I have no childhood apron memories. I’ve no gift box of aprons. Strangely enough, Chopper also has never been given an apron — which I believe is a good thing as I wouldn’t put it past certain nameless relatives to find him one of those hideous novelty jobs that says DANGER: MEN COOKING or HEY PRINCESS, BRING ME A BEER, because god, just shoot me now if he ever dons one of those.

However, this does not mean we’re bereft of aprons. On the contrary, we have many. Thing is, almost all our aprons look like this.

Yup. Culinary school aprons. If you peek under the folds you’ll find more grease stains than a bay at Jiffy Lube.

I said almost all our aprons. There’s one apron that stands out from the crowd.

This one.

It’s not terribly unique. I got it out of the Chef Wear catalog so there are chefs, aspiring chefs, and chef’s assistants all over globe with this exact apron.

The only difference is, this is my apron. My only apron. And when I wear it, I match. See?

That’s Chopper and me back in the summer of 2006 when we co-hosted a Geek Dinner in Seattle. Don’t we look spiffy? We wore the same matching outfits for the wedding we catered later than summer, and again for a Christmas party this past December. People took pictures of our matching spiffiness. (People need to give us copies of those pictures, too, ahem.)

But, as much as I love matching, sometimes I need to do my own thing, and for that I’d really rather not wear one of those tedious culinary school numbers. It’s just not my style. Besides, someone might see me in it and be fooled into thinking I can actually cook!

So, I think I might play a little.

(more…)

Sometimes, you’ve got to just jump back into the water, even if you can’t find your swimsuit.

No, I’m not naked.¹ More likely, I’m wearing an ancient t-shirt from a show I’ve no recollection of doing, and sweats covered in house paint. It’s been that sort of past few months.²

But, even if I’m not ready, I have to get back into the water. See, I signed up for something and I’ve got to do it.

That something? One Local Summer hosted by Liz at Pocket Farm.

The goal: from now till the end of summer, once a week, eat an all-local dinner. Or a dinner as local as we can make it. 85% local still gets us an A for effort. The point is to take time once a week to think about where we get our food.

Me, I’m thinking maybe this time I’ll actually fare better than I did during the Pennywise Eat Local Challenge. What? Missed my posts on that one? That’s because there weren’t any. That’s how well I did.³

This time, I figure, hey! More crops are in season. We can do this.

I tell Chopper. He gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up… and then promptly goes out and lands a new job that puts him out of the house five nights a week.⁴ And, since this week we’re busy the other two nights, and I’ve put it off till the last minute, it comes down to me and my brilliant culinary mind (stop laughing) to produce Belly Timber’s One Local Summer dinner, week one.

And here’s how it goes:

First item of note: For reasons involving utterly chaotic schedules and tight deadlines, I am unable to make it to the farmers market. Go figure. At least this time of year the grocery store’s got more options. On the other hand, I’m in a rush and I don’t have time to do much looking around. Also, we’re between paychecks and I need to skimp. A lot. I remember our eggs at home are relatively local (Stiebr’s Farms in Yelm, Washington, about 135 miles away), and I’ve already got half a Walla Walla onion (245 miles, so sue me), so what better than to grab some local spinach and make a nice big tasty (and easy) omelet! What the hell, I think. I’ll work up to the creative meals later.

So, I get home and I am ready to wash spinach, and then all hell breaks loose.

The dog, you see, has broken a window. Not only has she broken a window, she has decided that her locally-sourced meal of the day will be the bee that is buzzing frantically between the cracked pane and the closed storm window just inches to the outside.

She dives for the bee. Repeatedly. I scold her (repeatedly) and tell her that Very Bad Things will happen to her should she actually catch this bee.

Of course she ignores me, so of course I shoo her away and grab a newspaper, thinking I can reach around the glass and give the bee a quick smackdown.

I do this. My hand slips, the bee flees, and the next thing you know, the outside base of my thumb is bleeding like Steve Nash’s nose in game one of the Western Conference Finals.⁵

Now, since I (like the NBA) lack a courtside cut man, it took a while for me to get the bleeding to stop, and once it did stop I was in no condition to wash spinach. The mere thought of sticking my heavily bandaged hand under tap water or near a stove was enough to send me running for the microwave.

That’s right. One Local Summer dinner number one: Microwaved eggs.

(Now is our lack of blogging beginning to make a little more sense?)

Oh! Wait! I almost redeemed myself. For dessert, I stepped outside and I ate fresh raspberries and blueberries from the yard and they were quite tasty!⁶ Better yet, I didn’t even snag my bandages on a raspberry cane!

footnotes

1. Shameless ploy to get more hits. Shut up, Kevin.

2. Stay tuned for details. I mean it this time. No, don’t leave. Honest. I really truly mean it.

3. My diary for the Pennywise Local Challenge went something like this:

4. Remember when we said we were going to go freelance and start our own personal chef business? We still are. We’re just starting slowly. Very very slowly. Why? Talk to the Sallie Mae corporation. Tell ‘em we said hi. On the bright side, Chopper’s got the first job he loves since I can’t remember when. Before this blog existed, I can tell you that much.

5. I would like to take this opportunity to note that we here at Casa Belly Timber are big NBA fans, and I am, more specifically, a big Steve Nash fan. I used to hate him, back when he played for the Mavs, because, well, the Mavs. Also, when he had long hair I called him “stringy,” but I was still rather secretly fond of him because he is from Canada and I am from Canada, and us stringy-haired Canucks should stick together, especially when we end up with profusely-bleeding body parts.

6. I suppose you’re wondering where the food photos are, and why I’ve posted a watercolor instead? No, it’s not because microwaved eggs are frighteningly unphotogenic and it was too gloomy outside to photograph the berries — although that does sound like a pretty reasonable excuse. Nope, it’s computer troubles. Again. Remember that lappy? The one that made us so happy back in September? Well Lappy seems to have suffered what we like to call a “surprise,” and Lappy contained my one remaining route for moving photos from camera to computer. But, hey, look on the bright side. If this continues and I keep blogging, either I’ll actually learn how to paint, or I’ll start posting pictures of Chopper at age ten wearing a powder-blue tux.

(or Belly Timber’s new adventures in Portland, a three part introduction)

2. In which MizD goes crazy with the crafty thing.

Freshman year of high school, I had an English teacher I couldn’t stand. I’ll call her Ms. Rhubarb. Ms. Rhubarb was new to our school and had her own peculiar way of seeing things. This way included the rather brazen assumption that her Freshman English class was the single most important class of my entire high school career. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t an academic slacker. If anything, I was a nerd. The sort of nerd who cluelessly wore flowered underwear under white pants, and never missed a day of class even if it meant pockets stuffed with Kleenex and cough drops. I did my work for Ms. Rhubarb, but apparently my nerdly efforts weren’t good enough.

"She takes on too many things," she announced at my parent-teacher conference, "Theater and soccer and art classes and all these other extra-curricular activities. She needs to focus."

My math teacher nodded in agreement. At least I assume he did — I haven’t been good at math since sixth grade.

My mom (who’s always appreciated my scattershot attempts at finding life’s purpose) searched for something appropriate to say.

My advisor, who was, thankfully, also my theater teacher and had a rather Gandalfian presence which served him well, rose to my defense. "If she can’t try all these different things now, when can she try them?"

Ms. Rhubarb, who would have been fearful of a follow-up firebolt had she any interest whatsoever in genre fiction, backed down, muttering all the while that one day she would be proven right. My appalling lack of focus would do me in.

And to this day (conveniently ignoring the "now" part of my advisor’s remark) I am still determined to prove her wrong.

Oh, I have a calling. It’s not that I don’t have a calling. It’s simply that my calling is rather…

Okay, I admit it. It’s scattered.

Playwriting, fabric art, painting, film, comics, sculpture, decoupage Easter egg depictions of the complete works of John Norman… Honestly. Do I have to make up my mind?

Now, here’s the thing. For the past twenty months, I’ve been on a crafty starvation diet. Oh, I’ve had my compy and my camera and my sketch pad here and there, but damn, the craving for my old art supplies has been extreme.

And now that I’ve got access to them again at long last…

And now that I need to buckle down and kick some freelancing butt…

Well, the short ending to all this is, yes, I’m working with Chopper to build a personal chef business, but that’s not all: I’m rebuilding my arts and crafts studio and I’m hitting the marketplace. With a vengeance.

Scattered, you say, Ms. Rhubarb? Just watch me.

Next up: Part 3: In which we embark upon the rescue of our wayward house.

They tell us the second one is the cotton anniversary. We’re thinking of getting each other t-shirts or dish towels, but surely we can find something more exciting in cotton!

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.)

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.

(more…)

(Head to the end of the post for step-by-step origami box instructions!)

January 2004, six months before the wedding, budget the size of a postage stamp, I had this crazy notion. Why spend money on flowers when they’ll just wilt the next day? We’ll go origami! So, I horded paper, starting with all the leftover post-Christmas sale paper I could get my hands on. (Everything silver, that is; snowflake patterns when folded aren’t that different from random festive swirls, right?) And, under the guidance of our dear friend R.C. (origami expert and karaoke D.J. extraordinaire), I added roses and lilies and decorative boxes to my feeble repertoire of cranes, balloons, and silly hats.

(more…)

It’s not spring here just yet, at least not according to the outside temperature which still prompts me to wear thick, long-sleeved shirts. (Chopper, meanwhile, wears shorts, but then Chopper wears shorts in a blizzard, so this means nothing. Well, nothing other than my constant ability to admire his shapely Chef Legs, but that’s neither here nor there.)

(Is there such a thing as “Chef Legs?” Chefs do a great deal of standing, and do therefore tone their muscles, rather like soccer players, who have, in my humble opinion, the best legs in the world… but I digress.)

So. Cleaning. Not quite spring cleaning.

The short of it is: we’re mired in it. I spent yesterday organizing our spice drawers, liberating old jars for new spices, and creating a new set of labels which I then slapped on the jars so that they’d all look pretty, like they matched, like they were part of a set or something. (From a distance, they even fool people!)

Today, we threw out things around the house and surveyed the garden (much, much pruning to be done), but more importantly, I’ve wallowed myself in deep reorganization regarding the computer and the website.

Short version: Blogging may be somewhat light until I get reorganization work done.

Long version: One gig of free space left on my computer and I’ve got how many photos and graphics I want to play with? Time to bite the bullet, snag a new hard drive and shuffle everything around so that Photoshop says nice things to me like “yes, I have room to play, thanks much” instead of “holyfreakinghell are you insane trying to save that huge-ass file?”

Second half of long version: Blog changes coming up. Things could get weird around here. I mean, weird, cuz, you know, we’re not at all weird now.