Not so long ago, I ducked back into our archives to take a peek at the very first comments left on our infant blog, just over a year ago. Turns out, comment #1 was left by Jen of Life Begins at 30, comment #2 by Kevin of Seriously Good, and comment #3 by Owen of Tomatilla!.

How appropriate is that?

See, here we are, launching into the first Paper Chef since our one year Blogiversary, and not only is Kevin hosting (while Owen takes a much-deserved break), but this month’s theme includes local ingredients, in solidarity with the Eat Local Challenge, organized by Jen! It’s The Circle of Knife Life, Paper Chef style!

Now, some of our more observant readers (okay, okay, everyone) will notice that we haven’t been posting much lately. It’s spring fever, I tell you. It’s going around. The garden calls my name, the pooch begs for serious ball time; who am I to ditch that in favor of slouching at the computer?

But, when Chopper read this month’s ingredients and went on an immediate culinary brainstorm binge, I knew my time away had to end. Chopper cooks and I must blog.

And boy oh boy did he cook this time. Seriously. This food is so damn tasty, I want to head to the kitchen for seconds, thirds, and fourths before I type up another paragraph.

Hang on. Just a sec…

Okay, back.

(Dusts crumbs off keyboard.)

Now, where was I?

Ah yes, the ingredients. For this month, Kevin used his fine scientific skills in Haberdasherdivination to produce these pleasing results:

Lavender
Miso
Chickpeas
Something local

And Chopper, because he loves this style of food (and no, not because we’re trendy, dammit! We’re NOT trendy!), immediately announced his decision to produce a four course tapas extravaganza, with a different local ingredient for each course.

For our local ingredients, we hit three places: the Farmers’ Market, Westcott Bay Sea Farms, and, er, our freezer.

Now, here’s the thing about eating local on the island in May: There’s not a heck of a lot available. The San Juan Island Farmers’ Market (in its weekly, outdoor incarnation) has only been running two weeks now, and at last Saturday’s visit, I counted a grand total of 15 stalls, only three of which were actually selling produce. This time of year, local produce means greens, greens, and more greens, with the occasional baby root vegetable thrown in. Lucky for us, greens at the Farmers’ Market are surprisingly cheap — especially compared to later season vegetables (and to the scary-expensive $6.99/lb bucket of “organic mixed greens” at the grocer’s).

In our short jaunt along the thoroughfare (I’d say main thoroughfare, but at this market, there’s only one thoroughfare), we scored green garlic from Blue Moon Produce, and sorrel and a lovely bunch of baby turnips with greens attached from Thousand Flower Farm. (Total cost for the three bunches: $5.50) Both of these farms are located on Waldron Island, a remote island northwest of Orcas that’s known for its amazing produce. (For a great chapter on the farmers of Waldron, I highly recommend Greg Atkinson’s book In Season: Culinary Adventures of a San Juan Chef.)

Next, it was off to Westcott Bay Sea Farms for clams, because as far as Chopper is concerned a tapas spread just isn’t a tapas spread without clams.

Lastly, we took a trip to our freezer where, among all the other oddities that deny us room for ice cubes, Chopper had stashed a pair of lamb’s kidneys. Yes, local lamb’s kidneys. These particular kidneys came from last year’s farmer’s market and from Local Island Meats, a stand run by the fine folks at Z Lazy J Farm & Feed, which is located just a few miles up the road from us. Chopper had been saving them for steak and kidney pie, but this weekend, they just screamed empanada filling.

Now, how close to home did we find these goodies?

Well, inspired by Tana’s Chefs & Farms map over at Small Farms, I’ve launched Island Local, a map for San Juan County growers and producers of culinary products. So far, I’ve just marked the locations listed above, but I’ll be adding more in the weeks to come. (Now, if I can just get Platial to recognize all these wacky island addresses…)

In case you’re wondering, Casa Belly Timber is just south of the map’s visible area, right below the ©2006.

A quick word about our other ingredients:

We discovered, though it wasn’t much of a shock, that neither of the two grocers on the island carry dried chickpeas, so all of our dishes were made with the canned variety. The miso was from a container of shiro miso paste already in our fridge, lucky for us.

Our attempt to use local lavender in addition to our other local ingredients was thwarted by two things: our own tiny lavender plant that’s not even close to blooming, and the exorbitant price the local lavender farm charges for their culinary lavender. Don’t get me wrong, there are many things I love about the lavender farm, especially in mid-July when the fields are all in bloom, but nine bucks for a container the size of a tin of shoe polish? That’s not one of ‘em. So, our lavender came from an herb and spice distributor and I haven’t the foggiest idea where it’s grown.

Chopper made all four of these dishes at once so we could have a true tapas spread (and I could go a little nuts with the photography). I garnished everything with herbs from our garden, quickly snapped away, and then we dug in. And oh, was it good.

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Watch this space for site updates and mini-posts!

No re-hatching is complete without eggs. Here, a cuddly, baby Cthulhu bursts forth from his shell and plots world destruction. He’s young, though. Perhaps we can avert disaster with some motherly love and a perky little chant or two. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Not that changing over to a new blogging engine bears any resemblance to a horror movie, mind you. Nope, not at all.

It was all going swimmingly, honest. Last Tuesday, I hatched this grand plan to upload and install Wordpress (and transfer over all our archive posts) during the Day Without Food Blogs. I’d created a bare-bones page in honor of Net Neutrality, and set up a redirect so that I could, (meanwhile and quite nefariously) work behind the scenes and ready Belly 2.0 for a grand unveiling.

And then the Wordpress import engine stripped all of the CSS out of every single last archive post and my two hours of work turned into, well, many more. Many, many more. Because you know, once you’re forced to futz with one thing, you end up futzing with another, and then another, and then the futzing just explodes into a giant, week-long futz-o-rama.

Here, we have an egg discovered on board the French frigate Amitié during the Napoleonic Wars. Little did anyone suspect at the time, but this egg contained not just any dragon, but a most impressive Chinese dragon (with a most charming personality, to boot). To read about the dragon’s adventures during the Age of Sail, you simply must check out Naomi Novik’s Temeraire trilogy, new from Del Rey.
“It’s crunchy and delicious, just like cow!” — Dragon Dish Daily

(At which point Chopper says “enough with the futzing already. Get the damn site back up!”)

So, here we are. (And, yes, I still have more futzing to do.)

And now, a few truly boring technical notes:

1. Why the change over? Don’t get me wrong, I’m awfully fond of Movable Type and it’s served me well since the day we started this puppy, but when MT introduced version 3 and started charging for it, I said no thanks, I’ll stick with free because free and my budget get along better. All fine and good until MT Blacklist fell by the wayside. Within days, we were inundated with comment spam and my only recourse was to ether screen all comments or shut down almost all of our old comment threads. When I found myself spending more time closing threads and deleting spam than futzing (creatively) with the blog, I knew it was time for a change.

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The permalinks for the old MT install are down, but I’ll have the redirects up by the end of the day.
Whazzup? Well, some pernicious little files in the MT install kept doing rewrites and reinstalling my old MT html index. Aaaaaghhh! I tried to delete them, and they reappeared even so. So… silly me just hits delete on the entire MT install, then says “oh crap, the permalinks!” but it was too late. MT permalinks, bye-bye. At least I killed the pernicious files as well. I think. We’ll see. Meanwhile, Chopper and I are off to see a brewer about some beer.

Oh, if only I were referring to a good bottle of wine instead of the continuing feud between a pair of chef pants and the handle of a freezer door…

(Note: I have filed this post under crafty only because I intend to make my stitches quite small and tidy, and then I intend to add Velcro to the pockets to prevent this malicious ruination of chef pants from ever happening again.)

The lovely Sam of Becks & Posh (who doesn’t mention cats nearly often enough) has posted a link to a new Flickr toy over at Food Blog S’cool and ponders whether this toy works with blogging software other than Blogger.

Well, viola!

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I wrote this piece back on May 9th, then set it aside for other concerns, and because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. Today, Memorial Day, it seems fitting that I pull it out again and post it, though I’ve always felt it a bit strange that we should set aside just a single day a year to remember the loved ones we’ve lost.

Dad.

One year ago today, early on a Monday of a Paper Chef weekend, Dad, the gentlest soul and the best patient a caregiving daughter could ever hope for, breathed his last breath. I was there, by his side, morning medicine in one hand, my other hand on his forehead.

Chopper had to go to work that day and I had to make phone calls, arrange for the funeral home to come from the mainland, and ready Dad for his final journey.

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