a thing or two about the frozen treat their name extols. They’re currently on tour supporting their latest batch of cheeky, cheery electro-spasms, Future Future Future Perfect, and vocalist Liz Enthusiasm took a moment to lend insight into what she calls “the culinary marvel of Freezer pops.” Her tips range from the obvious (she warns against buying 500 of the slushy popsicles in hopes of freezing all of them at once in under 24 hours) to the bizarrely obvious (“If you eat nothing but freezer pops for several months on end, you’re going to end up severely malnourished”). But Enthusiasm has some helpful advice, too: “the green ones make your throat hurt”; and, if you’re in a band, bring freezer pops to the show (“an audience hopped up on sugar will be dancing in no time”).

Contrary to popular belief, freezer pops need not be enjoyed solely as a summertime, porch-stoop dessert. Here, the other members of the trio provide their favorite freezer pop spin-offs:

Sean's Down-Home Starvin' Freezepop Salad
10 freezer pops (2 each color -- red, green, blue, purple, orange)
Let thaw for a few minutes. Cut them in half with a good pair of fabric scissors and squeeze out of plastic wrapper from both ends. Mix in a metal bowl for a few minutes until the pieces are 1 1/2 - 2 inches long. Bon appetit!
(Note: The resulting yucky brown color cannot always be avoided.)

The Duke's Ch-Ch-Ch-Cherrybomb
1 part Vanilla Vodka
2 parts Cherry Vanilla Soda
1 splash of Grenadine
2 maraschino cherries
1 cherry Freezer pop cut up into 3rds
Stir and enjoy!

Ever wonder what members of Cobra Starship do when not penning infectious, if wacky, theme songs to movies about snakes on planes? If you guessed touring, you’re right (they’re currently on a massive jaunt supporting ¡VIVA LA COBRA!); if you guessed cooking, you’re right, too! Bassist Alex Suarez tells us there are only two things he’s good at, one of which is cooking. Sure, the other thing may be playing music, but who wants to do that when you’re a whiz at making White Wine Pomodoro over Spinach Fettucine?

Culinary inspiration for the bassist comes from his kitchen-savvy mom, and, Suarez reveals, from “traveling to Spain, tasting different foods, flavors and textures.” Need proof he’s always been a foodie? Just ask to see his baby photos: “My interest in food really showed when I was a hefty boy.”

It’s been said that music saves some from the streets, and the Notorious MSG are a testament to this. That these self-described “Chinatown Bad Boys” have survived long enough to package their food-fueled electro-hip-hop into Lunch Money, a six-song set boasting titles like “Dim Sum Girl,” is a thing of wonder. According to the trio’s lore, Hong Kong Fever, Down-Lo Mein and the Hunan Bomb met as delivery boys on the thuggish streets of New York City’s Chinatown. Though they’ve traded in their delivery bikes for beats, they aren’t forgetting their roots. Check out the take-out boxed set for Lunch Money:

I was hoping for some absurd prophecy from one of the three fortune cookies in the box, and luckily the third one delivered! “You would make a good lawyer,” it declares. Note to readers: I wouldn’t (so don’t bet on the fortune’s lottery numbers: 1 38 2 15 32 4).

But who needs lawyers when you can fend yourself? “Once only fighting to defend themselves, they renewed their fight, this time for all their brothers and sisters in the Chinatown ghettos who would never get the chance to realize their dreams,” their story goes. How far their influence will reach has yet to be seen, but the limits are boundless with anthems like “Chinatown Hustler,” during which one member spits, “I feel no pain / I’m insane…eat a bowl of chow mein / I’m the genuine Chinatown OG / Original recipe: KFC.”

Brooklyn’s the XYZ Affair make delightfully relentless little power-pop songs on their full-length debut, A Few More Published Studies. The quartet’s moniker comes straight out of history books (Wikipedia tells me it has something to do with diplomatic tensions between France and the U.S. three hundred years ago), and if you’re in my demographic, so does the video for “All My Friends,” which features Food Network’s own historian of sorts (on “Unwrapped”), Marc Summers. “The idea for the video came about as sort of a pipe dream: we wanted to see if we could collect some of the actors who starred on the Nickelodeon shows we grew up with,” Alex Feder says. “Marc Summers was the first one to sign on, despite his busy travel schedule for 'Unwrapped' and 'Dinner Impossible' [which he produces]. He even offered to help us get contact information for other actors from that era! Marc, Danny Cooksey ['Salute Your Shorts'], Michael Maronna ['The Adventures of Pete & Pete'], and Jason Zimbler ['Clarissa Explains It All'] were four of the nicest guys I have ever met, and it was really wonderful to have them help us in our fun little tribute to the shows of our youth.”