People, what is it with you?

You could google and stumble across our site because of our comet truffles, or our checkered ravioli, or at the very least The Cat’s lamentations of dairy dessert denied.

But no. You stumble here — as our sad stats tell us — for one reason above all others. You stumble here because we have a

MESSY KITCHEN.

That’s right. “Messy kitchen” is our number one search string result. And not by a nose either. It beats out “belly timber” at number two by a substantial margin. What is up with that? Are messy kitchens so rare that visitors must come to gawk?

Oh very well. If you must, we will accommodate.

First off, let me point out that the messy kitchen in our introductory post, is not our current kitchen. That kitchen belongs to the house we used to live in when we lived in Portland, and I assure you, I’m confident that it’s not nearly as messy now as it was then.

That’s not to say we don’t have a messy kitchen now. This time though, we’ve got an excuse. Don’t believe me? Here, take a look:

That’s the kitchen. And I mean the whole kitchen. Three steps to the left and you’re in the bathroom. Walk toward the camera and you hit the dining room table.

To better illustrate the utter chaos that is our messy kitchen, I have created this fine work of digital art. Okay, I’ve drawn badly on the photo. Read on to revel in our daily battles and chortle at our culinary misfortunes.

Now, just so you don’t think we’re completely screwed, we do have this lovely additional pot and pan storage area:

Ahem. Yes, that’s the dining area’s window seat. Just, ignore that. Go about your business.

Oh, and look! We have a pantry!

Well, sort of a pantry. More of an alcove, really. But it’s got shelves and the shelves have food on them, so that counts, right? To bad about that pesky hot water heater in the back taking up all that room, eh?

So, I know what you’re probably all thinking. You’re thinking “You have a kitchen like that and you write a food blog? Are you people INSANE?”

Well, if you have to ask…

In all seriousness though, we do intend to do something about this calamitous crisis of space. No, we won’t be knocking out any walls or putting in additional cabinets. We will be expanding the old fashioned way. We will turn the clock back to frontier-style living and make use of the great outdoors.

That’s right. Meet our new kitchen annex:

The Messy Porch: Future home of pot and pan storage and a brand new chest freezer!

Filed under: kitchen photos and, of course, holy crap what a freakin’ disaster.

Here’s another one from the Mom’s Secret Stash files: Irish Soda Bread.

I couldn’t find the old recipe card this time, but as with the not-so-Hungarian Goulash, I did locate the source: Page 132 of Ann Rogers’ A Cookbook for Poor Poets (and others).

This book is a Mom Favorite and I’m convinced it’s not just because of the simple, rustic recipes inside, but because of the title. Trust me, in our house growing up, it was all about being Poor Poets. (Or poor writers, or poor anthropologists for that matter. You get the picture. Everyone did the follow-your-bliss thing. Too bad bliss didn’t come with nice salaries.)

I don’t remember much else from the book aside from Poor Poet’s Chicken (p. 113), and a dish I never cared for called Hog and Hominy (p.76). I am grateful Mom never attempted the dish in the introduction on page 10: Cats’lleatit. “Cat’slleatit,” the author says, “is manufactured from equal parts of heart, liver, tongue, kidney, sweetbreads, and/or brains (eater’s choice) along with a handful each of dried salt pork and sliced onions. And a clove or two of garlic for those who like it.”

Sorry, but a vat of dark chocolate, for those who like it, won’t get me near that one.

But, back to the bread.

(Important note: this is an old book, and therefore has a peculiar type face that tends to make threes look like fives at smaller resolutions. It may not look it, but that does indeed say “bake for about 45 minutes at 350°”)

If I’d been thinking clearly when I wrote up my childhood memories post, Irish Soda Bread would have been near the top of the list. Those crisp fall days when I came home from school to the smell of freshly-baked bread in the kitchen were the best ever. Tea time was a mandatory occurrence at our house and I’d even give up a stack of soda crackers and a rerun of Gilligan’s Island if I could sit at the table with my parents and eat Irish Soda Bread so fresh that the butter melted on contact. (Yes, this bread is meant to be devoured warm and if you’re hungry enough, it’ll be gone before it hits room temperature!)

Now, I don’t make this often, and since we’ve a rather small and (say it with me now) Messy Kitchen, there’s not much room for actual baking. So, I have to improvise. On days when I’m thinking straight, I’ll move the bread board over to the dining room table and work there. It’s a little low for counter-work, but it gives me the space I need to get messy. And I do get messy.

See, I like to make this stuff the old-fashioned way. Or maybe it’s just the bizarre Mrs. D way, who knows, but when the recipe calls for just combining all ingredients and working on a board, I do just that, starting with all the dry ingredients in a big mound. I then turn my lovely flour mountain into something more resembling Crater Lake, and pour the mixed-up wet stuff into the middle. At this point, with extra flour close at hand, I work it all together until the sticky mess becomes a nice round lump of dough.

That is, if I remember to move the bread board to the table and set out the extra flour.

Last time, I didn’t.

The tragic results were as follows:

First, I misjudged the amount of wet stuff to pour into the middle, and Crater Lake sprouted Crater Creek, which soon turned into Crater Falls right off the edge of the counter and onto Crater Swamp.

Second, since the “additional 3/4 cup of flour” was still in the flour bag, my dam-building attempts were less than successful, and I ended up jostling the bread board around on the counter, thus resulting in this woeful casualty of war:

Oh, beloved pepper grinder, we hardly knew ye.

Third. Well there wasn’t exactly a third, except I had to holler at Mom (across the room) to come over and dump some flour onto the board because otherwise this was going to be one big colossal waste of ingredients.

Amazingly, after all the chaos, I ended up with this:

And it tasted good. And we ate almost all of it before it reached room temperature.

From the cat photo vaults, Pekoe at the birdbath: Here, dinner dinner dinner…

(For more kitty photos, check out Weekend Cat Blogging over at Clare and Kiri’s hep cat pad!)

I, um, really apologize for that. It came to me in the shower, and
I. Just. Couldn’t. Stop.

(For more eggy hits from the 70s, check in with Dispensing Happiness for September’s EoMEoTE round up!)

Ah, fall, my third favorite season.

To salute the equinox with this month’s edition of Paper Chef, Stephen of Stephen Cooks offers us a tasty list of ingredients.

• Duck
• Ginger
• Nut Butter
• Pears

Now, as to the first ingredient, I was apprehensive at first (I even commented on Stephen’s blog about it), but as I lay in bed that night I remembered that I had a large amount of duck bones hiding in the back of my freezer. YES! I thought. Finally a chance to put them to use!

The next day I set about making those (usually discarded) portions of our favorite water fowl into a rich stock.

(Note: the following is a rather wordy version of most stock recipes you can find in nearly any cook book.)

I began by removing the bones from the freezer (duh… and yes I weighed them: almost 10 lbs) and placing them in a roasting pan. I recommend that you try to break some of the larger bones before roasting. Next, I preheated my oven to 375 F. When the oven came to heat, the bones were just thawed enough for my purposes. I placed the pan in the oven and roasted the bones to a beautiful golden brown. Then I dropped them in my 16 quart stock pot and added enough water to cover. I then placed the roasting pan on one of my two still-functioning burners, and caramelized one pound of chopped onion, 1/2 pound of chopped carrot, and 1/2 pound of chopped celery (also known as 2 lbs of mirepoix to the French). I deglazed the pan with red wine (does it really matter that it was Carlo Rossi “Burgundy”? I didn’t think so) and added that to the pot as well. After bringing the whole thing to a boil, I then added a tablespoon of black peppercorns, two tablespoons of dried thyme leaves, five medium sized bay leaves, and a small handful of Italian parsley. I then reduced it to a very, VERY low simmer (about four bubbles a second), and allowed it to cook overnight.

Duck’s Head Soup (stock): View at your own risk!

The next day I strained the amazingly flavorful brown liquid and put it back to the heat. After a number of hours on the stove reducing, I was able to extract more than 80% of the water from the stock, leaving an immensely flavorful glace (that’s pronounced “gloss”).

Now the next thing was to make a “nut butter.” I didn’t want to just buy something; that seemed to me to be a cop out. (Though I’m not disparaging anyone who did. I just knew that I had the tool — i.e. my food processor — to do something homemade.) So, I chose pistachios, because I LOVE them.

My pistachio butter goes as follows:

Mmm, mmm.

At this point I began to think of the best way to bring the remaining chosen ingredients and my two variations, together. The first thing that came to mind was Italian, and how better to incorporate these ingredients Italian style than in ravioli with a sauce?

To that end, I grabbed about four ounces of gorgonzola cheese and a couple of “starcrimson” pears. After peeling and coring the pears, I brushed them with melted butter, and placed them in a 400 F oven, allowing them to come to a nice golden brown.

Then I pureed them and combined then with the cheese, which I crumbled by hand. After that, I added two teaspoons of the glace, thus making the perfect filling for Fall.

Next was the dough. I took a page from The Pasta Bible by Christian Teubner, Silvio Rizzi, and Tan Lee Leng, and, again turning to my trusty food processor — this time with its “dough blade” — I spun up pasta dough. Then we broke out our pasta roller.

This was the point when we (Mrs. D and I) thought: “How can we make this dish even more fancy?” When we spotted the oregano growing in our yard, the idea came. We took our pasta dough and rolled it out almost as thin as filo, thus allowing one to see things through it. We then made creative patterns on the dough with oregano leaves and folded the dough back on itself, sealing the leaves between the two layers. This created a most flavorful, and at the same time decorative, ravioli, which we filled heartily, and cut using a tartlet pan, meaning that they were BIG.

Before cooking, I felt the need to attend to a sauce. And, there were still two ingredients to use to make this Paper Chef worthy! So, I took a tablespoon of my pistachio butter and a tablespoon of grated ginger and placed them in a saucepan along with 2/3 of a cup of white wine, whisked them all together and allowed them to reduce. When the mixture was reduced by about 3/4 I took it off the heat. When it stopped bubbling I added 4 tablespoons of butter, and swirled it vigorously to create an emulsion. Then I strained it, leaving a wonderful green-tinted sauce that went perfectly with the raviolis and left the oregano decorations in the pasta easy to see.

And now I present:

Ravioli dell’autunno with Sliced Anna Kiwi

After that I found that I still had large amounts of my ingredients left. So, I decided to plug on! The next thing I made was a soup. Rather than regale you with the process of this one, I’ll give you the recipe:

After the soup, I STILL had some of the ingredients left and another thought jumped to mind: Risotto!!

Here’s another recipe for you…

Phew! That was fun! Good ingredients. What’s next? Bring it on!

–Chopper Dave

Hah! They think it’s all about them, but they are mistaken. In truth, it’s all about ME. See, I peeked at that latest webstats and you know what? “Messy Kitchen” is no longer the top search string. That’s right, It’s been replaced. The top search string now?

ANGRY CAT!

Ha ha! I am jubilant! I am vindicated! I will celebrate with Friskees and dead voles! I will revel in my anger!

I will…

What’s that you say? You want to look at pictures of happy kitties too? Oh very well. You know the drill. Weekend Cat Blogging #19, over at Kiri’s pad — check it out!

I used to be a dork.* A big ol’ American dork who thought all cool ethnic foods like chutneys and curry pastes came straight from jars which came straight from factories because who the heck would ever make this stuff from scratch, right? I mean nobody but chefs and people with tons of time ever did that.

At my house it was never about tons of time. It was about throwing some Kikkoman Teriyaki sauce on a bowl of Top Ramen, calling it “ethnic” (hah!), and then chowing it down in five minutes flat before rushing off to an evening’s rehearsal of The Pigeon by Some Guy Who Thinks He’s Anton Chekhov But Clearly Isn’t.

Yes, I lived a life of culinary… well, to be honest, the word culinary didn’t enter into it. (That is, except for those late nights at the theater bar with too many oyster shooters… but I digress…)

Then, wonder of wonders, I met a chef. Okay, he wasn’t exactly a chef when I met him, but point is, he knew things. Wondrous things. Like: You can make curry paste at home! Really! You can!

In fact, about this time last year, we made quite a batch of Thai red curry paste, and it was scrumptious. Hot as a freakin’ sun spot, but scrumptious.

The thing I adore about home made curry paste is that it’s so much more aromatic than the store bought kind, and you can tweak it into a hundred different varieties. It lasts a nice long time, too. Cook up this stuff, use just a spoonful or two (or a cup if you’re feeling bold) and freeze the rest. Curry paste for months!

Here’s Chopper’s recipe for Thai red curry paste. Check back in a jiff and I’ll have posted about the time I assisted Chopper in the making of Thai red curry paste. It was — how shall I put it — a memorable experience. One I shall treasure forever. Right along side that time I took my hiking lunch break atop a 4′ ant hill. Not that this should stop you from…

Home made Thai Red Curry Paste

Ingredients

• 1/2 pound dried red chiles
• 10 black peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1 teaspoon fenugreek
• 4 stalks lemongrass
• 1 tablespoon minced cilantro
• 1 teaspoon minced galangal
• 1 teaspoon minced lime zest
• 2 teaspoons minced garlic
• 1 teaspoon shrimp paste
• 1 teaspoon salt

Method

1. Have a large mortar and pestle ready. I know, not everyone has one of the primitive tools, but it works best, and they’re not as expensive as one might think if they know where to look. We got ours at an Asian market in Portland for $22. But, a food processor can work as well.
2. First, stem and seed the chiles. Then soak them for 20-30 minutes, or until they are hydrated enough to peel. Then remove the skins.
3. Put a small sauté pan on medium high heat, no oil. When the pan is hot add the peppercorns and shake them around in the pan until you begin to detect their aroma. Then add the coriander, wait again for the aroma. Then add the cumin, repeat, and also with the fenugreek.
4. When all the spices are toasted, place them in the mortar and pestle, and allow them to cool.
5. While the spices are cooling, take the lemongrass and bash it with the flat side of your knife until it’s bruised and frayed. Then slice only the white parts and mince.
6. Pound spices and salt into a powder, then add cilantro, lemongrass, galangal, lime zest, garlic, and shrimp paste. Pound down to a thick paste, then add chiles. Keep pounding until the paste has the desired consistency.

This method is not fast or easy. It is long, and difficult. But your toil will be rewarded with enough paste to make fine curries for weeks.

–Chopper Dave

(*Actually, I still am a dork. “Used to be” is only to suit the purposes of this post and to illustrate that sometimes I do indeed learn things.)

Not long after my first experience with home made Thai red curry paste, I wrote up a remembrance of the blessed event in my journal. This was months before the launch of Belly Timber. We were, in fact, waist deep in all things culinary school at the time, meaning, time to blog? Hah. Sleep first, blog later. Oh, yeah, and drink. And cook crazy, succulent inventions with fellow students till all hours of the night.

September 15th, 2004

I swear to God, I did not fucking touch my eye.

So, here I am, at the computer, taking a break from web design hell to read the latest treatise on kerning and superscript properties in ancient Sumerian clay tablets, when Chopper calls me into the kitchen for assistance. We’d just gone to An Dong, aka the world’s cheapest Asian market that happens to be located on 54th & Powell, and Chopper is now dealing with his main purchase: a one pound bag of dehydrated red chile peppers.

Chopper says, “I need to remove the seeds from all these chiles. There’s a ton of them, so I need your help.”

I think. Sure. How hard can this be? Stand at the cutting board and strip seeds from the insides of dried chiles. Chopper hands me a small knife to open the chiles up and I get to work.

Now, I know already that chile seeds are hot, and that the oil from chiles can sting if it gets in the wrong place; tongue, nostril, eye — and lord help you if you have to take a piss while stripping chile seeds — but what I do not know is that the oil from dried chiles is more concentrated than just any old chile oil, and a mild sting (back the last time I made salsa) is now the agonizing fury of a thousand matches, all trained at my screaming, membrane-peeled eyeball.

I swear to God, I did not fucking touch my eye.

I got my finger close to it, remembered, then stopped. But, when de-seeding a third of a pound of dried chiles, close counts. The oil has a life of its own. It leaps from fingertip to eyeball, and the next thing I know I’m in the bathroom, in agony, splashing water on my face, screaming “I swear to God, I did not…” Well, you get the idea.

After that, perhaps twenty minutes later when I am able to open my eye again, I rub my nose. Holy crapping hell, it feels like the eighth week of the Worst Cold Known to Mankind. It is hemorrhagically painful.

I curse Chopper out for his inability to remind me to be more careful. And then he has to go take a piss.

Later, when we’ve both recovered, we mix up the Thai red curry paste — lemongrass, galangal, ground peppercorns, cumin, fenugreek and coriander, lime zest, garlic, shallots, and the I-am-so-not-touching-those-ever-again chiles. The smell permeates the kitchen. My eyes water, but do not sting. The final product: A pint of the stuff, ready to mix with coconut milk and a meat of choice, potent enough to last many meals.

Still later, my neck aches from too much web design hell, so I get out the tiger balm and apply it liberally. By this point I’ve washed my hands several times, but — and Chopper does not believe me but I swear to this — the remaining chili oil is reactivated by the tiger balm and my fingers begin to sting like crazy. I go to sleep with stingy fingers and I wake up with stingy fingers.

In the afternoon, we make Thai red curry with pork and coconut milk over jasmine rice.

Chopper takes a bite, says “It’s a little bit hot. Too.”

“Too?” I ask, thinking if it’s too hot for Chopper it’ll be way too hot for me. He has the tolerance of NASA heat shielding.

“No, two,” he says. “On the scale.”

I take a bite.

Sweet Jumping Jehosiphat almighty, it’s hot. It’s not a two. It’s a fucking seventeen. I go back to the kitchen and dish all of the remaining rice out of the steamer, pour myself a pint glass of water and curse my gut for being intolerant of milk.

Next time, I tell him. One teaspoon full of paste to two cans of coconut milk. The paste will last longer that way, and it’s oh-so-tasty so we oh-so-want it to last a Very Long Time.

Hours later, as I type this, I note that my fingers still sting ever so slightly, and I’m still afraid to bring them within an inch of my eye.

I wonder if Chopper will mind if I suggest we learn how to do home made sorbet next?

In case of power outage: Light lamp, cuddle cat.

(For more weekend cat blogging visit Clare & Kiri’s all-cat round-up and kitty party announcement over at Eat Stuff!)

Inspired by Clare’s Mini Kiri photo over at Eat Stuff, I’ve decided to share one of my favorite Platelicker baby pics. Here she is at six weeks, certain I’ve got something quite edible right behind my camera. Ah, they grow up so fast…

(Check out Sweetnicks for this weekend’s dog blogging round-up!)