I think it’s about time we made some chicken stock.

(This brief post brought to you by MizD’s freezer, over-stuffed with bones.)

No, we’re not done with the pig’s blood just yet.

In fact, I’ve a feeling there could be 38 different dishes you can cook with Black Pudding. Thirty-eight at the very least.

Not that I plan on naming them all here.

In fact, I’ll just mention two or three.

First off: Chopper’s Lancashire Hotpot. He made this one on the Saturday after the black pudding was done and served it to unsuspecting guests. The guests were quite pleased and went back to the kitchen for seconds.

That Sunday morning, Chopper made a scramble with spinach, onion, more bits of black pudding, and the last remaining smidge of Lancashire Hotpot. It too was quite tasty, though it could have used something sweet to temper the spinach/onion/pig’s blood nexus.

Enter, apples. Inspired by denzylle’s comment on our Happy Entrails to You post, Chopper created a frittata wherein the black pudding mixed it up with tasty, crunchy bits of Granny Smith apple and the whole thing was topped with grated kasseri.

We declared it tasty and wolfed it down, thus ending Black Pudding Days at casa Belly Timber after only three dishes.

Only three? Surely there must be more!

Now, I’d offer up a challenge to see who can come up with the largest number of black pudding variations, but to be perfectly honest, after writing this post up I think I’m quite ready to move on from pig’s blood for at least a short while. So instead, because we’re never completely done with All Things British in these parts, and because we believe in extending all birthday celebrations at least a week and a half, your challenge (with a hat tip to Riba Rambles for the meme) is this:

Grab a pencil and paper and without looking at any resources, see if you can list all 38 (most commonly agreed upon) Shakespeare plays. And don’t give me any of that silly Francis Bacon really wrote them twaddle.

Mmm…. bacon.

(End note: This post was written last week, but MizD’s woefully uncooperative digestive system has prevented her from thinking joyful thoughts about food for several days running. At this very moment, in fact, she is resisting the urge to gaze longingly at photos of dark chocolate.)

Is English food a joke?

No! It’s not a joke, it’s an adventure!

I happen to believe one should firmly embrace one’s ancestors’ culinary traditions. Especially when one has ancestors who interbred, had bad teeth, killed one another off on a regular basis, and consumed far too many unnervingly rich, meat-based dishes.

I am, of course, talking about the Plantagenets. We’ve got a chart somewhere around here. On it, I can draw a rather crooked line from me back to Henry II. Not that I particularly want to be related to the king who offed Thomas Becket, but I am happy to claim a few other connections, including the fellow on the right here, who was, despite what those bratty Tudors say, a pretty decent guy.

I bet he ate some damned tasty food before riding off into battle.

Like this crazy thing Chopper’s making.

It looks like a sausage, but he tells me it’s called Black Pudding. I am told it is tasty and not at all dangerous. Not like that Black Pudding that enveloped and digested Timion Vayla, my second level paladin in the Dungeon of Aeras Kinth. Boy, was that a bad night.

No, this Black Pudding is made from tasty things like oatmeal and onions. Oh, and pig’s blood. Lots of pig’s blood. Turns out our local Asian market sells pig’s blood by the pint, and when Chopper made this discovery, I knew we were left with only two choices: Black Pudding or a reenactment of the prom night sequence from Carrie. Since the latter would mean a Chopper impersonation of John Travolta, we opted for the Black Pudding.

Now, I haven’t tasted it yet, so I can’t tell you anything about the results. I can tell you that it’s quite black (the hour and a half plus in the oven congealed the blood quite nicely), and the sausage stuffing procedure was quite messy. So messy, in fact, I may have give up that fantasy I have about CSI Warrick Brown showing up at the door with a spray bottle of Luminol. Far, far too risky.

On the bright side, no prom dresses were ruined in the procedure, and I’d like to think we did my Plantagenet ancestors proud. Especially the ones who preferred a good feast over a good beheading.

(Next: we devour the happy entrails and live to tell the tale.)

Ilva has asked to see kitchen photos and I am compelled to comply.

I blame a web stat for this.

See, back in October of 2005, way back when Belly Timber was less than a year old and our notion of search strings was all shiny and new, we discovered something quite amusing: More people showed up on our doorstep because they’d googled “messy kitchen” then for any other reason.

The cause of this glorious notoriety was the photo I’d posted on our About page. Yes, that photo.

Funny thing, though: That wasn’t a photo of our current kitchen on San Juan Island. It was a photo of our Portland kitchen – a kitchen we’d deserted ten months earlier. So, not wanting to disappoint Seekers of the Mess, we then posted new photos of our new messy kitchen, complete with messy diagrams. Little did we know where that would lead.

Just a day later, Kevin took up the gauntlet (we’d thrown a gauntlet?) and posted photos of his kitchen. Shortly thereafter, Kalyn followed suit, and within hours of this first trio of posts, Kevin declared it a “movement” and announced it on Food Blog S’cool. Soon, everyone was showing off their kitchens and soon it became apparent that ours was indeed the messiest.

In fact, our messy kitchen photos took on a life of their own, appearing in unexpected places, sometimes even illustrating a cautionary tale, or a “how not to” Q&A on a blog far more serious than our own. (Geez, people, we thought, don’t you ever make messes when you cook?)

And now? Now we’re back in that Portland kitchen and though it’s still messy, it isn’t quite as messy as it was before. There’s a reason for that. (No, we didn’t clean up for the camera this time.) We’ve a new tale to tell: We’re renovating.

See that corner just past the stove? We’ve got a gas cooktop for that corner. It’s going in at a 45 degree angle, with a nice big counter that stretches from near the doorway over to the drawers just right of the sink. Above it, we’ll have a range hood, and instead of those half-broken drawers? A dishwasher – our first kitchen ever with a dishwasher! Oh, and that scungy linoleum floor’s going away, and needless to say, we’re painting the walls and the ceiling, and check this out:

It’s our work island. Cute, eh? Don’t worry, it won’t be that small forever. Soon it’ll be taller, and have shelving, and be suitable for vegetable slicing in all its butcher-blocky glory. And just beyond it, we’ll have more counter space, and storage space, and (oh, I love this part!) a pot rack above so we’ll finally have a place for all our pots!

Oh, and… shhhh… we’ve got a secret:

We’re barely spending anything.

How’s that?

It’s like this:

• All the paint? We’ve got from the Habitat for Humanity store Habitat ReStore and from the mis-tinted five-buck-a-gallon section at Rodda.
• The gas cooktop is from the last time my brother renovated his kitchen. We snagged it at his yard sale for free.
• The pot rack, Chopper’s step dad made from copper pipe scraps at his place of work.
• The butcher block island is an old table my sister’s restoring for us as a Christmas present.
• The shelving? We’re building it ourselves and the lumber’s all used cedar decking, free from Craig’s List.

We’re still on the prowl for flooring, more counter tops, a dishwasher, and an oven (or a double-decker, if we’re extra lucky), and we’d die happy if we could score replacement cupboards, and of course this would be tons easier if we could just hire a contractor or buy everything new, but here’s what makes this extra cool:

Not only have we spent just twenty bucks on the entire project so far, we are saving trees from the lumber mill and junk from the landfill! We are frugal eco-warriors! Woohoo!

And, naturally, because we’ve got lots of searching and building to do, this project will take quite a while, and that means one thing for certain: many many messy kitchen days in our future!

Most people recoil in horror when they are told what the primary ingredient is in the classic Mexican breakfast dish menudo. No, it’s not Ricky Martin…

The first time I ever tried menudo was at a tiny Mexican cafe in San Diego back in the mid-nineties. My friends told me it was good, and having never heard of it before — I was rather young — I ordered it. Little did I know I was about to have a “Mikey” moment, where my friends were just seeing if I’d eat it. Well, I did, and I really liked it, especially the little tender chewy bits.

“What was that?” I asked my friends as they were about to burst into laughter…

That’s right, beef tripe. Stomach of cow. The funny part for me was that I didn’t mind.

Now, I’ve always been up for a good experiment, so why not try my hand at this culinary gem?

I think I did it justice. It was spicy the way I like it, and the texture was just like I remember. It was good enough for Mrs. D to give it a try. In her words…

Chopper sez: So, I’ll consider this experiment in Chopper’s lab a success. What’s next, you may ask… Just wait and see.

MizD sez: Braaaains, I tell you. Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiins. (Hey, what can I say? We’re only seven and a half weeks from Halloween.)

So, Independence Day, yet again.

You probably thought we Yanks were done with those pesky Brits back in 1776. Wrong. ‘Round these parts, sovereignty didn’t get settled till almost a hundred years later. We blame the pig.

The roots of our story can be traced back to Article III of the Treaty of 1818: the joint occupation of Oregon Country by the United States and Great Britain. How the treaty signers thought two countries vying for land claims and navigation rights would resolve any boundary issues is anyone’s guess, but nevertheless, the increasingly tumultuous Oregon Country free-for-all continued for 28 years, until, in 1846, the two sides determined they’d had enough. They signed the Oregon Treaty on June 15th, set the border between the US and Canada at the 49th Parallel (excepting lower Vancouver Island), and that was that.

Or so they thought.

Trouble is, the folks signing the treaty were, to put it bluntly, cartographically inept. The border between Canada’s Vancouver Island and the US mainland, they said, should lie down the middle of the “major channel” through the islands. Easy to say if there’s one major channel.

Not so easy if there are two.

And not at all easy if both Yanks and Brits are enjoying the resources of the group of islands that lie in the middle.

And so, while politicians squabbled over maps and over which strait was “major” — Haro to the west or Rosario to the east — settlers arrived from other parts of the continent and soon American “squatters” (as the British preferred to call them), had laid claim to land just a stone’s throw from the sheep runs of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Belle Vue Farm at the southern end of San Juan Island.

And for the most part, the sheep ran along their runs, and the handful of Americans eked out a living on their tiny parcels of land (which the British insisted were most decidedly not theirs), and all was, if not calm, at least not explosively tense.

Until the pig entered the picture.

For sheep will trot right past a farmer’s potato patch, even if there’s nothing much for fencing in their way, but pigs, or more specifically Berkshire boars? They’re born for rooting, and when they sense potatoes, they have at it.

And having at it was just what one particular Hudson’s Bay Company pig was doing in Lyman Cutlar’s potato patch on the morning of June 15th, 1859. And Cutlar had had enough. He grabbed his rifle and shot it.

Charles Griffin, Belle Vue Farm’s manager, was not pleased in the least. He demanded exorbitant compensation. Cutlar, being an obstinate sort, refused. Griffin, being equally obstinate, demanded Cutlar’s arrest. A blink of an eye later, the American settlers on San Juan Island (all 18 of them or so) had armed themselves and were demanding military protection.

In July, the first American soldiers arrived. In August, British war ships. By the end of the summer, the count was Americans: 461, British 2,140, and — most happily for all involved — not a single casualty of war.

Except, of course, for the pig.

This peaceful standoff — so peaceful that troops from both sides celebrated holidays together and held sporting events on the prairie at American Camp — continued for 13 years. In November of 1872, the Royal Marines withdrew from English Camp at the north end of the island, not because they’d been defeated in battle, or even because the Crown had called it quits. No, in fact, the American and British governments did what governments do so well in border disputes such as this: they passed the buck. They turned to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany and said, excuse me, could you figure this one out for us?

And, after a year of meetings by his three-man commission in Geneva, Kaiser Wilhelm did just that, and ruled in favor of the United States.

These days, the Pig War is serious business. We’ve got our two National Parks, the 4th of July Pig War Barbecue, the Pig War Museum, Encampment, over a dozen books about the subject, and no doubt a good forty other things I’ve forgotten. Truly, there’s a bit of a porcine glut in these parts.

Even so, when it came time to commemorate Independence Day (or rather the San Juan Island version with all its local piggy trappings) we couldn’t resist adding our own culinary homage to the mix. And, because we are (as I mentioned in the intro) only 400 yards from where this all happened, I took said homage on a field trip.

Piggy, the Pig War Scotch Goose Egg,
Takes a Field Trip

Here’s Piggy in the car. Are we there yet, he asks. Of course, I tell him, it’s only a quarter mile drive up the county road!

Piggy arrives at the main trail marker for the American Camp interpretive trail. Silly Piggy, blocking our view of the image on the sign. Oh, wait, here it is.

Piggy poses in front of the Officer’s Quarters. The camp’s commander, Captain George E. Pickett, lived there. Yes, that Pickett.

What, they named a fence after him, too?

Piggy checks out the prairie. According to the sign (stop blocking the signs, Piggy!), Pickett’s horse bolted during one of those joint sporting events and all the British soldiers cheered.

Uh oh. Piggy’s rooting radar is on high alert. What’s that beyond the fence?

It’s a potato! (Careful, there, Piggy.) Piggy’s found a meal on the bluff above Griffin Bay. Have at it, Piggy, the H.M.S. Satellite’s got your back!

Not everyone is so lucky to have their own commemorative rock! Here’s Piggy, checking out the rock named for Henry Martyn Robert, the military engineer who built American Camp’s fortifications. Piggy says behave yourselves, or he’ll go after you with a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order!

Ah, Piggy had a grand time at the park! So grand that now he wants to head up to the north side of the island and check out Garrison Bay and the British fortifications!

No, Piggy, I’m afraid that won’t be on our plate this afternoon, because, well…

You are.

On June 3rd we took a road trip to Seattle and indulged in a wee bit of geeky revelry. Here, at long last, is our trip report.

1. The party begins with a cheese sandwich.

It’s the beginning of February and we’re waist deep in The Great Cheese Sandwich Controversy of 2006. Chopper’s just grilled up this crazy tuna melt extravaganza, and I’m all set to blog on it, when I see this post over on Food Blog S’cool. Andrew of Spittoon is pointing us toward free wine from the Stormhoek Winery in South Africa. Free wine? Cool! How can I pass that up?

So, I head over to gapingvoid and the free wine blurb …. and get utterly sidetracked reading Hugh Macleod’s most excellent manifesto on How to Be Creative. Now that’s what I’m talking about, I think, and promptly rewrite my first cheese sannie post, pack my bags, and run off to the crazy land of Gastroblogia.

And then, I sign up for the free wine, because first of all, duh, free wine, and second of all, this whole Geek Dinner thing is just plain cool.

Now, where to go to find a bunch of geeks?

2. Dude! Seattle!

Of course, the next thing I do is contact our good buddies over at Clawfoot Bathdog and say Hey! We need geeks! Oh, and we’ve got free wine!

Naturally, they jump on it.

Of course it helps that we offer to cook. A lot.

3. You want us to cater your what?

Because, see, not only do we seriously dig cooking for parties, but later this summer — end of July to be exact — we’re catering our first wedding. Or, to be more exact, we’re catering our first wedding that’s not our own wedding. In a word: Yikes! In four words: we need to practice. A lot. Okay, that’s six words, but point is, this party gives us a great chance to not only show off our cooking chops to our geeky Seattle friends, but refine the art (or chaos, as the case may be) of preparing great food in someone else’s kitchen.

So, we dedicate many hours in May to discussing recipes. Menu items are discarded for being too time-consuming, too messy, or too costly in ingredients. Other menu items stay on the menu despite being too time-consuming, or too messy, or too costly in ingredients. Eventually we find a moderately happy medium and begin the at-home prep work prior to packing up our whole kit and caboodle for the trip to Seattle.

And naturally we run out of time to prep everything we want to prep ahead of time, so now I know I’ll be spending at least two hours before the party rolling truffles. (Note for future reference: don’t let this happen at the wedding.)

4. Once again: Dude! Seattle!

We arrive the night before and of course the first thing we do is stay up too late. Never fear though, that’s what annoyingly grating alarm clocks are for. Next morning, somewhat bright and moderately early, we head down to Pike Place Market and complete our party shopping.

The thing about Pike Place is you don’t want to have to shop in a hurry. The thing about our recent visits to Pike Place is we’ve always had to shop in a hurry. This time, we rush through the outdoor stalls and then hit Sosio’s Produce, where we snag some mighty fine looking fruit and a couple of ginormous yams for Chopper’s mixed tempura veggie platter. I want to stay and look around, or at least snap a few decent photos, but we’ve got to run. We’ve got to hit the neighborhood grocery store and then head over to the party location by noon or we’ll never get our cooking done in time, truffle rolling or no truffle rolling.

5. Belly Timber’s Circus of Innovation and Libation.

That’s what we call it on the Geek Dinner Wiki, but in truth, libation leaves innovation at the starting blocks and hits a hundred meters in nine seconds flat. Not that we don’t hobnob with about fifty seriously cool and creative people (most of whom rarely ever update their blogs, ahem, and yeah, look who’s talking), but the topic drift from creative ventures to Damn, this pinotage rocks with the chimichurri is both abrupt and overwhelming.

Eventually we give up, give in to the great cosmic party magnet that is a fine spread of wine and food and say, screw it, let’s indulge.

Regular readers of Belly Timber may recognize the chickpea spread and a variation on the fritters from May’s Paper Chef. Shame on us, repeating ourselves like that! Readers may also question the two “spicy” items at the top of the list. Well, let me assure you that while the meatballs are just spicy, the brochettes are SPICY. So spicy that I have to snag the little title card I’d made for them and change SPICY to

6. And about that libation…

There’s a reason for spicy.

We cheated. Well, not exactly cheated, but see the fabulous folks at Stormhoek sent us lots of wine and we had more of the pinotage than anything so we just had to sample it first. So, we tested a bottle, promptly loved it to death, and declared its rich, blackberry flavor perfect for a kick-ass spicy food pairing.

Oh darn, Chopper says. I have to go spicy again, what a shame.

Right. Like I can ever get Chopper to cook bland food.

Now, back at the party, granted, the libation factor is at a level that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the finer points of sommelierity (oh screw it, of course sommelierity is a word), but we do reach the conclusion that Stormhoek’s pinot grigio goes quite nicely with the tomato basil fritters, and their sauvignon blanc is a fine match for the savory chicken and mushroom pate. But the pinotage? Seriously, if Chopper would cook spicy foods every night for a year and pair it with that pinotage, I’d be in red wine heaven. Love it to death, I say.

7. And when the party’s in full swing…

…we discover our fabulous hostess has been keeping a secret from us. There’s a reason for that mirror ball in her back room and it’s not to con us into a re-enactment K-Tel’s Discomania, featuring Boogie Oogie Oogie by A Taste of Honey. No, it’s much better than that.

It’s karaoke!

Because nothing screams creative amateur hour in all its exuberant participatory glory quite like a pinotagedly (yes, that’s a word too, dammit!) giddy Mrs D and Chopper Dave luring the crowd into a sing-along with the Worst Journey Song Ever.

Ah, but it didn’t stop there. Neil Diamond! Meatloaf! Ozzy! The Madonna Like a Prayer dance party! Sheryl Crow in the style of Rammstein meets Klaus Nomi!

Oh, I could go on, but I won’t. It’s far too scary. And we have pictures to prove it.

8. Again pls, thanx!

No more parties for us while we’re stuck on this rock, but oh let me tell you when we finally get back to Portland we’ve got plans. Big, crazy, collaborative plans. (Plans we can’t talk about just yet, so shuush already!)

And big, crazy, collaborative plans always go down well with wine.

Special monster thanks to Stormhoek for the great wine, to Hugh Macleod for setting up the whole Geek Dinner thing and for the cool swag, to our co-coordinators at Clawfoot Bathdog, to our fabulous house hostess, Dawn, and to all our wonderful collaborators in revelry!

Oh, and PS: more party pics over at Paul’s photo gallery!

We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors,
We’ll range and we’ll roam over all the salt seas,
Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England:
From Ushant to Scilly ’tis thirty-five leagues.
    — traditional sea shanty, as sung by the crew of the HMS Polychrest

For this post, in honor of St. George’s Day and Sam and Monkey Gland’s inspired food blogging event, What’s For Pud, Belly Timber takes to the high seas.

Or, to be more precise, Belly Timber takes to the English Channel, and to a rather peculiar double-ended boat and its famous captain, Lucky Jack Aubrey.

What’s What’s For Pud, you ask, and what the devil does it have to do with sailors?

Exactly this: What’s For Pud is a celebration of English ‘afters’ — pud, pudding, biscuits, sweets — those sticky sweet, scrumptious dishes that prove wrong all the naysayers who turn their noses up at quintessential English cuisine. And we here at Belly Timber, being rather nautically inclined to begin with, believe that nowhere else can one find dishes more quintessentially English than aboard the great ships of the British Navy during the Golden Age of Sail.

Because, as we know, meals aboard Lord Nelson’s fleet were all about two glorious things: Rum and suet.

Yes, I did indeed say suet.

And nice big bottles o’ rum, by gum.

Which brings us to our splendid St. George’s Day dish: Figgy-dowdy.

First, a brief confession: Chopper and I read out loud to each other at bedtime. So, when I say we read Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain together, I mean out loud, sharing the book from front to back. We’ve gone through Lovecraft tales, the last three Harry Potter books, two brilliant novels by Tim Powers, and now (with a brief interlude for dragons, which I’ll cover in my next post), we’re tackling the Aubrey/Maturin Series. I tell you, every couple should do this. It’s even better than spending the week debating what’s going to happen next on 24.

Partway through Post Captain, I scoured the web for Aubrey/Maturin related books and discovered this one: Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It’s a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels. Now, we don’t own this book yet, but lo and behold, BBC Radio 4 did a programme on shipboard food and they’ve got recipes from the book up on their website — including figgy-dowdy.

Also partway through Post Captain, we ran across this delicious scene in which Jack Aubrey and several of his officers explain figgy-dowdy to a dinner guest aboard the Polychrest.

And because we’re not the most, shall we say, sensible lot in the kitchen, we immediately determined that we just had to try it out for ourselves.

Now, if you follow the link to the BBC website, you’ll notice the Lobscouse recipe for figgy-dowdy is slightly different than the one in Post Captain, though both follow the same pattern: cram a bunch of stuff in a bag with fat and rum and boil it.

Patrick O’Brian himself speaks highly of this style of pud. “Second only to that of Christmas,” he says in a short piece titled Thoughts on Pudding, “we find a series of others, all founded upon that happy marriage of flour (two parts), suet (one part) and sugar consummated in a cloth or basin surrounded by boiling water.”

For our part, we took bits from both recipes: pork fat rather than the hard-to-find traditional suet, and flour instead of ship’s biscuit (even though I do seem to recall seeing a marlin-spike somewhere in the tool shed).

For the add-ins, Chopper included raisins, currents, figs (naturally), and for the spices, ginger and pumpkin pie spice.

As for the rum and water, well the Lobscouse recipe (which we halved) didn’t call for much, and at first the dough refused to stick together. ‘Are you going to add more water?’ I cried. ‘Why no,’ Chopper said. ‘I’m going to add more rum! Ha ha!’ And thus he did. Quite a lot of it, I think.

And so, with a full bottle of rum handy (just in case), and with much fear in his heart, Chopper set to work.

Yes, fear. Because, well, dessert. With pork fat. How can a Yank raised on cobbler and cookies not have fear in his heart?

But, here’s the thing…

Around the mid point of the boiling process, we noticed a shift in the odors from the pot. They weren’t quite so porky anymore. They were spicy. And rummy. And quite tantalizing. And we started to wonder if figgy-dowdy might actually taste good.

Now, the scary part, aside from just knowing that this is a dessert with pork fat in it (do I need to repeat myself? PORK FAT. IN A DESSERT. Okay, done) is that fact that it is, as Patrick O’Brian described, a “pale, amorphous, gleaming, slightly translucent mass.”

In a word, ick. In several words? It looks rather like something that hasn’t been born yet.

Fortunately for our appetites, our figgy-dowdy wasn’t quite as pale and translucent as I’d expected (no doubt due to the copious amounts of dark rum Chopper poured into the mix), so we ventured further.

In fact, when we sliced it open, it looked rather good. Like rum cake.

So, after a quick photo session (that included an attempted assault on the figgy-dowdy by both Villeneuve and a rather menacing crew of pirates) we sampled our pud.

And our pud was good.

A bit chewy perhaps, and slightly dry in the middle — something easily remedied by packing the cheesecloth a little less tightly or, of course, more rum — but damn if it wasn’t a pretty tasty shipboard treat. Call me crazy, but I think we may have to dine like British sailors more often!

We hove our ship to when the wind was south-west, boys,
We hove our ship to for to strike soundings clear,
Then we filled our main-topsail and bore right away, boys,
And right up the Channel our course we did steer.

Tagged with: What’s For Pud? and St George’s Day

I’m not sure what’s gotten into him, but Chopper’s been chomping at the Paper Chef bit extra hard for days. Usually, when the time grows nigh, he gets notions. “Whatever the ingredients are,” he says, days before they’re announced, “I’m gonna use _____.” And then he proceeds to name some exotic item in our pantry or our freezer that quite possibly won’t go with anything on the final Paper Chef ingredient list.

And so, on Friday afternoon, when we checked the list, it was no surprise that thoughts of the freezer item du jour fled out the window and instead we began the required pondering of item number four.

Ingredient 1: Rice
Ingredient 2: Carrots
Ingredient 3: Anchovies
Ingredient 4: Something from the other side of the world that helps make this dish a celebration for you.

Hmmm… Something from the other side of the world, we contemplate, conveniently forgetting the whole “celebration” bit because just finding something from the other side of the world around these parts can be quite the challenge.

Immediately, Chopper starts talking Asian food because, well, the ingredients rather scream Asian, but I interrupt and say, “hey, let’s figure out where exactly the other side of the world is. Who knows. It could be nowhere near Asia, geographically speaking.”

So, after several minutes of semi-fruitless longitude, latitude, and antipode googling, we pull out our trusty National Geographic Atlas of the World and do the math.

Ahah. Page 168, 48S, 57E give or take a few degrees, and there we are. In the middle of the Indian Ocean.

But wait! There’s land nearby! Maybe they’ve got a national cuisine!

Right. The nearest land to our antipode, as it happens, is a tiny little island called ÃŽle de l’Est, the (appropriately named) Eastern most member of the Crozet Islands.

Hey! They’re a French Colony — we can cook something French! Wait a sec. France still has colonies?

Well, an interesting thought, but probably not exactly what Owen, our illustrious Paper Chef host, had in mind. No, let’s check out the local flora and fauna… No trees, not much growing on the ground that looks edible… a few imported species that, for the most part, have vanished… Ah, here we go:

Whoa. Okay, okay, we’re not really going to cook penguin. They’re too cute and fluffy, and honestly where is one supposed to find penguin meat on this short notice?

(By the way when searching (unsuccessfully) for nearby penguin vendors, we happened upon a place in Seattle that sells kangaroo! Note for future reference…)

So then, no food from the antipode, sad to say.

We stare at the map a while longer.

“Well,” I offer, “it’s kinda close to Africa.”

(And no, we are not googling that scary place in the Midwest that sells lion meat.)

So, Chopper dives into a bit of quick spice research and comes up with tamarind, a tasty fruit native to tropical Africa. He jumps in the car, heads out to the store and… comes back empty-handed. Tamarind is not to be found on our island.

Back to the spice research.

Ahah! Fenugreek, indigenous to Northern Africa through the Mediterranean and into Asia, this herb is extremely common in African cuisine, so that could count, right? You know fenugreek was used by ancient Egyptians to embalm mummies? How cool is that?

Okay, that’s one… close to our antipode, though rather far to the north. So, we fudge a little.

Meanwhile, there’s that whole “celebration” thing we’ve forgotten about. We ponder a bit further, and unable to settle on a single ingredient number four, decide to celebrate the following cool, far-from-home items we’ve located on recent culinary expeditions, first to our local favorite shop The Gourmet’s Galley, and then to Uwajimaya in Seattle.

1) Szechwan peppercorns. I spotted a bag of these at Gourmet’s Galley a short while back and sent Chopper into paroxysms of joy. These babies aren’t easy to find. For a while, the FDA had a complete ban on their importation because they carried a citrus canker, but this past spring that ban was lifted after it was discovered that heating the peppercorns to 160F killed the canker bacteria. Now, they’re simply heated before importation. (And there was much rejoicing!)

2) From Uwajimaya, dried shitake mushrooms. Yeah, they’re not that hard to find — unless you live on an island, and then the come in tiny, “gourmet” packages that cost an arm and two kidneys. So, we got the nice big bag at Uwajimaya, and again, there was much rejoicing!

3) Last, because it’s on the list already, the piece de resistance for our festive dish: anchovies. Not anchovies in a tin, or anchovies in a jar, but dried anchovies from Japan. The ones that still look like cute little fishies, so much so that if you glued strings to them and hung them from the ceiling under a blue light you’d have quite a lovely little aquatic mobile (not to mention one hell of a great Christmas present for the cat). Yes, those anchovies, because there’s nothing that says Insane Belly Timber Paper Chef Entry quite like dried fish leaping out of shitake mushroom cap siu mai.

(Okay, we admit, the rice isn’t so much in the dishes as under the dishes, but we’ll just plead “dim sum” as an excuse and suggest that one does not ever eat dim sum without copious amounts of steamed rice.)

Now, for this month’s Paper Chef, previous winner Noodle Cook (and yes this is, happily, all our fault!) has created categories! And there are prizes! (I now officially feel like a complete slacker.)

So, without further ado, here are Noodle’s categories and our self-nomination within each appropriate one.

Paper Chef Personality – creative, clever or witty writer. ::cough:: Um, penguin meat and fishie mobiles. Do you need to ask?

Paper Chef Super Saver – budget meals or crowd pleaser specialist. We’re probably not suited to this one because, frankly, I’m too lazy to do the math. I will say that the only items that cost more than a buck or two were the shrimp and the pork spare rib meat, and even all of that was pretty darned cheap. Hell, if dim sum’s not cheap, it’s not doing its job and should be sacked immediately.

Paper Chef Prestige – food styling, presentation or plating up expert. Styling? Hahahahahahahah. Sorry. Do leaping fishies count?

Paper Chef Nutrition Genie – magician for getting fussy diners to eat veggies, less salt, less fat. Usually, Chopper Dave and the phrase “eat veggies, less salt, less fat” do not belong in the same kitchen, but with Asian food he makes an exception. On the Chopper Health Scale, I’d give these dishes a solid 8.5.

Paper Chef Supreme – the champion for Paper Chef #13. Well, one would assume that if we’re here at all, we’re here for the big prize, eh?

So then, clear as mud.

But wait, there’s more! Didn’t Noodle say something about bonus points?

Oh crap! We forgot the festive atmosphere! Quick! Scramble for the camera and –didn’t Noodle Cook say something about — what was it — beer? Incense?

Ah, here we are:

Hey, don’t bogart that siu mai, man.

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?