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For more, check out the Chapin Sisters in this great live-in-studio performance podcast. Meanwhile, the eerie and meditative “Digging A Hole” (in the video above) is the perfect soundtrack for strange times.

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SISTERS BIANCA AND Sierra Casady, better known (maybe) as freak folk duo CocoRosie, offer up an otherworldly mix of vocals, strings, and sounds from children’s toys in their often haunting, undeniably original songs. The duo sometimes performs with longtime TSP fave, Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, but for many years, the girls didn’t see much of one another at all.

Then younger sister Bianca turned up for an unannounced visit to Paris-based Sierra. When Bianca’s stay turned into an extended recording session–in the tiny bathroom of Sierra’s Montmartre flat–the sisters’ first disc, La maison de mon reve was born. For a introduction to Cocorosie’s ethereal sound, check out their tracks “Terrible Angels” and “By Your Side”, and watch for their new CD, Grey Oceans, dropping this week.

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BROOKLYN-BASED, TEXAS-twanged sextet The Sweetback Sisters describe their music as “Honky-Tonk for the modern day cowboy and girl”, and really, who are we to argue? Watch for this fabulous band of harmonizing (non) sisters on tour. And meanwhile, sing along to one of my favorites of their tunes, “Don’t Put Her Down.” Let that one be your motto, sisters.

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Enjoy, and tell us what’s on your iPod for spring.

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WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, my mother did a ton of needlework. She’s a master seamstress, quilter, you name it, and for a time, she taught a group of Seventh Day Adventist missionaries how to make cloth dolls for children in Central America. How they hooked up, neither she nor I can remember, but as a result, we spent some time hanging out in the Seventh Day Adventist community. The thing that made the biggest impression (I was 6, remember) was that they were vegetarians. Maybe that’s what made my recent find of the Benton sisters’ cookbook speak to me as it does.

To my horror, the Seventh Day Adventists I met all those years ago ate a faux-lunchmeat, a kind of 1970s predecessor to Tofurkey, which I tasted, found unspeakably nasty, and never tried again. While I like tofu, I don’t do fake meat. That said, I am all for vegetarianism, though it’s not for me.

But when I started researching sisterly cookbooks, I discovered the Benton sisters. Audrey, Trishonna and Emberley Benton, with help from their  mom, assembled their own nearly-vegan cookbook in 1993, and managed to keep it in print through (at least) 1999. (I call the book nearly-vegan because some recipes include honey, which strict vegans eschew.)

The Bentons are (or were–it seems that they may have stopped performing) Christian singers as well, and have an oddly charming quality. Maybe it’s just all that amazing hair. Maybe it’s their enthusiasm for educating not just adults, but teenagers, about health and nutrition: They label their recipes as “teen tested.” (Now if they could make my 7-year-old and 4-year-old eat any of their food, that would be a feat.)

While I am unlikely to ever prepare or serve Cream Peas on Toast (despite the enthusiastic endorsement of this book’s previous owner), the granola sounds good. Really good. (Though I might reduce my own fresh cider, boiling it down into a syrup, rather than using frozen apple juice concentrate. I’m funny that way.)

Want to come over for breakfast? No mystery-meat, I promise.

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The Sister Project is starting to write down its rules for sisterhood. Mine follow; Marion and Anastasia have some, too. We hope you’ll add to the list.

LET’S FACE IT–cooking is more fun when it’s done with a partner. I don’t mean a husband or a boyfriend, I mean a sister, one who likes the same flavors you do, is happy to skate back and forth between top chef and sous chef, one who will chop onions for you or remember to take out the roast while you run off for a bath or a quick battle with a family member.

These days, I don’t get to cook in tandem like this very often. When I first moved to Los Angeles, my then-roommates and I cooked together–a lot. Driven by grad-student poverty and a shared love of entertaining, with different specialties and wildly different heritages represented, we were able to feed everything from vegetarian chili to sweet potato pie to Japanese curry to crowds of friends.

After our happy household broke up, my cooking life dwindled, and certainly my ability to cook alongside a sister-friend disappeared, at least for a time. Then, without really thinking about it, my friend Chris and I began to cook together. I’m not even sure how our culinary partnership started (though I suspect it began in earnest when she moved into The New House With the Beautiful, Big Kitchen.) This was after marriage, and at the beginning of motherhood, and cooking together brought yet another dimension to an already-deep friendship.

Chris is the one who taught me about brisket, who endured my experiments in Passover baking, who would always tell me the truth about flavorless stock or gummy risotto. But mostly, we kept ourselves comforted and sane while we nursed babies, weathered professional tsunamis, rolled our eyes at spousal insensitivity and, whenever we could, laughed at everything, funny, or not.

And so, for Chris’s birthday, I decided a few years ago to put together a cooking class with a few of her dearest nearly-sisters. Four of us gathered at the home of adorable wunder-chef Tim, and under his tutelage we made divine cocktail-party food and drank champagne. One of the guests, Stacey, had been fighting breast cancer for almost six years. She wasn’t feeling great, but she managed to rally for her sister-friend, and she chortled and bitched and reveled with the rest of us.

As it turned out, that night was one of the last times Chris and Stacey really went out, one of the last times she was feeling well enough to just enjoy herself, before enduring months of a bitter, painful end. Chris was with her every single step of the way through her disease, and I like to think that the memory of that evening, spent stuffing endive leaves and drinking champagne, laughing together, stirring and sautéing in a sweet stranger’s apartment kitchen in L.A., is one of the good ones from that dark time.

For me, the memory of that evening, and all the other uncountable evenings Chris and I spent in her kitchen or mine, make clear the first rule of the Cooking Sisterhood: Laughter is not optional when cooking with your sister. You can cry while you’re laughing-that’s OK–but when you’re chopping, peeling, or beating, nothing is so sacred that it cannot be mined for humor, no matter how perverse, bleak or even tearful the laughs might be.

What are your rules for cooking with your sisters? Must there be wine, but no whine? Does anyone get to lick the bowl? Are there any recipe secrets between sisters? Chime in.

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I AM CONSTANTLY [choose one: bemused/ amused/ frustrated/ mystified] by the dynamics between my son, known around here as the River, and my daughter, aka the Rock. That mystery, or my sense that there must be one, only intensifies when I try to understand that most unique sibling relationship, that of twins (or, for that matter other multiples–say, how about those California octuplets?)

The multiple-birth topic flying around TSP these days is the now-solved mystery of picture-perfect twins Maurine and Noreene Everett, whose beautifully dressed portraits ended up in the hands of a vintage-photo collector. Thanks to a reader, we now know who these women were, a bit about their family, where they grew up, and so on. But what we can’t know, about them or really any other set of siblings, friends, or husbands and wives, for that matter, is the essence of what drew them together into those fabulous identical-outfit poses.

What did they have in common (other than an obvious love of great tailoring)? What did they argue about? I wonder about these things when I see my kids, heads together, shutting me and the rest of the world out–and when I hear the explosion resulting from a conflict that is, despite the outburst it occasioned, private, and certainly not to be shared with a mom.

As an only child, the intricacies of sisterhood are a mystery to me. A few months back, TSP’s Margaret Roach and I went to the movies together, where we watched I’ve Loved You So Long. At the end, I couldn’t wait to ask Margaret, “Was that true?” Not the story–I knew it was fiction. But the way the two women, brilliantly played by Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein, circled each other, reached out and then ran away, and stayed together despite the pain they both suffered–was that real?

I see the same circling and loyalty (with, thankfully, smaller stakes and much less pain) in my kids–as much as they infuriate each another (and oh, lately, they do: I’ve taken to announcing that the prescription for ending the vicious fighting over Saturday-morning cartoon choices is to simply eliminate said cartoons. That threat works, for about 10 minutes, until they’re at it again). Each is always the other’s staunchest defender ( whether against end-of-TV parental threats, or other foes).

Recently, the Rock announced her plans to marry her best friend from preschool, a (truly adorable) little boy named Noah. River responded that such a union was impossible, given his sometimes-fractious relationship with Noah’s older brother. I told the older brother to mind his own business, and the subject shifted. A few days later, I asked Miss Rock about her wedding plans. Would parents be invited? The wedding might be off, she replied. Her brother had spoken.

When I look at the great pictures of Maurine and Noreene, I wonder how they sorted out their similarities (so strong) and differences (inevitable). What did Maureen think of Noreene’s husband, Donald? Did they stay as close throughout their lives as they appear in our wonderful Kodachrome archive? In this case, we may never know the intricacies of these clearly close sisters.

But what about the rest of you? Can you help this sisterless mom understand how you really feel about the people you’ve known forever? Can you freeze a moment in time from your sisterhood, to share with the rest of us?

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