Don’t you just hate December?

No, seriously, bear with me for a moment.

First of all, it means there’s less than a month left in the year and you’ve got to scramble to get done everything you should have been doing in the last eleven months, and on top of that, organize and participate in holiday activities, and then on top of that you’ve got WINTER WEATHER.

Here in Portland, we were caught in the Worst! Snowstorm! In! Forty! Years! Oh sure, it was nothing compared to what you Midwesterners and New Englanders put up with, but we think you’re all crazy anyway. Besides, have pity. We don’t even own snow shovels.

So yeah, what with all this snow and angst there was something fishy (or was that shrimpy) about this year’s December. All this chaos and on top of that, only four entries for Paper Chef!

Judging just four entries, especially when they all look tasty and are all somewhat similar (what, no crabs? No barnacles? No wood lice?) can be a difficult endeavor. For this outing, it came down to favorite details – an ingredient here, a method there.

The four entries were:

Terry from Taste Adventures with her “blood” orange risotto cake, with “drunken” Mexican white shrimp in a blood orange vinaigrette. We were especially impressed with those lip-smackingly large head-on shrimp.

Lori Ann from Lip Smacking Goodness with her double-entry of Shrimp and Rice Empanadas and Spring rolls. Being big fans of stretching that food dollar, we’re always up for extra ingredients and double entries. Also, that sauce sounds delectable!

Sara from Culturally Confused brought us Shrimp in Brandy Cream Sauce. This looked like a perfect meal for a cold December night, and easily adaptable.

Mike from Spikey Mikeys made Blood Orange & Brandy marinated Prawns with Coconut Rice. We’ll forgive him the minor difficulty with shrimp shells (Chopper always cooks shell-on) and admire the Asian influence and attention to detail within the ingredients of the marinade.

In the end, it was that detail and the elegant presentation that won us over, and so the December Paper Chef winner is…

Mike from Spikey Mikeys!

Congratulations, Mike!

And now, gratuitous Shrimp-related content: Our favorite new NBA T-Mobile commercial. Say it with me because it is the tastiest part: “YAO SAYS EAT THE HEAD!”

Kitty Kaga, dusted off and ready to report for duty, says…

It’s Paper Chef time!

Since Chopper and I were the lucky winners of last month’s challenge (thanks, Magnus!), we have been given the great privilege of announcing the ingredient list for the December edition of Paper Chef.

What’s Paper Chef? Think Iron Chef without Kitchen Stadium or without judges that include pop stars and members of parliament. Also, you don’t get to taste everyone’s creation. Sorry. No trout ice cream for you!

All the rules and regulations are on the Paper Chef blog, but here’s our super-short version:

The four ingredients are announced on the first Wednesday of the month.

You must use all four of these ingredients* (plus any others you require) to make a dish and then write about it. You may make more than one dish if you’re feeling inspired.

Your deadline is midday the following Tuesday: For this month, that’s Tuesday, December 9th at noon, Pacific Standard Time.

After that, roundup and judging!

(*reasonable substitutions for food allergies or dietary restrictions are allowed.)

Now, on to the ingredients. Using our high-tech, icosahedronal randomizing device (pictured at right), we selected three ingredients from the Paper Chef nomination list:

Rice
Brandy
Blood Oranges

The fourth ingredient is always judges’ discretion, so for this month we’ve decided to take a dip into the nearest body of water and see what pinches. That’s right:

Crustacean.

And by crustacean, we mean any member of that crusty little subphylum: crab, lobster, crayfish, shrimp, barnacle, woodlice, tongue worm… okay maybe not those last two, but you get the picture!

So, have at it, have fun, and we look forward to see you all at the round up!

(Post links to your Paper Chef entries here, and don’t forget to email a link to your entry to paperchef@gmail.com!)

"This is the best Indian curry I’ve ever made," Chopper announced after devouring several bites in rapid succession. "Of course my specialty is Thai curry, but still…"

"Om nom nom," I said.

"Yes," Chopper agreed, "Om nom nom."

We weren’t certain if we were ever going to make it back. After all, a year is an eternity in Internet Time, and during that year, Belly Timber just sat, gathering dust, taunting us with rapidly aging posts.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, it vanished completely. Internal Server Error, our home page announced. I thought: crap. I need to do something about this, pronto… and proceeded to get excessively busy on six other projects. What finally got the ball rolling was Chopper’s incessant chomping at the bit every time anyone would bring up the name "Paper Chef."

"It’s this weekend," I told him. "The ingredients are turkey, Anaheim peppers, winter squash, and lentils."

Within three nanoseconds he was making a shopping list and planning recipes.

And me? I was battling the dreaded Internal Server Error.

Which kinda sorta explains why this entry is so excessively late. (And why you might be reading this on a generic WordPress Template.)

What follows (now that we’ve finally got this blog working again) are three of Chopper’s creations inspired by this month’s set of four ingredients: Meatloaf, Turkey Galantine, and Indian curry. A galantine is a French dish that’s typically made of boned meat wrapped around forcemeat. It is poached, coated in aspic, and served cold. Surprisingly (for us) we skipped the aspic.

The best part about joining in this month: three of these ingredients are large quantity ingredients by default, so we’ve got delicious leftovers for days!

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The happiest recent news in Gastroblogia is that Owen of Tomatilla has revived Paper Chef after a six-month hiatus. Paper Chef was our introduction to the food blogging world, and it’s always been Chopper’s favorite event. He loves the excuse to play.

Now, the irony isn’t lost on us that Owen picked “home” for this month’s theme. Over the past months we’ve rarely ever had time to do much cooking at home. For a while this summer, Chopper was working six days a week with most of those days on shifts that lasted through the dinner hour. “Home” meant “where we crash at the end of a long day” and not much else.

This fall, things are finally looking up in that department, and — quite amazingly — this Paper Chef coincided with two days off wherein we weren’t booked solid with errands and social obligations. Of course those two days were yesterday and Monday so we still ran smack up against (and fell over) today’s deadline. So what else is new?

Given this rare opportunity to play, Chopper gave himself the challenge of creating three dishes: a canapé, a soup, and a main. We picked up a sampling of eggplants and chiles at our favorite Asian market, and for the fish — since smoked swordfish is unheard of in these parts (and I’m not a swordfish fan to begin with) — Chopper found a nice big slab of cod, coated it in spices and threw it on the smoker.

My (ongoing) challenge, in addition to my usual sous chef duties, is to put together a photo post of the day using my old, borrowed camera and Chopper’s computer, which lacks my usual photo editing software. Why that, you ask? Well, remember that computer that needed fixing? Ahhahahah, yup. It’s dead again. Soon as I’m done with this post, I’m constructing a shrine to Saint Isidore.

But first, photos…

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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.)

Prologue:
At first, I was horrified. Cookiecrumb and Kevin hosting a Mac-n-Cheese event? But I can’t! You don’t understand. I just can’t. I cried to Chopper: Look what they’re doing, I said. How cruel. How evil. Can I ever forgive them? If you make mac-n-cheesy goodness and eat it alone, can I ever forgive you? Chopper merely shrugged and said, hey, it’s me here. I can make it happen. I bit my lip in fear. But… the history, I whimpered… my history…

1.A cheesy childhood.
Oh dear lord did I love mac-n-cheese as a child. It wasn’t just that it was vast and goopy and satisfying beyond all reason, or that it sometimes held the exquisite secret of little salami nuggets, tucked beneath its placid surface. No, it was this: It lacked vegetables. And for a child, especially one in a house wherein vegetables were routinely cooked to oblivion, this was nirvana. I always went back for seconds. Sometimes even thirds or fourths. If the mac-n-cheese pot had been bottomless and my plate accompanied by an equally bottomless glass of Nestle’s Quick, I would never have left the table. Not even for episodes of Star Trek.

2.College in a box
When one is single and one is in college and living in a tiny apartment, one’s episodes of Star Trek are accompanied by a box. The blue kind. You know the one. Gross, eh? I bet Spock’s Plomeek soup never tasted so bad. Perhaps it was just the way I (ineptly) cooked it, but my Kraft mac-n-cheese always came out a little gritty. Not that this stopped me. Nope, not one bit. After all, it was cheap and easy and isn’t college all about cheap and easy? Hey! I’m talking about food, here.

3.Is that a shot put in my gut, or am I just sorry I ate you?
We’re on break from the gaming session, it’s been five weeks and still no one knows my red shirt security goon is really a Romulan spy. I love surgical alteration. Now, if only I could get some surgical alteration on my gut, I could make it through this cheesy meal without feeling like I’ve been injected with an elephant’s dose of cordrazine. What is up with this? I used to love mac-n-cheese and now I can barely touch the stuff. Could it be… no, say not so! It’s true. My gut hates cows.

4.Cold turkey (sandwiches)
Are you coming over for dinner, the in-law says, I’m making mac-n-cheese! I attempt to hide my sour face and fail miserably. Oh, right (now, she remembers), you can’t do cheese. There’s some cold turkey in the fridge! Dave can make you a sandwich! I try very hard not to pout, but I’m just not good at it. Oh, I’ve no doubt the sandwich will be just dandy. Heck, it may even have fancy Dijon mustard on it, but must I watch everyone else eat mac-n-cheese? Can’t I go downstairs to the family room instead? C’mon, Sci Fi Channel’s running a marathon, and I could be communing with Chekov and the space hippies right this very instant! Hey! You think they solved lactose intolerance in the 23rd century?

5.Nirvana, with goat.
So, if I’m going to make it, Chopper says, I’m going to make the creamy kind. Not that crusty stuff that ends up tasting like a rubber waffle. We’ll have to get kasseri, since we know it melts and we know you can eat it, and we’ll need something other than cow’s milk. Um, I say, just a wee bit optimistic for once, would you believe I saw a quart of goat’s milk in the health food section at Fred Meyer? No way! Way! We (boldly) go, we shop, we find. Chopper cooks. He serves me up a small but perfect portion (not too much on my first try in over a decade), and I take a bite. Simple, unadorned with frivolity save for a dash of smoked paprika and a sprig of fresh thyme. Creamy, just like Mom used to make. I am in nirvana. Hey, I think, I should eat this in front of the telly with the boys in gold, red, and blue. But, damn, SciFi channel never shows Trek episodes anymore. Ah well, that’s okay. I get to eat mac-n-cheese.

It was the event that almost wasn’t. The event that re-emerged from the abyss, from the long lost annals of Gastroblogian history, stifled by photographic traumas, by the death cries of a computer far past its prime, and by the evils of a creature known only by the minacious name Blogger BETA.

No. We refuse to believe it. And why? Because this meal was just too damned good.

It’s true, I confess it. We haven’t finished unpacking our kitchen. We’ve got reasons, many of which I’ll explain another day, but in brief, we’re still using our picnic basket plasticware, and we’ve no idea where we put our favorite can opener. Not that this will stop us.

It’s also true: Our camera is broken, my computer’s throwing tantrums (Lappy jealousy, I’m certain of it), and we’ve yet to figure out where we can set up a reasonable spot for food (or for that matter, craft) photos. Not that we’re deterred by this either, dang it all.

Nope. We’re determined. We’ve been away from our favorite food blogging event far too long. We’ve had too many months without proper kitchen access at all.

And so, Paper Chef Weekend, we took to the store, and subsequently armed with a bag of cranberries, a bottle of sweet vermouth, and a glug of cheap champagne, we embarked upon our search for something wild. And cheap. Cheap is good. We’re on a scary budget these days. And with that in mind, first stop: the freezer and that chunk of wild Alaskan salmon we snagged from the in-laws while we were house sitting.

Second stop? The yard. Yard? Wild? Come again?

Trust me on this. The yard is wild. At least we haven’t had anything to do with it for our two years away, and since then? We chopped a few branches off the fig tree so the satellite dish would (ostensibly) work, but yes, the yard is wild. Weeds gone wild, herbs gone wild, and most of all, apple tree gone wild. As in, it’s been two years plus since it met a pair of pruning shears.

Result? Rosemary, sage, and thyme to gather by the bunch, and apples, apples, everywhere. Most of our apples hit the ground before we could get to them, but even so, we managed a partial harvest — enough for several treats, including this Paper Chef’s dessert.

A note about the apples. I believe they’re Granny Smiths, but in all honesty, I haven’t a clue. All I know is this: they are green, they are sour, they are crisp and they are damn good.

Here’s our makeshift studio. It’s a tiny end table atop a coffee table, with a TV tray table to the side to hold the desk lamp. Both desk lamp and the bridge lamp above have full-spectrum daylight bulbs to help with the color balance, and behind the setup, I’ve got an old curtain rod and one of our freshly unpacked curtains, which I think might belong on a window around here somewhere. I’ll figure that one out someday soon.

After we’re settled in (ha ha, in our distant future), I’ll build my first true photo set-up. See, up on the island, we had a luxury — a luxury in summer at least — of an enormous bank of west-facing windows. We were in daylight heaven. Here, well… we’re in a bungalow, a tiny bungalow with tiny windows and tall trees. (My S.A.D. is sad, I tell you.) Photos in natural light will be a rare occurrence this time of year. Or, I should rephrase, considering the current condition of the camera: photos will be a rare occurrence this time of year.

But enough of that. On with the food!

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Saturday morning, we went to the Portland Farmers Market.

And at the Portland Farmers Market, one is generally not lured in by such things as fermented black soy beans and giblets, two of this month’s Paper Chef foursome.

No, indeed. Instead, we heard the siren call of maitake mushrooms, patty pan squash, and glorious, fat leeks for a dollar a piece.

(Okay, so we didn’t exactly hear the call — the market is rather noisy and what with that odd band playing some sort of world beat, syncopated version of the 70′s disco hit “Ring My Bell,” well, the quiet voices of vegetables and fungi were completely drowned out. But boy did they look good!)

So we brought them home, stashed them away near last week’s Moreland Farmers Market purchase of Pale Blue Ewe from the Black Sheep Creamery in Southern Washington, and were promptly distracted by household and family issues.

That is, until tonight when Chopper announced he was going to make goat cheese stuffed patty pans with crispy pan fried leeks and sautéed maitake mushrooms. (And, after a quick and boisterous exclamation of YUM, I scampered to the computer, double-checked the date and the rules and declared: Hey! This is perfect for Festa al Fresco!)

So, to Ivonne and Lis, I hope we’re not too late to join the party! Chopper finished our dish just as the sun lost itself behind the giant elms and maples to the west, but the hazy summer light lingered long enough for me to snap a few shots out on the porch railing of our current, temporary abode. Look! There’s even a tree in the background. Perfect for a picnic!

la festa al fresco

This is our last Paper Chef in this house.

In two and a half weeks, we’ll be moving back to Portland after 20 months of camping out and caregiving on an island we only occasionally called home. I can’t say that we’ll miss this disastrously tiny and ill-equipped kitchen, but we will have fond memories of a few small miracles we were able to pull out of the chaos.

At long last, this Fall, we’ll be back in our own home sweet home and our own kitchen. Sure it’s in serious need of updating — the linoleum floor has divots you could hide a mouse in, the drawer faces have a habit of falling off at inconvenient times, and there’s no dishwasher — but it’s ours, ALL ours, and that’s what counts!

But, because we’re here and because it’s Paper Chef time once again, we had to create just one last bit of chaos before we ramble on, and this time we had a grand bit of help from the annals of Paper Chef history and our bloggy neighbors from Down Under.

This month’s ingredients? Peaches, cherries, something hot & spicy, and a “new herb.” Now, by “new,” our Paper Chef host, Owen (welcome back, Owen!) means something we’ve not tried before. Not an easy command for Chopper to follow, as he’s used just about every herb on the island and then some.

But wait! What about that scrumptious and heady prize we received from Noodle Cook for Paper Chef 13? Aussie herbs and spices, the likes of which we’d never seen before? Perfect!

For this challenge we bent the rules a tiny bit to include spices (though by strict definition, two out of our three selections are ground leaves and should be considered herbs) and chose one for each of Chopper’s dishes. For his Tandoori Style Chicken with Stone Fruit Chutney, Chopper used Mountain Pepper Leaf, for the Chile Rellenos with Stone Fruit Salsa, Lemon Myrtle, and for the Spicy Braised Short Ribs with Dueling Gastriques, Wattle Seed. All three of these spices came from the Oz Tukka “A Taste of Australia” gift pack, part of our wonderful gift from Noodle Cook and his fellow Paper Chef 13 judges.

The gift pack includes five spices (ours has Mountain Pepper Berries and Bush Tomatoes in addition to the three we used for this adventure), and a helpful flyer with spice information on one side and recipes on the other. Not that Chopper used any of those recipes. For him it’s all about sample and invent first, read what others do later.

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Finally!

For the past three months we’ve had a hankering in the worst way to participate in Barbara’s The Spice is Right over at Tigers and Strawberries, and for the past three months, our cooking schedule (such as it is) has failed us. But not this time! Not when chiles are on the menu and Chopper’s in the kitchen.

This month’s theme, It’s Too Darned Hot, brings to mind a myriad of tongue-burning dishes, but our inspiration comes from the cold waters of the North. Copper River, Alaska, to be exact, and that slab of salmon at the local market that was just too darned good of a deal to pass up.

But what to make with salmon and chiles — especially when the goal is to feature the chiles? Something cold for our hot summer weather, perhaps? Something with an extra chile kick to make cooling off all the better?

Ah, that’s it. Skip the oven altogether and make ceviche.

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(In our so-tardy-it-shouldn’t-count second entry for Paper Chef, we stick close to home for our tale of Independence. How close to home? Oh, about 400 yards up the road. And as for that tardy thing — what was it the late, great Douglas Adams once said? Oh yes: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Words to live by.)

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.

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So, because we’re contrary sorts, we’ve got two entries into this month’s Paper Chef and neither of them have anything to do with July 4th.

Oh sure, we had a billion Independence Day ideas: Grit Cakes with Boston Harbor Tea (pre-dumping, of course), Firecracker Popcorn, The Most Frightening Apple Pie Ever, Pine Nut and Coriander Encrusted Corn Dogs, but truthfully, I think the onslaught of holiday tourists to our tiny island was just too much for us to bear, and by midweek we were ready to step out into the middle of Spring Street with a bull horn and direct all traffic off the docks and into the harbor.

In short, we are over the whole 4th of July celebration thing. So very, very over it.

So, for our first entry, we declare ourselves Citizens of the World (or at least of North America), and as such we are celebrating El Grito de Independencia, Mexican Independence Day.

Which is not, some may be surprised to learn, Cinco de Mayo!

El Grito de Independencia (the cry of independence) is a festival that begins on the night of September 16th with a reenactment by Mexico’s current president of the famous Grito de Dolores of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest who, in 1810, changed the course of Mexican history with a ring of his village church bell and a cry to his countrymen to rise up against Spanish rule. And though Hildalgo himself was captured and executed in 1811, the fight for independence continued and was eventually won in February of 1821.

Now, Chopper’s the lucky one. He’s been to Mexico, eaten the fabulous food (and no doubt consumed more tequila than he’d care to tell me). Someday soon, he hopes to return and bring me with him and we’ll take the tour, Rick Bayless style.

Meanwhile, for our El Grito de Independencia Paper Chef entry, we’ve got a list of Mexican ingredients a mile long, all worthy of the number 4 spot on our Paper Chef ingredient list, but in the spirit of competition, I’m going to pick the one that makes this Chopper invention unique: Nopales — prickly pear cactus pads.

What I love most about Chopper’s exploration of Mexican cuisine is the closer and closer he gets to the authentic, the further and further he moves from the horrid, cheese-laden Americanized crap we find at so many poor excuses for Mexican restaurants in these parts. Not that he ever cooked horrid, cheese-laden crap, mind you. I think of it more as an ongoing discovery on my part of just how good Mexican food can be. And, I should add, how good it can be for my poor, lactose-intolerant digestion! Swap out the quesa fresca with a little goat cheese and I’m set. Can’t get that sort of goodness at Chevy’s!

(In just a bit, I’ll post our second contribution to this month’s Paper Chef. It is, I promise, quite scholarly and historical in nature and entirely lacking in silly content involving a meal dressed as a pig. Okay, I lied about that last part.)

Paper Chef19

Our tiny kitchen in this home away from home of ours is rife with tragedies (don’t get me started on this week’s flood), but during the hottest of summer days, perhaps our greatest sadness comes not from the kitchen itself but from our lack of an ice cream maker. True, ice cream with actual cream in it is an evil that must be avoided by Mrs D’s tummy at all costs, but what of sorbets? Soy gelatos? Frozen yogurts? Must I debase myself by buying hideous supermarket products, laden with high fructose corn syrup? No! I won’t have it!

And so, because I long for the real thing, and because Chopper makes it so well, I must sneak off to his place of work every so often and sample his latest concoction.

Last time (back on Chopper Day) it was rum raisin ice cream and my tummy only allowed me the tiniest of bites.

But this time… ah, this time: Sorbet! And not just any sorbet, but the perfect holiday weekend treat of Vodka Watermelon Sorbet in a tuile cup! Oh, hell yum. There’s nothing… nothing at all like homemade sorbet with real fruit, not to mention a good top shelf vodka. It’s not sticky. It’s not cloyingly sweet. It’s just the perfect frozen cocktail refreshment for a warm summer evening.

I dropped by Chopper’s work last night to snag a few photos (and devour this tasty treat) just in time for the Canada Day Ice Cream Event over at sweet pleasure : plaisir sucré.

(Okay, so Sam at sweet pleasure : plaisir sucré didn’t actually call it a Canada Day event, but since he’s from Canada and since I am always happy to proudly wave my maple leaf of dual citizenship, I say it’s a Canada Day event! (Which probably means Chopper should have made something strictly Canadian for his sorbet, eh? Ah well, watermelon vodka will have to do. And do quite nicely, thank you very much!)

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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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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.

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Happy Chopper Day!

It’s not his birthday. Our anniversary isn’t for another two months, so there’s really nothing special about this occasion at all, though it is Sugar High Friday and Chopper’s got a new rum poached dessert on the menu at his place of work.

Oh, and this week marks a year since Chopper’s official graduation from culinary school.

And that, in itself is extra special.

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Poach Me Deadly, a noir drama of passion and poultry, was inspired by far too many movies to count, and by Chopper’s delicious Eggs en Plastic recipe, which you’ll find at the end of this tale. Chopper’s recipe was inspired by a passage in Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour, wherein Bourdain describes a chef using truffle oil and plastic wrap to poach an egg. For more hard boiled adventures (and more egg puns than you can shake a whisk at), visit this month’s End of Month Eggs on Toast Extravaganza over at Dispensing Happiness. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that some of the most egregious jokes in Poach Me Deadly are entirely Chopper’s fault.

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“Of course! Lager! The only thing that can kill a Vindaloo!”
– Dave Lister, Red Dwarf

We can’t help it. Someone mentions Indian food, and soon enough someone mentions vindaloo, and the next thing you know, we’re off on tangents involving curry monsters from outer space. Silly DNA modifiers, acting up again.

But, where the vindaloo mutations on board the good ship Red Dwarf are quite dangerous and must be dealt with (Leopard Lager into the beast’s maw generally does the trick), here on Earth, and at Casa Belly Timber, we find the notion of vindaloo mutations quite intriguing and potentially delicious.

And so, even though we’ve been horrifically busy of late, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to join this month’s From my Rasoi event over at Meena’s Hooked on Heat, and create a bit of Indian fusion of our own.

This month’s theme: Pick a favorite international dish and give it an Indian flavor. Now we mulled this over a bit, pondering pasta, contemplating enchiladas, but in the end we agreed that there was nothing we wanted to do more than tame a wild vindaloo and turn it into the perfect Red Dwarf party food, because if a bunch of scifi geeks like us are going to get together to watch episodes of our favorite British science fiction comedy, the last thing we should do is order our pizza from Domino’s.

That’s right, pizza! Delicious, steeped in the flavors of India, lamb vindaloo pizza. Or, as Chopper calls it, because he just can’t help himself…

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Pssst. I’m cheating.

See, I’ve got something I want to write about for the newest edition of Dine and Dish from The Delicious Life, but I need to break the rules.

It’s not that I intend to write about something other than a restaurant that serves small plates — oh, I’m all about multitudes of small plates (just ask the nurse who weighed me in at the doctor’s office today) — it’s that time frame thing that’s got me in a pickle.

More specifically, this, Sarah’s rule #2:

Go eat any time betwixt now and Monday, February 27, 2006.

(“Now” being February 3rd when Sarah posted her announcement.)

First, can I tell you where we’ve eaten betwixt February 3rd and February 27th? Aside from around our dining room table or in front of the telly laughing at melodramatic ice dancers, that is?

   The pub.
   The Thai place for lunch.
   The pub again.
   The crappy Chinese place when the pub was unexpectedly closed.
   Oh, yeah, and the pub again.

Note the alarming trend. The trend that screams: It’s Off-Season! It’s the pub or (almost) nothing, baby, cuz until the spring tourists arrive, this place is all about wonky restaurant hours and tiny paychecks.

Yup, winter on the island; so not conducive to culinary exploration.

Not that we’ve got much of that to begin with, mind you. Take this month’s Dine and Dish theme, for example. Amazing Graze? Small plates? I can think of one — yup, one — restaurant that falls under that category on this island, and go figure, we already covered it back in Dine and Dish #3: The Freshman.

Now the Thai place could count as a small plate venue — if we were to write about their spring rolls — but we got that one back in Dine and Dish #4: Rachael Ray for a Day.

And the pub? Hah. Been there, done that in Dine and Dish #1: Barfly. Not that their plates are even remotely small, mind you.

So, nothing left to write about. Or, I cheat.

Which (after this absurdly long preamble), brings me to the place I want to tell you about. The place that’s 251 miles (plus ferry ride) away and we haven’t been to since Christmas. Chopper’s and my favorite dim sum joint, Fong Chong, in Portland’s Chinatown.

Now Fong Chong isn’t much to look at — in fact it’s got detractors who bitch about the lack of atmosphere (as if that’s more important than a damn fine steamed hum bow) — but we’re not here for pretty décor. I can find plenty of places that scream heavenly temple and serve up deep fried MSG-laden crap any day of the week. Well, any day I’m in an actual city, mind you.

No, Fong Chong is not about elegance. It’s a cavern of a space with scuffed floors and smudgy windows, but it holds a special place in our hearts and come hell or high water, when we take a trip to Portland, we make a stop at Fong Chong.

My first time dining out with Chopper’s parents was at Fong Chong. It was one of those early, get-to-know-the-folks meals, and we couldn’t have picked a better place. At any other restaurant we’d of run the risk of gulfs of silence; each of us engrossed in our own private plate, only occasionally exchanging pleasantries.

How’s the salmon? Oh, good. How’s the steak. Fine. Vegetables are over-cooked though.

Not at dim sum. Here, we shared the excitement of approaching carts together. Is that ginger chicken? Yes! Oh, and yu chee gow. Score! We sampled our favorites together and together we came just inches away from the big dim sum Do-We-Dare Challenge: Chicken feet.

In the months that followed, Fong Chong became our spot, and Chopper and I were such regulars we even had a favorite server who recognized us on sight and popped by our table soon after we were seated. “Two Tsingtao?” she’d ask after every greeting, to which we’d invariably say “of course,” because we could never resist a crisp Asian beer to follow up a good chomp of dim sum.

We had our favorite dishes – mine was the har gau, Chopper’s the siu mai, but every so often we’d venture out of our safety zone and try something we’d never tried before. Sometimes it was a one-shot deal, but more often than not we’d finish the meal exclaiming “I can’t believe we waited this long to try that one! We are idiots! Gah!”

(Yes, that last line should be read in a Napoleon Dynamite voice.)

Even so, we never quite got up the courage to face the chicken feet. That is, until a day we arrived and found Fong Chong so busy they were seating multiple groups of diners at their large, Lazy-Susan centered tables. Not that this hadn’t happened before; we’d shared tables many times — it was just that this time was different. We landed at a table with an absolutely charming and loquacious Chinese couple who’d just come into town from Astoria out on the coast. Fong Chong, they told us, was a necessary stop to their every Portland trip, and then they proceeded to recommend their favorite dishes, including — oh look, there they are on the next cart! — chicken feet.

How could we resist?

And y’know? Those crunchy collagen-filled feet, they aren’t half bad.

(I could go on, but remember, I’m terrible at waxing eloquent about flavors. See, I even admitted it. Ooh, the chicken toes, so crunchy yet tender in my mouth! They make me happy! They are happy feet! [giggle])

Actually, I’m lying. The chicken feet were just a little too fatty collagenesque strange for my liking. Chopper, on the other hand dug them so much I feared this would lead to a new culinary extremity trend. Pig’s feet, frog’s legs, lizard toes…

When Chopper started culinary school full time, we had to cut back on our visits to Fong Chong, sometimes going without dim sum for two to three months at a time. (Agony!) Meanwhile, we were working hard, saving what we could for our absurdly DIY wedding, which we’d foolishly planned for month number eight of Chopper’s schooling.

The day after the wedding (which I may write about sometime after our second anniversary, when I’ve fully recovered), we were so utterly dim sum deprived, we had to make the Fong Chong trip. Nothing else mattered. Presents? They could wait. Cleaning up the mess from our 11th hour wardrobe construction? Feh. What’s a living-room full of fabric scraps, anyway? A sign of creativity, that’s what!

So, off we went with visions of sesame balls and onion buns dancing in our heads.

As luck would have it, the new (and newly married) manager was working that morning, and she was so tickled to learn we’d made Fong Chong our choice for First Meal Out as a Married Couple, she knocked the price of the food right off our ticket. All we owed for was beer and tip — and a good thing too because oh did we pig out that day!

Now, you might think that my ode to Fong Chong will end on a melancholy note. That things have changed or that we’ve moved on to a new favorite spot. Not a chance. Even after our longest dry spell — a gap of nearly half a year without a Fong Chong visit — our return was just like old times. Last December, halfway down I-5, driving late at night after catching the 10:15 ferry (Chopper having hightailed it from pastry station to ferry line), the urge kicked in.

“You realize what we need to do tomorrow,” I said.

Chopper glanced at me from the driver’s seat to check my expression. He saw my smile and returned it.

“I mean, we’re getting into town at what, 2 a.m. at the earliest,” I said. “We can get ourselves out of bed by 10:30, and…”

“Fong Chong,” Chopper said.

“Fong Chong,” I echoed. I was grinning from ear to ear now in the dark car; the anticipation of har gau, hot chili oil, lotus leaf rice… it was almost too much to bear.

We were there within 45 minutes of waking the next morning. And there, first at our table, was our favorite server.

“Two Tsingtao?” she asked.

“Yes, yes, oh YES!” we answered.

Fong Chong
301 NW 4TH Ave
Portland, OR 97209-3882
(503) 228-6868

Fri-Sat 10:30am-10pm
Sun-Thu 10:30am-9pm

Best time to go: Fong Chong opens for business at 10:30, but they don’t really get rolling till a little after 11. Show up between 11 and 11:30, before the line kicks in, and you’ll be there when the carts first hit the floor with goodies fresh from the steamers.

On the table: The hot chili oil (that fire orange liquid in a jar) is a must. Pour it on your plate. Lots of it. Don’t be shy.

Thirst quenching: We love our Tsingtao and think you should too, but if you’re not in a beer mood, don’t worry, the house tea that comes with every meal is a light jasmine blend that tastes great even if you’ve been sitting at the table for an hour letting the tea pot go cold.

What is on those carts, anyway? You might not be able to understand everything the servers say, but here’s a tip: Just try it anyway. You can hardly ever go wrong, and at just two to three bucks a serving, the experimentation’s worth it. P.S. Chicken feet. Chopper insists on it.

I wanted to spend the weekend making cheese sandwiches. Trouble is, every time Chopper sees the ingredient list for Paper Chef, his eyes light up like a puppy in a butcher shop. And this time? Beets, lime, pears, and aphrodisiacs, and us a couple blogging together? Ahem. How could we resist?

So, we hit the books. Or rather, the Google, and discovered all sorts of nifty lists and references to dozens of aphrodisiac foods, from the obvious (caviar) to the unexpected (coriander).

Now, I have a personal favorite aphrodisiac. It’s a combination of dark chocolate and Barry White. Gets me every time. But Chopper had other plans (or maybe he’s saving the dark chocolate and Barry White for later). See, he’d recently received a $25 gift certificate to our local grocery, and now he’d found the perfect excuse for some sensuous splurging.

So, to completely knock us out of contention for Paper Chef’s Super Saver category, we picked up three lusty participants for our lusty trio:

Caviar (Okay, black lumpfish roe, close enough for our purposes. Ah, mystical fish eggs, symbol of fertility…)
Truffles (They’re musky. Need we say more?)
Snails (I’m told it has something to do with their shape. What? It’s suggestive?)

Marcus Licinius Crassus: Do you eat oysters?
Antoninus: When I have them, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Do you eat snails?
Antoninus: No, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?
Antoninus: No, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Of course not. It is all a matter of taste, isn’t it?
Antoninus: Yes, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: And taste is not the same as appetite, and therefore not a question of morals.
Antoninus: It could be argued so, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: My robe, Antoninus. My taste includes both snails and oysters.

– Sparticus, 1960, Lawrence Olivier as Marcus Licinius Crassius; Tony Curtis as Antonius

Ahem. So, where was I?

Oh, yes, we weren’t done yet. Chopper had other ingredients in mind for our Lusty Trio, and surprisingly, we found that several of them were also included on various lists of aphrodisiacs. Here are six more:

Vanilla (Its powerful scent evokes strong and sensuous emotions.)
White wine (In moderation, of course, or the hot date ends badly.)
Wasabi (Nature’s Cialis, rumor has it.)
Red chiles (Hot, hot, hot.)
Coriander (According to The Arabian Nights, a coriander concoction once saved a merchant from 40 years of infertility!)
Agave nectar (Not fermented agave, like tequila or pulque, but still…)

In Aztec times, pulque was the highly esteemed drink of the elders, priests and warriors, a nectar that according to myth oozed from the 400 breasts of the goddess Mayahuel.
–source: Sign on San Diego

Four hundred???

Okay, I think that should do it for aphrodisiacs. Time for some recipes.

Now, I should note that I neglected to include smoked salmon on my list of nine (nine!) aphrodisiacs, above, but whether documented or not, as far as I’m concerned, in my book the combo of smoked salmon and Peter Gabriel is right up there next to dark chocolate and Barry White. (Follow all that up with a glass of port and Alan Rickman, and I’m done.)

Oh, I could go on, but never mind that. Our Lusty Trio turned out quite delicious and so rich that just the smallest helping did me in for the evening. In fact, the both of us have been in recovery for three days, so it’s a wonder we’ve gotten any blogging done at all!

Tagged with: Paper Chef

A recent conversation at Casa Belly Timber:

Kitty Kaga: (positively dripping with disdain) Oh. So you’re back.

Platelicker: (bursting, as usual) Oooh! Kitty!

Kitty Kaga: I would have wished you gone forever, but there’s work to be done here, and I cannot do it alone. I suppose my captors completed the judging for Paper Chef?

Platelicker: Must! Chase! Kitty!

Kitty Kaga: Ahem. They were in Seattle almost a whole week, you know. They could have posted, or at least completed their judging notes.

Platelicker: Seattle has many dogs. Wheeee!

Kitty Kaga: Right. So, about the judging…

Platelicker: And yummy food and big hills and…

Kitty Kaga: They weren’t able to finish, were they?

Platelicker: If I tell you, can I chase you?

Kitty Kaga: If you tell me, after I am done eating, I shall let you lick up the scraps of food that fall from my dish to the floor.

Platelicker: Wheee! Free food! Okay, okay, so they didn’t finish, and they couldn’t post and — you’ll probably hear about that later cuz it all has to do with stuff like bowling and dancing, and meeting other food bloggers, and strange, yummy food they wouldn’t let me eat — and, well, they tried to think it all through, but they just got pooped, and then there was this whole planning for the future thing, and visiting relatives, and knee injuries and…

Kitty Kaga: Planning for the future thing?

Platelicker: You’ll hear about that later too. It has to do with words and jobs and more strange, yummy food they wouldn’t let me eat, and — Hey! Do I get to lick up your food scraps now?

Kitty Kaga: Silly furball. You always lick up the scraps of food that fall from my dish to the floor.

Platelicker: Oh. Right. (a befuddled pause) Oh! Guess what! I’m going to take climbing lessons!

Kitty Kaga: Wonderful. Now, go away.

Platelicker: I’m starting with chair backs and working my way up to counter tops and trees.

Kitty Kaga: (after a heavy sigh) How nice. Say, isn’t that a leftover pig ear out in the garden?

Platelicker: Pig ear!! Wheee!

(exit dog, kitchen left.)

Kitty Kaga: Well then, it appears I must complete my chairmenical duties and announce the winners for this month’s Paper Chef Competition. Oh, shut up. I know chairmenical isn’t a real word. Do I look like I care?

So… on with it.

This was, as can be deduced by the lateness of this post, a most arduous process. I have reason to believe my captors quibbled and quarreled over their decisions for days on end. (When they weren’t off bowling or shopping or planning their futures that is. Silly creatures.)

I have, since their return, obtained their copious notes, reviewed them, and am now prepared to post the official announcement.

Well, there you have it. The results of my captors’ arduous quibbling.

Oh, wait! They appear to have attached an additional note to their abundantly annotated scoring page:

(Meanwhile, Platelicker has returned to the room)

Platelicker: Mommy and Daddy are asleep! I want to play and they’re asleep!

Kitty Kaga: Oh. Back again?

Platelicker: Why are they asleep?

Kitty Kaga: I don’t suppose you know what the phrase “It’s been a long week” means, do you?

Platelicker: Play with me?

Kitty Kaga: Not a chance.

Platelicker: (pouting) They won’t be doing this Paper Chef thing again any time soon, will they?

Kitty Kaga: Not if they can help it. As much as I relish this donning of finery — and don’t you dare raid my wardrobe again! — I do possess great sympathy for their battle with this thorny task, and understand completely if they choose to run screaming from such competitions in the near future.

Platelicker: But, but… next month could be cream and salmon and tuna water and juicy mouse head month!

Kitty Kaga: Cream… Salmon… Juicy mouse head… Ahem. Well. My sympathies can be short-lived if the occasion warrants. You were saying?

Platelicker: Play with me?

Kitty Kaga: (with a flexing of claws) Don’t push your luck.

It’s round-up
time!

I don’t know whether to blame it on the ingredients, or on planetary alignments, or on our our own Paper Chef Gourmet Academy Chairman, Owen of Tomatilla! but we have a record twenty three entries for our Brand Spankin’ New Paper Chef #14.

Twenty Three!

(We hereby announce our retirement from food blogging and subsequent publication of Quinoa! It’s Not Just For Hippies Anymore!)

Ahem.

Needless to say, the judging (which isn’t done yet) is going to be a four-beer-at-the-pub challenge. Yes, we’re taking a page from last month’s Down Under crew and hitting our favorite ale house to sort out the winners. Look for our results sometime… um… soon.

Meantime, a couple quick notes before I launch into our round-up. With 23 entries to cover, I’m going to attempt to not make this The Post That Wouldn’t Die and be somewhat brief. (Cough — Oops, she says about six hours later) I encourage everyone to follow the links and check all our participants’ tasty dishes.

When I tossed in that photo of baby food into our ingredients post I had no idea those little jars of flavored mush would be so useful! Several participants were — most wonderfully — weirder than we expected, and found nifty ways to Gerber up their entries. Other ingenious “baby” choices included sprouts, seeds, biscuits, and yes… an actual baby. (Read on. You’ll see.)

Another highlight of this month’s adventure: the number of entrants cooking with quinoa for the first time. Not everyone had complete success with it, but check out the comments on some entries and you’ll already see cooks sharing their tips and tricks and, in at least a few cases, planning to add quinoa to their regular repertoire. It’s a great grain (at least we think so!) and it’s always exciting to read about culinary discoveries.

The yog(H)urt (okay, okay already, I’ll ditch the H!) and cashews sent many entrants in the direction of Indian cuisine. Cumin, coriander, and curry powder abounded (yum!), but we found some complete surprises in the mix as well, and for all of those (and for the baby)… well, read on!

Paper Chef #14: The Big Honkin’ Brand Spankin’ New Round Up

First up is California blogger Cyndi from Cookin’ with Cyndi and her Sweet Potato Quinoa Corn Bread. Cyndi’s entry came to us first and, yes, she uses baby food. (Right from the beginning, I knew we were in for surprises in the “baby” department.) Cyndi grinds her quinoa in a coffee grinder to make meal, and, to give the corn bread an extra healthy touch, she uses Splenda Brown Sugar Blend instead of sugar. The results? Husband asks for seconds and the bread is declared a success!

Another bread baker this month was Magictofu from Ottowa’s Slurp and Burp, who provides us with a full day’s menu, including a most adorable baby multigrain loaf in swaddling clothes (nope, that’s not the real baby). Ever cheeky with his entries, Magictofu declares the need to avoid prions by not baking actual baby, and instead launches into an impressive menu that includes French Canadian Quinoa Crepe with Cashew Butter and Maple Syrup for breakfast, Quinoa Stuffed Crepes with Sprout Salad for lunch, and Lamb Extravaganza for dinner. Magictofu also takes an alternate route to boiling the quinoa: dumping it raw in hot oil till it puffs. The result: a tasty boost to quinoa’s nutty flavor.

Also from Canada: Lyn from Lex Culinaria and her elegant Roasted Baby Beet, Labanya and Quinoa Salad. Lyn tells us she stepped out of her “comfort zone” for this one, tackling quinoa for the first time and combining it in layers with baby beets and a luscious favorite of hers: Labanya. Labanya is a Middle Eastern soft cheese that’s made from suspending yogurt in cheesecloth so all the excess liquid drains away. It’s a fascinating process, and Lyn’s skillful use of yogurt for this Paper Chef produces beautiful results.

A salad of a different style comes from Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Regular readers of Kalyn’s blog know she’s a master of low carb recipes, but for this one, she cheats just a teensy bit, producing a Curried Cashew Chicken Salad with Quinoa and Baby Peas, that (in Kalyn’s words) is “something slightly resembling a low carb dish” owing to the dominance of tasty low carb ingredients like chicken, celery, cashews, and green onions. Mmmm, protein!

Another chicken dish comes from Lady Amalthea of Noshes, Thoughts & Reves! in New York City. Her Yogurt-Marinated Chicken Stir-Fry with Cashews, over Quinoa is an impressive bit of fusion, combining techniques and ingredients from China, India, and Mexico –and possibly Italy too, if you count the extra-dry Vermouth! She uses one of our personal favorite babies — baby Bok Choy — and the quinoa makes for a nice stir-fry bed, replacing the usual rice.

Jumping across the U.S. from New York to L.A., we’ve got Sylvie from Soul Fusion Kitchen, who not only resists the taunts of our ingredients to go vegetarian, she embraces her inner-carnivore with a nice heaping plate of Baby Back Ribs with Quinoa and Cashews with Two Yogurt Sauces. It sounds almost All-American, save for that tasty Curry, Cilantro and Garlic flavored yogurt sauce. Sylvie is also one of several entrants to toast her quinoa as well as cook it, bringing out the grain’s flavor. Combine that, the yogurt, and those ribs, and Chopper’s still drooling.

We’re still in California, and we’ve got Rachael from Fresh Approach Cooking who provides us with our solo seafood entry for this month (outside of our N.E.E. non-entry entry salmon): Broiled Perch with Quinoa-Cashew Crust and Pinapple-Kumquat Salsa. Rachael contemplates pandering to us (with penguins and spraypaint??), but no need, her plating is exquisite, and the fish, with yogurt under the crust to keep it tender, sounds melt-in-your-mouth divine. Rachael bends the rules just a wee bit with her “wee” instead of “baby” kumquats, but we’ll forgive her!

Another member of this month’s California contingent is Brendon from Something in Season. When I saw “Sushi” in his entry title, I expected a second serving of fish, but Brendon surprises us with a unique, minamalist approach, setting a goal for himself to use as few ingredients outside the chosen four as possible. His Spinach Sushi with Quinoa and Cashews uses exactly eight ingredients, and that’s including salt and water! Another bit of ingenuity — ground cashews in the quinoa to turn “fluffy” into “sticky.” A perfect substitute for sticky rice.

Still in California (and still resisting hippie food!) is Erin from Erin’s Kitchen with her offering: Red Quinoa with Curried Yogurt, Cashews, and Baby Apples. (Still no actual babies yet — hang on…) Erin uses Inca Red quinoa in her dish — a heirloom variety known as Pasankalla. (A quick google search tells me there are five basic categories of quinoa but thousands of varietes.) With baby apples, red bell pepper, green onions and a healthy dash of lime to prevent the apples from browning, the end result is a pleasingly colorful dish that would be perfect for a picnic.

Now we head down to Wellington, New Zealand for minimalism of another sort. Emma of the The Laughing Gastronome gives herself a ten dollar challenge for this event and comes up with a tasty Indian dish: Baby Biryani. Emma is another quinoa first-timer, and gets great results with her yogurt-marinated chicken dish. And the babies? Black cumin seeds, because if microgreens and sprouts are babies, then seeds, being “A ripened plant ovule containing an embryo” are most definitely babies!

A second seed-baby (pomegranate this time) makes an appearance in Kimberly’s Quinoa in Blueberry-Yog(h)urt Vinaigrette with Cashews and Three “Babies” at her Seattle, Washington blog, Music and Cats. Kimberly’s an architect by day and her attention to design shows in this elegant dish. She’s not cooked quinoa before, and so embarks first on a simple rinse, boil, and steam to experience the grain on its own before playing with flavors. For her other two babies, Kimberly chooses baby citrus (satsumas or clementines), and baby spinach. The result: a light dish with an emphasis on the flavor and texture of the quinoa.

Jumping east of the Cascade range, but sticking to our home state of Washington, we’ve got Jennifer of Taste Everything Once and her Quinoa-Cashew Crusted Lamb over Baby Greens with Yogurt Dressing. This meal looks refreshing and meaty all at once and is a breeze to put together: quinoa and cashew crust for the lamb in the food processor and a complementary yogurt dressing with shredded cucumber and garlic powder. Add tasty greens and salad veggies and it’s dinner time. So simple and super healthy!

Now we’re off to the other Washington — DC this time — and more lamb! Katherine of ToastPoint, in a witty, baby-laden entry, brings us Baby Curry and Quinoa Fritters with Cashew Cream. The babies? Baby sheep, baby spinach, butternut squash baby food, baby bananas, baby chickens (okay, eggs) and (“double word score!”) Yobaby Yogurt. And though her cashew cream doesn’t contain any babies, it sounds extremely good. Now, where’s my blender?

More multiple babies (but no actual babies just yet) abound at Kitchen Crazy Daffy’s Chopsticks blog, where Daffy whips up two treats: Mustard ‘Quinoa’ Salad and Cinnamon ‘Quinoa’ Pudding with Cashew Cookies and Roasted Grapes. Why the quinoa quotes? Turns out Daffy, away from her usual UK haunt, has a beast of a time trying to track down the grain at the local Tesco, and ends up with bulgur wheat and pearl barley as most excellent substitutes. Her babies? Spinach, plum tomatoes, and — what fun — baby biscuits!

In India, apparently quinoa is also quite hard (if not impossible) to find, so Deccanheffalump from The Cook’s Cottage lucks out when her good friend Uma provides some for her Feisty Quinoa Salad. Deccanheffalump, finding this event a great excuse to expand her salad repertoire, creates a lovely, healthy dish with baby corn, spring onions, dates, apples, and beautiful golden raisins sprinkled on top. For her dressing, she employs the same hanging trick as Lex Culinaria, and blends her thickened yogurt with salt, pepper, and freshly chopped garlic.

Now we travel south east across the Indian Ocean to Australia, where Paul from No Sauce Thanks! shows off his Quinoa, Baby Chantenay Carrot, Cashew Pilaf with Pan fried Turkey chops and Cranberry Apple Relish in the very first post for his brand new blog. He doesn’t even have an intro post up yet! (And we thought we were jumping into it!) Maybe it’s the turkey and cranberries, but this takes us right back into winter comfort food after our previous entrant’s spring salad. Only twist is — it’s the southern hemisphere and the carrots are fresh from the garden!

Still in Australia but definitely switching seasonal influences, we’ve got Noodle Cook from An Electronic Restaurant who defies computer problems and comes up with the niftiest plate of heart-shaped ice-creams we’ve ever seen. There’s Cranberry Cashew Yoghurt Ice-Cream, Wattleseed Cashew Yoghurt Ice-Cream, Banana Macadamia Yoghurt Ice-Cream, Caramel Cashew Ice-Cream with White Truffle Oil, and Salted Macadamia Ice-Cream. Again — Ice creams? With these ingredients? Using baby food? Just go take a look, and take notes for Valentine’s Day!

Another frozen entry (would you believe we’ve got two?), is from Lady X’s Experiment in Writing. Her entry? A Cashew Praline Frozen Yogurt Pie. The quinoa flour lends some unexpected protein to the dessert world — and it makes for a surprisingly nutty, tasty crust. Now, Lady X tells us she didn’t include a “baby” in this recipe and so — in a last-minute save — she provides us with an adorable photo of her younger self dining on baby food (no, that’s not the real baby yet!). But, remember, with our stretchy rules, eggs are baby chickens, so her frozen pie passes the test. (Though we still love the photo.)

Another last-minute save comes from Jonski Blogski in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where husband spies the serving bowl, suggests the addition of yogurt (completely unaware this is a Paper Chef dish!), and Tricia snags the appropriate container out of the fridge. Tricia’s Three Babies Quinoa with Cashews and Yog(h)urt uses baby spinach, baby corn, and (raiding her pantry) a mysterious leftover jar of sweet potato baby food. She serves her dish with chicken, sautéed and seasoned heartily with green chile salt and (yum!) orange Muscat champagne vinegar.

Yet another jar of baby food makes an appearance in Cookiecrumb’s fun duo of entries from her Northern California blog, I’m Mad and I Eat. First up, complete with shredded coconut, allspice, stuffed animals, and the theme from Backdraft; Creamy Quinoa Pudding with Tropical Flavors. How to get tropical flavors? With a jar of tropical flavored baby food, of course. Next, not content to let her bulked up boatloads of cooked quinoa go to waste, Cookiecrumb engages in a bit of improvisational kitchen alchemy and produces Quinoa Tabbouleh D’Brickashaw. (You’ll have to follow the link to see what that’s all about!) Despite this being January, and Marin County being in the Northern Hemisphere, Cookiecrumb raids her patio garden and supplies her dish with home-grown baby mint, parsley, tomatoes and arugula.

Cookiecrumb isn’t the only one to toss allspice into the mix, Kevin, from Seriously Good, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, uses allspice in his Quinoa Pilaf, and though he isn’t thrilled with the quinoa’s performance, he does, as you can see from the festive photo, try to put a happy face on his result. Kevin uses baby zucchini for his infant addition, and adds dried apricots as well, which — happy face or no — sounds pretty tasty to me!

Next up, another pilaf, and another blog from the southern U.S. Also, another adorable baby picture! (But we’re not quite to the real baby just yet!) Alanna, from A Veggie Venture brings us a “definite keeper” with her Quinoa Pilaf with Raita. For the pilaf, she toasts the quinoa before boiling it, and includes fennel, carrot, and baby Portobello mushrooms. Raita is an Indian yogurt sauce, similar to tzatziki, and Alanna’s version is an easy blend of cashew butter, ginger, spices and lime juice. It sounds like the perfect complement to the nutty-buttery pilaf.

Our culinary traditions, such as they are in the Pacific Northwest, are nothing compared to those in the south, and we are delighted to discover a new one in the form of the Culinary Bookworm’s Quinoa King Cake with Orange-Yogurt Cashew Filling from her Baton Rouge blog, Weekly Dish. Turns out, Paper Chef Announcement Day coincided with the first day of Mardi Gras season, and what better way to embrace the theme of renewal than to bake a New Orleans King Cake. Traditionally, King Cake is a brioche with cream cheese or almond paste filling, but since this is Paper Chef, out goes the usual, and in comes quinoa flour, yogurt, and cashews. And the baby? Well, you’ll just have to check out the Culinary Bookworm’s post because we never would have dreamed it, but she really did bake a baby into her cake!

So, there it is! The Paper Chef #14 Round-up Extravaganza. Phew! I feel like I just spent the last week in a maternity ward.

I hope you all enjoyed the entries and our (oops, we weren’t very brief) recap, and for the final results — all I can say is check back soon! Meantime, we’re off to the ale house for our four-beer-at-the-pub judging challenge. Wish us luck!

Babies? What were you people thinking?

Oh, wait. That was us.

Seriously, we’re utterly gobsmacked by the quality and quantity of Paper Chef entries this time, and it’s going to be a full day’s adventure going through them all, just for the round-up, never mind the judging! You people are all insane. And we mean that in a loving, join usssss, be one of ussss way.

In the meantime, we’ve got our own N.E.E. (Non-Entry-Entry) to post. Now, since we’re non-competitors, we’ve allowed ourselves a wee bit of laziness. We didn’t come up with brilliant takes on “baby” ingredients, nor were any actual babies baked into our dish. Instead, we simply snagged two of the ingredients we’d featured in our Paper Chef Announcement Baby Food Photo Set: Baby Food and Baby Ruth bars.

Ahem, make that baby bok choy, and baby Yukon gold potatoes.

Chopper, always one to find ways to envelop seafood in a crust, zipped to the market for a few salmon fillets and produced this tasty dinner treat: Quinoa crusted salmon with baby bok choy, baby Yukon gold potatoes, and chipotle yogurt sauce.

Some notes on our curious dish:

The crust was crumbly, very crumby, which meant we had a limited number of plating options. Salmon medallions were out of the question, as was slicing the fillet lengthwise and standing one half up against the other. So, after various ill-fated architectural endeavors, we opted for the simple, upright, halved fillet.

Hmm… Something almost mythic about that stark statue of salmon. What is it?

Ah, yes. Now I see it:

Now, the sauce. A word about the sauce. It’s hot. I mean really hot. Yosemite Sam biscuits-are-burnin’ hot. You might want to tone it down with more yog(H)urt. Or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

Meanwhile, we’re reviewing this month’s record number of Paper Chef entries and we promise a round-up tomorrow or Friday, with judging and awards to follow soon after. (And, let me tell you, this is not going to be easy! I mean… can I trade places with an Oscar voter? Please? Please?)

Hey! Who’s been messing with my wardrobe?

Ahhh… this black one looks especially good on me!

Mrrrrrrreooooow!! Phhhhhtht!

There. Much better.

Yes, my fine feline friends, Kitty Kaga is back, just in time for Paper Chef #14!

It’s a brand new year, which means time for brand new ingredients and a brand new theme!

Right. The ingredients are new every month. I knew that.

So, without further ado…

Our first three ingredients, chosen at random from the nomination list:

1. Cashews
2. Quinoa
3. Yoghurt

And for our fourth, specially chosen ingredient, in honor of the brand new infant year….

(No, not BABIES, silly!)

Here, have a lookie:

Got it yet?

That’s right. It’s Baby Food!

Er…

Or rather, it’s the baby variety of any older food, be it veggie, fruit, meat, or fish. Baby corn, baby bok choy, baby clams… the possibilities are endless!

Now, if you’re feeling a bit scary adventurous, we’ll also allow any food that’s got the word “baby” in the title! (Though, if you go for either of those last two in our photo set? You’re weirder than we are, got it? Weird.)

So… go healthy, go vegetarian if you like, go for simple elegance, and express the spirit of a brand new year’s renewal with your brand spankin’ new burblin’ baby ingredients!

Oh, and don’t forget to play!

Now, here, freely lifted from Tomatilla, are excerpts from Owen’s Paper Chef event guidelines:

And now for our nitty gritty details:

Entries are due midday (PST) on Monday, January 9th. We’re pretty lax around here, so any time before mid-Monday evening will probably do, and even after that we’ll be forgiving, if, say, you managed to torch your kitchen while inventing Baked Baby Yukon Gold Alaska.

Send your entries to mrs_d AT belly-timber DOT com, and include your name, blog name, location, and a permalink to your entry. You can also post your entry information here on this comments thread. Also, I’d like to encourage everyone to add a “Paper Chef” technorati tag to the end of their post, thusly –

Tagged with: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/Paper Chef” rel=”tag”>Paper Chef</a>

– so it gives everyone an extra place to search for entries before we post the round-up.

Have fun, and once again, Kitty Kaga sez:

Allez Cuisine!

Get your
Paper Chef
Ingredient Nominations
in now!

Since we here at Belly Timber believe that you should never refrain from playing with your food, we are delighted to be once again judging one of the food blogging community’s premiere excuses for massive foodplay: Paper Chef.

Wait a sec, you ask. Didn’t the great founder and Paper Chef guru, Owen of Tomatilla! declare this month’s theme to be simplicity, health, and renewal?

Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play too. Think of it like creating a stunning tic tac toe board, versus spending six weeks designing your own Neverwinter Nights module. Capiche?

After all, we here at Belly Timber are all about simplicity, health, and renewal.

Okay, I lied. That’s not even remotely true.

We are all about getting the clutter out of the kitchen, losing twenty pounds, and taking those damn overdue books back to the library.

Close enough, right?

So, if your New Year’s Resolutions are anything like ours, maybe that clean kitchen, that drive toward slimness, and another six weeks with the library’s copy of The Essential Dalai Lama will lead you straight down the path toward the perfect, simple, healthy (and playful) Paper Chef entry.

Nominations for ingredients are happening over at Tomatilla! and they’re only open till Friday mid-morning. After that, we pull three out of a hat and add a fourth of our own choosing. The photo accompanying this post, I should note, contains a huge hint relating to our secret fourth ingredient.

I should also note, that the photo is of Chopper’s niece and if we have anything to say about it, it will remain on the internet for all to see until she’s old enough to date.

December 24th,

12 am, PST.

Hey you!

Yes, you!

See that deadline up there? The one just 32 or so hours away? That’s the deadline for this year’s Menu For Hope campaign. So… whaddya waiting for?

The food blogging community’s lined up some seriously cool gifts (including our own Belly Timber Island Insanity Package) to make this far more than just your every day fundraiser, and don’t forget — all of the donations go to Unicef and are specifically earmarked for Kashmir earthquake relief. So… if you haven’t had a chance to check out the gifts and donate… go! (Cracks whip!)

Ah, I wish we could be around to watch the total climb up to $15,000 (and I think it will), but alas, we’re on the road for two days, hauling our exhausted asses down Interstate 5 to visit relatives in Portland, and then hauling our exhausted asses back up here — bright and early on the 25th so Chopper can cook dinner at the restaurant for silly people who want to eat out on Christmas Day.

Who are these silly people, anyway?

Well, never mind them.

Oh, and about these holidays…

I finally figured out what’s bugging me so much about being around food bloggers during the holiday season.

It’s the dairy products. They’re everywhere. Puddings, cream-filled pastries, cheeses, egg nogs… no, no, please, not egg nogs!! Aaaaaauughhhh. It’s enough to make me want to throw my hands over my ears and sing lalalalalalalala I can’t hear you till January.

Seriously, you’re all wonderful people, I’m sure, but you’re killing me with these dairy products.

(Yes, the Holiday Season is the worst time of year for the lactose intolerant. In the summer, we’ve always got sorbet. Now? We just stare longingly at platter after platter of scrumptious, untouchable food and drown our sorrows in mulled wine.)

Mmmmm…. mulled wine….

So, just ‘cuz, here’s a gratuitous food photo of sushi. Neener, neener.

Second frost

Second frost? Not first frost?

Well, it’s like this. It’s midnight before first frost and I’m reading, and the plot thickens and then it thickens some more, and then more after that, and then it’s two thirty in the morning and Chopper asks what happens next, and I check the next chapter title and I tell him, and he says, Hagrid’s back! You have to keep reading!

So, blame the lack of first frost photos on J.K. Rowling and the fact that we’re well over a year behind on our Harry Potter reading. And the fact that one simply cannot stay up till 3:30 am and expect to wake before the frost melts.

So, second frost.

Also, rose hip harvesting time.

Our meadow is thick with wild roses. Nootka roses, or rosa nutkana to be exact. They bloom delicate pink in May, and by fall their Christmas-red hips are everywhere. I spend October and November, impatient; chomping at the bit. I want to get out there and gather my bucket of vitamin C-laden nuggets, but I’ve got to wait. Rose hips are best after first frost when their sugars have concentrated, but if I wait too long, if we have a late first frost, many of the hips will have died; shriveled up into useless black lumps.

Patience, patience… some will still be red. I’ll still have enough for a harvest.

So, when first frost hits, I leap out of bed and go a-gathering.

(Or I would have, if it hadn’t been for that damn Harry Potter book.)

Two days later we are thick with snow, so harvest is delayed again. Then, second frost. I leap out of bed (for real this time, only because we’d hit a slow spot and Chopper’d drifted off early during some bit about centaurs or celestial orbs or whatnot), and I head out to the meadow with camera and puppy.

First, I take photos, then I harvest.

I soon discover that harvest is easier said than done. I need gloves. And boots. And thick, snag-proof pants, not these ancient sweats — which I notice, too late, are on backwards so they’re saggy in front like freaky old man trousers. And I need Tall Guy.

Tall Guy, alas, is in the kitchen cooking kippers and eggs and I’m most grateful he doesn’t ask me to photograph the finished product because if ever a dish fit the comfort food is butt-ugly bill, it would be Chopper’s kippers and eggs. The kippers, chunked up and tossed into the scramble, give the whole plate a rather sickly beige tint, reminiscent of a few of the more frightening entries in the My Blog Went up in Flames competition, or of something the cat’s hurked up.

They do still taste good, and they give me a nice little boost of energy for the harvest, if only I can drag Chopper out into the meadow. (Whaddya mean you’ve got other things to do?)

Oh, okay, the harvest can wait a few more days.

Meantime, I gather what I can reach, take a few more photos, and spend most of the time viewing the surroundings in a blur:

The puppy, who loves the frost, cannot help but do figure eights around my every move. I’m surprised I don’t end the expedition on my ass.

I return to the warm house with just a small bag of rose hips. Not enough yet for tea, or jelly, or crumble pie, but we’ll be out there again shortly; as soon as we’ve got the time. Just hold on, I say as look out our window and spy the telltale red dots that pepper the meadow. Don’t shrivel up and turn black just yet. Stay tasty.

(Check out more Weekend Herb Blogging over at Kalyn’s Kitchen!)

Dude, check out the announcement thing for Paper Chef, dude.

Whaddya mean, dude?

I mean, dude, check it out.

No way.

Way.

I am so totally dreaming this. I’m going to wake up and find out I’m really twelve years old and I just got grounded for feeding foie gras to the dog.

Dude, those other entries totally kicked ass.

I know, dude.

Dude, make a speech.

No, you make a speech, dude.

Oh, wait. I got it. I’m going to talk about something else, something more important. It’ll be the heartwarming moment at the end of the show, you know, like when the kid turns to the camera and says, “but most of all today I learned that cuttlefish have feelings too, and if you chop their heads off to eat them, their tentacles will retaliate and drag you down to a watery grave.”

Dude, that is so heartwarming.

That was just an example, dude. Here’s my heartwarming moment: Hey. People. Go to this Menu for Hope site here, okay? And donate money to help all the kids and stuff who were injured and left homeless from the earthquake, because, dude, they need more help and not enough people are paying attention and you could win all sorts of cool prizes like our Island Insanity Gift Package. So like, donate a lot, okay?

Right on, dude.

Oh, and dude?

Yeah, dude?

We should tell them that there’s just one day left to nominate blogs for the food blog awards and that it would really rock if we got more nominations.

Dude, way to ruin your heartwarming moment with total selfishness.

Hey dude: A vote is free.

Good point, dude. So like donate. And vote.

Right on, dude.

Right on.

IMPORTANT Update: Pim’s most excellent menu of raffle items has been munched by Typepad, but will be back up soon. Bookmark her main page and check back for updates!

Our
fashionably
late
entry…

I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of A Menu for Hope until just this week. Last January, when food bloggers raised money for tsunami relief, Belly Timber was four months from birth; an item on our to-do list, constantly shoved below “pack for the island” and “get all the damn laundry done, for once.”

So, I was quite stoked to discover that we can still join in this year, even if we’re fashionably late.

What is this year’s A Menu for Hope? It’s the international food blogging community’s campaign to raise money for earthquake relief in Pakistan. October’s devastating earthquake in Kashmir registered 7.6 on the Richter scale and the death toll stands near 87,000 with another 80,000 injured and 3.3 million left homeless. And with winter coming on (and the potential for more disasters — a 6.7 quake hit the remote Kush region of neighboring Afghanistan just this morning — further relief is urgent.

So, we bring you A Menu for Hope II. Head on over to Chez Pim, where Pim, the gracious hostess and coordinator of this event has gathered together an impressive list of gifts from food bloggers around the world. A donation of as little as $5 puts you in the running for one of these gifts, and trust me, this isn’t just landing another travel mug from Public Radio; there’s some amazing stuff here.

All the proceeds go to Unicef through the Firstgiving website, and the fund will be earmarked for the victims of the Kashmir earthquake. In just two days, Menu for Hope’s raised over $5000, and we’ve got till December 23rd to donate. The generosity of this community is simply outstanding.

And meanwhile, what’s Belly Timber adding to the mix?

Well, because we’re a little stir crazy on this rock, and we can’t snag any hip, big city gifts for our prizewinner, we’d like to offer up…

Belly Timber’s Island Insanity Gift Package

The exact contents of the package will be a mystery (oh, come on, we all love surprises), but we can promise the following (insane island) treats:

1. Culinary products from Pelindaba Lavender Farms. (Yes, people here are so strange, they have entire 20 acre farms devoted to a single herb.)

2. Jellies and sauces from our sister islands, Lopez and Orcas. (Now, how can you pass up a jar of Lopez Larry’s “soon to be famous”^TM Smokey Chardonnay Mustard Sauce? Yes, that is a ^TM next to the phrase “soon to be famous.” We assume the trademark will be changed once he becomes famous.)

3. And behind door number three? Here’s where the fun begins. The rest of the care package will be (we promise) home made, and could resemble anything from culinary delights from our kitchen to craft projects, Belly Timber style. (And Mrs. D has been known to get pretty crafty, given a pair of scissors, a stack of hand painted rice paper, and a carton of bottle caps. Okay, maybe not so much with the bottle caps, but trust me, Mrs. D likes to play with crafts a lot more than she likes to talk about herself in third person!)

So, there you have it: Vague but adventurous, kind of like the average day on San Juan Island!

Now, to put your name in the hopper for our gift, or for any one of the fabulous gifts on this year’s Menu for Hope, just follow these simple rules:

1. Find the gift you would like on the menu.
2. Go to A Menu for Hope II donation page and donate $5 or whatever sum you can spare.
3. Use the comment section of your donation form to indicate which gift(s) you would like to have. Each $5 donation will give you one chance at winning the prize of your choice. (Yes, if you donate more than $5, you are allowed to specify more than one prize.)
4. That’s it!

Menu for Hope II ends on December 23rd. Winners will be announced at Chez Pim after January 1st, 2006.

Please join us in helping a region in desperate need.

Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging is in its 10th week and so far, sad to say, I’ve been all good intentions and no posts.

I’ll think of an herb — like fennel a month or so ago when it was still all perky and feathery in the garden — and then I just run out of time to photograph it. Or, I decide I’ve nothing interesting to say about fennel other than yum, and ooh, the bronze kind sure is perty.

Sometimes, I’m gone over a weekend, and then I pay no attention to the blog at all (much to the obvious dismay of The Cat, ahem). But, this weekend? I’m at home while Chopper works extra long hours.

Yay! At long last I can do herb blogging! So, what’s still pretty in the garden?

Well, pretty much nothing.

Besides, all my garden herbs are so ordinary. Thyme, oregano, rosemary, sage. Yawn.

Wait a sec. I’ve got that cool Cuban oregano I brought up from Portland. Now where did I leave that pot?

Uhhhh…. whoops.

Heavy sigh.

My first foray into Weekend Herb Blogging has morphed into How Mrs. D Completely Sucks at Caring for House Plants.

For example:

The one leaf left on the philodendron:

Mrs. Haversham’s Jade plant:

This citronella repelled its last mosquito months ago:

Also, that truly hideous, frost-bitten Cuban oregano used to look like this:

And I wrote about it back in April in the post Mrs. D. Eats a House Plant. (Which is much better than Mrs. D. Kills a House Plant.)

So, long story short, with profuse apologies to Kalyn, I’m joining Weekend Herb Blogging, but only to send people to my archives, wherein they’ll read about this nifty, lesser-known succulent herb, Cuban oregano.

Next time I promise I’ll find something new and tasty, and I won’t kill it.

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.

Honestly now, was there any chance we could resist this one?

I mean, we’ve already just graced our pages with the most unappetizing plate of mashed potatoes ever (and trust me, that was the prettiest food of the week), and our regular readers all know we have no qualms whatsoever about showing off our Messy Kitchen.

Bad food photos? We’re all over it.

When Rachael of Fresh Approach Cooking put out the call with her My Blog Went Up in Flames competition, I dove into our photo archives like Platelicker diving into the five-day-old dried chicken remains that fell behind The Cat’s dining counter. Okay, maybe not. Ick.

Anyway.

Now, I could tell long, agonizing stories of food photos gone horribly wrong, but instead I think I’ll just let the photos tell their story. A story (with brief, out-of-focus interludes) of what it’s like to be the photographer when someone else is doing the cooking…

For this delicious meal, we focus on…. furniture!

Hey, honey, could you move your hand? I’m trying to get a shot here.

Yes, this would be the ass end of the chicken…

Honey, your hand is in the way again!

I’ve no idea what this is.

Oh, that’s right. It went inside this rather attractive lasagna.

Ahem. Hand.

Ah, always nice to photograph the duck fat before it’s rendered for confit.

Honey, what part of move your hand before I take the picture did you not understand?

Well, apparently that was tasty.

Hey! I didn’t say move the food too!

No more hypotheticals, it’s round-up and judgment time!

First of all a huge thank you to Owen for allowing us to do the whole shebang: hosting, selecting, and judging. Oy, was it work! Fun, but work. (Next time remind me not to do this in the same week I’ve scheduled 10,000 words of writing and a trip to the mainland. Kerthunk, indeed!)

So, first things first, a reminder of our intriguing set of ingredients. We opted for the grab-em-out-of-a-hat method and came up with a threesome of basil, oranges, and fish sauce. To that, being ever devious (and just to see what amazing concoctions we’d get), we added lamb. This intriguing foursome took our participants on a culinary trip around the globe with influences from the Mediterranean to South East Asia to right here on our home turf of the Pacific Northwest.

In addition, we had two first-time participants, four pseudo-participants (not including our own non-entry entry), and a nifty collection of discoveries along the way. So, follow along as we check out this month’s Paper Chef extravaganza. (And don’t forget to drop by all of these great blogs to see what other goodies they’ve got to offer!)

First up, Shauna of Gluten Free Girl, just a short jaunt from here in Seattle, brings us a twosome of Lamb Shank Braised with Orange and Basil, and Shauna’s Seafood Soup. A one-time vegetarian, Shauna had a lamb epiphany with this post. She cooked it for the first time, and she’s going to cook it again and again! The soup — with Shauna’s creative, gluten-free substitution of fish fumet for fish sauce — sounds just delicious and brings a Northwest flair to this month’s Paper Chef with fresh Dungeness crab. Yum! Shauna’s post also celebrates her return to the kitchen after far too long of being laid up with a miserable foot injury. As Shauna says: “Oh goodness, of all the good meals I’ve eaten in the last few months, this was one of the best. It was made with joy, It tasted of joy.” Welcome back, girl!

Next, another full and tasty meal from the Bay area’s B’gina at Stalking the Waiter. B’gina, who is still sadly sans photos this month (curse you, evil technical difficulties!), takes us to the Mediterranean with her Pastitsio (Greek lasagna) inspired Greek Lamb Trainwreck with Orange, Basil, and Onion Salad with Feta and Poppyseed Style Dressing. B’gina says, “What actually gave me the idea for this dish was a Greek pork sausage flavored with orange zest.” (Ah, orange zest. I can’t express how cool it is to see so many participants discover the joys of orange zest!) The match of “Trainwreck” and Greek salad sounds quite good, and I particularly liked B’gina’s addition of fennel to both dishes.

Sticking with the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern influence, we’ve got first time participant and brand new food blogger Tanja from Tanja Dahl with Couscous with Kebabs and Sweet Orange and Chili Sauce. Tanja is a Swedish blogger now based in the UK and has been at this for less than a month, so stop by and give her a hearty food blogger welcome. She told us, “Being new to the food blogging scene I was a tad apprehensive to begin with but I couldn’t stop thinking of the ingredients so I had to give it a go.” Hurray for enticing ingredients! Her kebobs look juicy and succulent and we appreciate the simple presentation and the nifty cheese cups for the couscous. Also, who can resist a good spicy sauce? I’d go drizzle-happy with this one.

Now we jump from the UK to Down Under and to An Electronic Restaurant where 2-minute Noodle Cook (a name that has nothing to do with the astonishing amount of time and dedication to his craft) brings us Bush Tucker Lamb Parfait with Orange Basil Seed Champagne Jelly and Whitebait Tapanade Sauce. Noodle Cook, who regularly wows us with unique Australian-influenced dishes, chose an extra challenge this time: a budget of $5.00 AU for all four ingredients. Now, I had to go check the exchange rate on this and was floored to see that $5.00 AU came to only $3.66 US, so… damn! Several things about Noodle Cook’s entry impressed us, including the home charcuterie of the lamb parfait, the home-made fish sauce, and the ingenious substitution of basil seeds for basil. Says Noodle Cook about the results: “The champagne jelly not only looks sensational, but the licorice, citrus and honey aromas can only be described as WOW!” Sigh. When is someone going to invent smell-o-vision for the home computer, huh?

Also working on a low budget and impressing us with his attention to detail, was Magic Tofu from Kitchen Blog based in Ottawa, Canada. At first he was concerned about combining fish sauce with lamb, then said “faced with such dilemma, the best option available to me was a South-East Asian inspired curry dish. After all, citrus fruits, herbs and fish sauce are great flavoring accents to curries.” Ah, curries. A chef after our own hearts. MagicTofu didn’t just make a curry dish, he made his own curry paste, and (as we know all too well) that’s not easy. His presentation with Napa cabbage, orange segments, puffed wild rice, basil chiffonade, and chopped pistachios turned his Lamb Medallions with Orange Curry Sauce into one hell of a feast for the eyes — and, we imagine, for the stomach as well!

Next up, Stephen, from Stephen Cooks, straight across the continent in Maine, brings us a traditional lamb chop with quite a twist: Shiso-Marinated Lamb Chops with Orange Curry Gastrique. Stephen’s revelation for this Paper Chef? “Fish sauce! Wow! It’s like liquid anchovies!” Stephen had a challenge tracking down fresh basil and came up with a clever substitution — shiso, a Japanese version of the herb — at his local Asian market. Armed with that and a memory of roasted curry-citrus flavored cashews, he set to marinating, juicing, and reducing and produced what sounds like a scrumptious meal with the orange curry gastrique as a perfect complement to the lamb. Stephen served this one to hungry and appreciative guests and promises details about his tasty side dishes in upcoming posts. We’re looking forward to it!

Heading south to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we’ve got the Culinary Bookworm of Weekly Dish, and her impressive spread of Lamb Stuffed Acorn Squash with Spicy Marmalade Vinaigrette and Buttermilk Basil Biscuits. Undaunted by the (rather evil) addition of a cuddly lamb photo to our Paper Chef announcement, the Culinary Bookworm snagged some tasty lamb sausage from her local vendor and assembled acorn squash stuffing that included orange, pesto, garlic, and Fontina cheese. The vinaigrette turned out so well she drizzled it over the whole plate, and as for the stuffed squash? “The lamb sausage filling really worked well with the squash: the eating experience involved mouthfuls of creamy, savory filling and sweet, buttery squash flesh, with hints of the sweet heat from the vinaigrette.”

Another first timer for Paper Chef is Katherine from ToastPoint, based in Washington DC, where people are so culinarily in tune with the universe they can go to bed and dream an entire menu. How cool is that? Katherine almost skipped this one, but then she woke up with a breakfast of Chilled Caramelized Oranges with Yogurt and Tangy, Spicy Lamb Sausages in her head and had to make it! Good thing too, because this looks mighty delicious. We are especially fond of her unique take on oranges for this entry, and… breakfast! It’s always great to see a surprise breakfast entry. Says Katherine of her tasty dish: “The aromatic basil complimented the super-sweet oranges, the tang of the fish sauce made the sausages sing.”

Last, but certainly not least, our Paper Chef Founder Owen of Tomatilla, brings us South-East Asian Lamb Braise with Orange-Basil Rice. Since Owen’s got (go figure) tons of tomatillas on hand, he’s putting them into every dish, and this one is no exception. He added tomatillas to a marinade of fish sauce, garlic, orange juice and chiles, and while the lamb was doing its tasty thing for an hour or so, he made a lovely, sweet basmati rice dish by substituting a cup of coconut milk for water. But for Owen, the real revelation was the crispy orange zest he created as a garnish. “The crispy orange zest was totally brilliant,” Owen says, “I will be trying it again with many other dishes.”

Now, of course no Belly-Timber version of Paper Chef would be complete without a nod to our brilliant comic relief team of pseudo-entries.

Yesterday we posted Cookiecrumb’s Hypothetical Imperial Rolls, which, though hypothetical (there I go with that word again) sound awfully good and definitely worth a try.

Adding to that, we’ve got Lady X over at Experiment in Writing whose craving for sweets outdid her desire to participate and prompted her to post a Not Paper Chef #12 entry of Pink Lemonade Cupcakes, “which uses none of the ingredients suggested and was totally about me eating something pink and sugary.”

And lastly, Rachael of Fresh Approach Cooking cracked me up with her pseudo-entry from the Paper Chef Announcement comment thread: “A salad of Lambs Ear Lettuce and Purple Thai Basil, with a Taramosalata and Dried Orange Peel dressing (Get it? Fish egg sauce. I’m so darned clever.)”

Hee.

And now for the moment we’ve been waiting for.

Whose cuisine reigns supreme?

(dramatic pause)

This month’s winner of Paper Chef is…

Noodle Cook of An Electronic Restaurant! Remember when we said knock our socks off? Well, consider us officially sockless. Noodle’s combo of Lamb Parfait and Orange Basil Seed Champagne Jelly is nothing short of stunning both visually and in the description of flavors — flavors so uniquely combined we can only begin to imagine how sublime this dish tastes. Well done!

We’d also like to give special nods of recognition to three other entries that especially impressed us: Magic Tofu at Kitchen Blog for adventuring into the labor-intensive land of homemade curry paste, Culinary Bookworm at Weekly Dish for great utilization of what Chopper likes to call “nature’s edible servingware,” and Katherine at ToastPoint for dreaming up a breakfast treat for the morning after all our tasty dinners.

Many thanks to everyone for participating. This was a fine group of entries and a challenge all around. Next month, I swear we’re making something simple. Really simple so we can sit on the sidelines and cheer all of our fellow crazy food bloggers on.

Good show, everyone!

Oh, and…

Kerthunk.

Mrs D & Chopper out.

Tagged with: Paper Chef

Why we thought we’d have time and energy to actually make a Paper Chef dish (and write it up) along with our judgment and round-up duties is anyone’s guess, but here we are, and here’s our dish. Before I get into the details, let me just say that my admiration for food blog event hosts has gone through the roof this past week. Talk about ass-busting work. Wow.

So, about those four ingredients… The tricky thing with Paper Chef is that it’s global so it can’t ever be truly seasonal. The best we can ever hope for is to have a list of ingredients that anyone anywhere can approximate. And since we went random for three of them this time, we ran the risk of drawing one that was so seasonal, people on half the globe would be S.O.L. Even so, I will admit that I was surprised that some folks had trouble finding fresh basil (it’s easy to think “well, if I can get it here on this tiny island…”), but I’m pleased to see the fascinating substitutions folks came up with for their entries this month. We’ve been guilty of griping about ingredient accessibility in the past ourselves, and it wasn’t until serving as hosts that we came to realize how tough this whole process is.

And now, on with the dish. Since we’re hosting and not feeling compelled to do anything mind-bendingly creative, we opted for the first thing that sprung to mind, moments after selecting our list of basil, fish sauce, oranges, and lamb: a Thai curry dish.

For this particular dish, Chopper chose Mussaman (also called Massaman) curry. Mussaman is a Thai transliteration of “Muslim” and this curry originates with Muslim immigrants and the spices they brought to Southern Thailand many years ago. It’s a mild curry compared to most other Thai curries, and works well with lamb and with the subtle shifts of flavor brought on by the addition of orange and basil.

Chopper says: Mmmm mmmm, I love Thai curry!

Mrs D. says: I think I died and went to Thai curry heaven. Seriously, this one rocked our little culinary world. We loved it so much, Chopper made it twice. (And I will force him to make it again, and again, and again…)

And now… stay tuned…. Paper Chef Round-Up coming right up!

KERTHUNK!

This is the sound our brains made after yesterday’s long, exhausting day on the mainland. A day that ended, I might add, with a flat tire on the ferry boat.

Yes, our brains are on the floor. Today, still deep in recovery mode, they are sad, tired brains. Brains too tired to write the Paper Chef Round-Up. We have, however, reviewed all the wonderful entries, and decisions are at hand… but, today, our poor brains lack the ambition to do justice to this grand competition. So, our tired brains beg forgiveness and ask for your return on Thursday, when all will be revealed.

(Uh, yup. That was a long-winded, sorry-ass way of saying, hey, we’re going to be a day late. Don’t kill us!)

In the meantime, since, hypothetically, this post should be a round-up, we offer instead — courtesy of the always entertaining Cookiecrumb of I’m Mad and I Eat — a Hypothetical Paper Chef entry.

Cookiecrumb sent this my way with the endearing title (below) and an equally endearing introduction of “I didn’t actually make this dish, but I sure as heck thought it up.”

Now, since (hypothetically) these rolls sound damn tasty, I figured what better way to beg forgiveness for our late round-up than to offer up this nifty (hypothetical) entry!

Okay, I’m done with the word hypothetical now. Really.

“Brownen.” Snicker.

Many thanks to Cookiecrumb for this tasty (hypoyaddayadda) recipe!

The delectable dishes are starting to come in and oh, are they making us hungry! So hungry in fact, that Chopper’s made a second batch of our non-entry entry for today’s lunch. That’s a sneak peek of it above, but we’re not giving away any details till we post the recipe just before round-up time.

And speaking of round-ups and time, we’re busy tomorrow, which means no round-up till later in the week, which means — you guessed it — there’s still time to enter! Quick! Race to the market before supper! Lamb, basil, oranges, and fish sauce. You know they go great with Monday Night Football, right?

Ah, November. The month of late harvests, of turkeys and cranberry sauce, of battering storms and evenings snuggled by the fire, of blockbuster holiday movies and screaming Christmas commercials that inundate the airwaves all too soon, of four day weekends and raging political arguments at the Thanksgiving table, of cold mornings and days too short for decent dinnertime photography. Ah, November, how we wish… how we wish it was, well, June.

But, here it is, November. And Paper Chef time at that. And since we here at Belly Timber are particularly crabby about what this time of year does to the Northern Hemisphere, we have decided that this will be a Theme-Free Month. No pilgrim celebrations. No preemptive strikes on the game-day turkey gorge. And, absolutely no maize.

So, this month, we go random. Roll the dice, Chopper. What have we got?

1. Fish sauce
2. Basil
3. Oranges

And for the fourth ingredient of our own selection (no, Owen, it’s not quinoa)…

That’s right. Lamb. Cute little fuzzy lamb. Say it with me now: awwwwwww……. yum.

Now, here, freely lifted from Tomatilla, are excerpts from Owen’s Paper Chef event guidelines:

And now for our nitty gritty details:

Entries are due midday (PST) on Monday, November 7th. We’re pretty lax around here, so any time before mid-Monday evening will probably do, and even after that we’ll be forgiving, if, say, you managed to torch your kitchen while inventing fish sauce brulee.

Send your entries to mrs_d AT belly-timber DOT com, and include your name, blog name, location, and a permalink to your entry. You can also post your entry information here on this comments thread. Also, I’d like to encourage everyone to add a “Paper Chef” technorati tag to the end of their post, thusly –

Tagged with: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/Paper Chef” rel=”tag”>Paper Chef</a>

– so it gives everyone an extra place to search for entries before we post the round-up.

As for judging, I regret to say that we will not be including any actresses, lower house members, baseball commentators, fortune tellers, or Rosanjin scholars on our panel. Photographers and songwriters, on the other hand, will play a key role in our virtual Tasting and Judgment.

So what are we looking for?

We love dishes that are original, inventive, and make use of the chosen ingredients in unexpected ways. We love dishes that sound like we’d want to gobble them up in a heartbeat. We appreciate traditional dishes as well, but we love them even more when they come with a twist. Dishes can be extraordinarily complicated or beautifully simple, but it’s the perceived flavor that will count the most. We hope to choose not just one winner, but runners up in additional categories. In short, knock our socks off.

Allez Cuisine!

Just one more day for Paper Chef ingredient nominations! Post ‘em here if you’ve got ‘em.

Our current ingredient list:

Fresh coconut, something you get from a neighbour’s garden, walnuts, lavender, tofu, parsnips, sweetcorn, apples, red peppers, seaweed, rice, carrots, a root vegetable, basil, fish sauce, butternut squash, scallions, little fishes, quinoa, anchovies, olives, yoghurt, barley, fennel, Halloween candy, pumpkin (or any squash) seeds, fancy vinegar, and cranberries.

Remember, one nomination per person. Nominations close November 4th at 8am, PST. At noon (PST) Friday, November 4th, we’ll be posting the four selected ingredients: three chosen randomly from the nominated list, and a fourth, chosen by Chopper Dave and Mrs. D (who promise not to be too horribly devious in their selection).

Paper Chef participants have till noon on Monday to send in their entries (though creative excuses for lateness are acceptable). Check back on Friday for more details on entries, judging, and of course, for the secret ingredients!

If my memory serves me right, this, the weekend of October 29th and 30th, holds a special dual significance. Not only do we don our festive attire and celebrate the birth of Kiri, beloved cat of Clare’s Eat Stuff, we also mark the launch of the internationally acclaimed Paper Chef Ingredient Nomination Week.

Ahhh, Paper Chef. It was nearly a year ago that one man’s fantasy became reality and this grand event of the food blogosphere came into being. From humble beginnings, Owen of Tomatilla has risen to the occasion time and time again to bring us this quintessential competition, where masterful chefs from all corners of the globe celebrate their creativity and their diversity in artistic dishes never tasted before. Each month, the secret ingredients are revealed, and each month, the illustrious winners are announced. Who can forget the majestic Cocoa-Pomegranate Roast Chicken with Eggplant Stuffing, the salacious Feta Soufflé with Walnuts, Dates and Feisty Greens, the mighty Po’ Boy?

So now, bloggers, show me the ingredients you so desire for the creation of your culinary masterpieces. Remember, you may only nominate once, so choose wisely. Let Paper Chef Ingredient Nomination Week begin!

Oh, and happy birthday, Kiri!

(Paper Chef ingredient nominations run today through Thursday. The four chosen ingredients will be posted Friday, November 4th at Noon, PST. Stay tuned for a complete list of nominated ingredients. Not eligible this time: duck, pears, ginger, & nut butter.)

(For more weekend cat blogging, visit Kiri’s Birthday Bash at Eat Stuff!)

Submitted for your approval: The tale of a chef and his doppelganger, separated by a continent, each devoted to his own unique culinary path, yet driven together, inexplicably, time and again, by a mysterious force. Some might call it fate, some might dismiss it as the natural result of expert training and the synchronicities of our modern age. In a moment, witness the true compulsion that drives these two men to labor from the same page in that great cookbook we call life. Recognize it for what it is.
For it is a recipe whose ingredients can only be found… in the Twilight Zone.

Can I just say that we adore Stephen of Stephen Cooks. His recipes always look positively scrumptious and it’s clear that he enjoys mucking about in the kitchen as much as Chopper does (though I’d hazard a guess his kitchen is a lot cleaner). Over the past few months we’ve gotten a kick out of the fact that, on more than one occasion, Stephen and Chopper have been on the same wavelength. It’s as if they’re channeling each other; as if this curious culinary conduit stretches all the way from Maine to the Northern tip of Washington and then, from the aether — or perhaps from Saint Lawrence, the patron saint of chefs — they receive their instructions. Tonight, it will be bread pudding. Next week, a soup… Then, in October…

The IMBB/SHF combo chocolate soufflé!

Chocolate Orange Frozen Souffle

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: But this is Monday. Why are you posting this on Monday?

Well, it’s like this:

Me: Hey! Let’s make the chocolate soufflé on Friday!
Chopper’s Boss: Can you come in early on Friday to bake bread?
Me: Okay, how about Saturday? After the rummage sale?
Chopper: If there’s time. Oh wait, time for work!
Me: Hey, it’s Sunday, shouldn’t we be making that soufflé?
Chopper: Um, what time was that White Sox game again?

So, Chopper did eventually finish the soufflé, and the White Sox won, making it an even better evening, but by the time we had the puppy plated and had photos taken, we were just too dead dog tired to post.

Okay, I lied. I was too lazy. Chopper was tired. He did all the baking.

Which brings me to the next part of this post. Or rather, an apology. No recipe this time. I can tell you that Chopper took the Cointreau Iced Soufflé recipe on page 515 of Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen (fourth edition) and adapted that. (How much adaptation, I really can’t tell you. You’ll have to pester him.) The sauce is from pulped orange, the topping is candied orange zest and dark chocolate shavings, and the base under the frozen soufflé is a squashed macaroon.

We gave the plated version to Mom who gobbled it up with gusto. Me, I just had a small tasty bite (to save my lactically incompetent stomach), and nibbled on the leftover candied orange zest.

Meanwhile, we will gaze in awe at Stephen’s half of the IMBB/SHF brainwave. Where Chopper’s is ice, his is fire. To be exact, a dark and fiery chocolate soufflé with espresso, brandy, and cayenne pepper. I think I just died and went to heaven.

I swear, one of these days we’re taking that cross country road trip and putting these two in the same kitchen. The results might just be astounding. Or, it could end up like that old Trek episode where if the guy from the matter universe meets his twin from the anti-matter universe, life as we know it will cease to exist. But hey, that would be pretty astounding too.

IMBB # 20 + Souffle

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

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!)

Sam, our lovely host from Becks and Posh has presented us with quite a quandary for IMBB #19. Vegan, she tells us. Specifically, I Can’t Believe I Ate Vegan. As in, a meal suitable for trickery.

Ah, vegan. Where do we begin?

Granted, though Chopper and I have, on occasion, accidentally eaten vegan, it’s just not something we would want to do on a regular basis. We like edible animals far too much. And no honey? What’s up with that?

Now, don’t get me wrong, we eat tofu and attend peace marches with the best of ‘em, and hell, I’ll even say thank you and mean it if someone calls me a socialist, but we are not about to say goodbye to fresh fish or eggs or bacon or … Augh! How do you vegans do it????

Ahem. Well.

Anyway, for this month’s all-vegan IMBB, since we have no one to trick into eating vegan but ourselves, we decided that the best route was to throw the stereotypes to the wind, scream a big NO THANK YOU to sprouts, and ask the question “what if vegan CEOs controlled the fast food industry?”

We think the results would be something like this:

Direct from Veganville USA:

Burger, fries and a shake!

Now, I do have to insert the caveat that we didn’t check every single syllable ingredient against a strict vegan rule book, but we did our best at eliminating all obvious animal products. I mean, if Crisco is made from animals, that’s news to us.

Besides, the important thing is, this food tasted good. I mean GOOD good. As in wow, that was a great burger, and the shake rocked my world. (I said to Chopper after two sips: why the heck didn’t we figure this one out at the beginning of the summer?) The tofu fries were a little bland without ketchup, but hey, add some salt and look out Micky Ds!

So, anyone up for franchising?

Tagged with: IMBB # 19 + Vegan

I have custard issues. It’s not that I dislike it horribly (though it can, on occasion develop a bit of a skin that screams I am bad! I defy you to eat me and not get a tummy ache!), it’s that it brings back memories. Memories of my own personal actor’s nightmare.

See, I was doing this production of The Actor’s Nightmare, go figure, when custard reared its ugly head. Let me explain: For those who don’t know the Christopher Durang play, it’s like this. A man with the unlikely name of George Spelvin is thrust on stage, sans script, sans costume, sans any notion whatsoever of where he is and is told he’s “going on” in a short number of minutes. Going on to what, George wonders, and soon finds out that he’s Hamlet and it’s opening night. Or maybe it’s Noel Coward’s Private Lives and he’s Elyot, or it’s Beckett’s Endgame, and he has to act while sitting in a garbage can. No matter, because soon enough it’s on to the execution scene in A Man For All Seasons, and George (as Sir Thomas More) has his head on the chopping block.

Now in the script, George’s fellow actors have gathered around him, all save for Dame Ellen Terry, who is still in Endgame mode, eyes out front, up to her neck in a garbage can. The actress now playing Thomas’ mother enters, carrying a custard, uttering the line “I’ve brought you a custard, Thomas.” Thomas thanks his mother (or some such) and she stands there, holding custard and spoon, until the moment the executioner swings his axe and the lights go out.

In my own personal actor’s nightmare, it goes more like this:

Thomas’ mother enters: “I’ve brought you a custard,” she says and stumbles slightly causing the custard to fly up into the air and land, face down on the stage in front of the gathered cast. She gasps, then giggles. Fellow cast members attempt to say their lines, then giggle. Then laugh. Then, along with the audience, guffaw most horribly.

All except me. Why? No sense of humor? Nah. It’s because I’m Ellen freaking Terry, stuck in the garbage can out front and I don’t see a damned thing.

So here I am – attempting to be the best straight man the Theater of the Absurd has to offer – in character even, eyes out front, never a glance behind to see what the hell is going on, uttering my lines with the straightest face I can muster, and in a garbage can no less – and just upstage of me we’ve got the entire Roman Legion from the Bigus Dickus scene in Life of Brian, all because of a CUSTARD.

Is it any wonder I am scarred for life?

Now, Chopper assures me that my playing the straight man probably generated even more laughter from the audience. Not that this is any consolation. In fact, it could provoke me to shun custard all the more. But, because this is Sugar High Friday, and the theme is indeed custard, I will allow him to play. Provided he does it away from home.

Fortunately, on that score, we’re in luck. Chopper’s been patisserie guy at the restaurant for a while now, and today is the perfect day for him to make another rendition of his successful dessert special, Bread and Butter Pudding. And this isn’t just any bread and butter pudding. It’s a brandy-soaked concoction with home (or rather restaurant) made brioche. The recipes for pudding and brioche are Chopper’s adaptations from recipes in Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen (4th edition). And because this is for a restaurant, it’s a big recipe. We’re talking 18 by 34 by 4 inch hotel pan here, and enough tasty goodness for eighteen rather sizable portions.

For many more custards, check out the Sugar High Friday Round-up!

We’ve been at a loss for words. I think we still are, to some extent, numb from the horrific events of this past week and not quite able to sit ourselves down and just write about food without thinking of the outrage of so many going without for so long. (Lord knows I’ve tried posting every day; tried and failed.)

But this month’s Paper Chef, with its New Orleans theme, has finally pulled us back to our neglected blog and reminded us that life can (and must) go on.

Chopper and I have never been to New Orleans and in fact just two weeks ago or less we were brainstorming a potential trip around the country and naming our must-see cities. New Orleans was at the top of my list. I still want to go, though I know it’ll be a while yet. I want to see the New Orleans that once was and will be again. I want to fall in love with her as so many of my friends have.

But that must wait, and in the meantime, we’ll give the city and her neighbors to the east as best a culinary tribute as we can muster, improvised with our own Northwest flair.

Paper Chef’s four required ingredients as selected by Owen of Tomatilla were sausage, beer, tomatoes, and shrimp. Owen’s further suggestion for this month’s competition: “participate in the Paper Chef this weekend specifically INSTEAD of going out to dinner one night” and then donate the money we would have spent to hurricane disaster relief.

Since we don’t dine out much (or spend much when we do) we decided instead to choose simple ingredients, raid the panty (or the freezer) if we could, and cook enough for several meals. It seemed most fitting: Jambalaya and biscuits and gravy; hearty meals we wish we could cook for Katrina’s refugees if we weren’t two thousand miles away. Dishes designed to fill us up on the cheap so our money could go where it mattered so much more. All told, we spent no more than $25 and our Paper Chef results fed three people for three lunches and four dinners.

And here’s where I have to stop and consider for a moment. It’s easy to congratulate ourselves: Seven meals and for only twenty-five bucks? Good going! As if there weren’t thousands upon countless thousands in this country alone who’d gladly take twenty-five bucks to feed a family of five for a week. If there’s one thing that’s shocked me even more than the gross incompetence of our government in this disaster, it’s the gross and willful ignorance of so many who truly believe that everyone who stayed in New Orleans stayed out of choice; who truly do not get what poverty means. Couldn’t they have walked, they ask. Why don’t they have cars? If they all had 40-hour-a-week jobs and weren’t so lazy, they could have been prepared. I am numb with fury over such thoughts, and I lack the eloquence to put into words how much it breaks my heart to know that a disaster of this magnitude isn’t enough to smack a little empathy into the damaged souls of the selfish.

Instead, I’d like to direct readers to these links. First, from writer John Scalzi on Being Poor. If you’ve been there, it’ll bring back memories. If you haven’t, it’ll open eyes. Second, this most excellent post and its follow-up from novelist Cherie Priest. Just go, read, you’ll be glad you did.

Last, closer to our virtual home, Amy of Beauty Joy Food is hosting a fundraiser. She asks participants (and you don’t need a food blog to join in) to write about New Orleans — food, memories, music, whatever — and then add this banner and fundraising link to your post:

We’ve no memories to share, but for this post, we’ve food. Good, hearty Southern food, Belly Timber style. Enjoy, share, live, and most of all, give.