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

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

So we’re stuck in traffic on I-5 (note to planners of military air shows: staging them within viewing distance of major interstate thoroughfares is DUMB. Ooooh, purty loop-de-loop contrails… CRASH…), and I realize, just south of Seattle — where, oh man, it’s total gridlock — that I’ve left my Chinese tea set in Portland. Not only that, but it’s packed in lord knows what unlabeled box and I probably won’t see it for a year.

This sad fact reminds me of the IMBB post I’m supposed to write Sunday evening (assuming we make the 5:10 ferry, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we won’t), and that in turn reminds me of tea ceremonies (of which my family has none, other than we drink a LOT of the stuff) and of the Classical Chinese Garden in Portland, which has an absolutely lovely tea house that I recommend to everyone who ever visits Portland. Unless, of course, they are visiting Portland to attend a military air show.

My favorite thing about the tea house (aside from the view of the garden and the sublime variety of green teas) is that each cup of tea is prepared in a gaiwan, which is infinitely better than the caddy full of tea bags and the stainless steel mini-pot of hot water I get at just about any other tea-serving establishment I frequent. Except for our favorite dim sum joint, of course. There, we get a nice big pot of jasmine/chrysanthemum blend and I drink it like it’s going out of style.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. We did have a single afternoon last week during which we could play with food and tea, but sadly, we had little time to do anything fancy — no puff pastry barquettes or plaid raviolis, alas. Instead, Chopper made a Southwestern Corn Tortilla soup with Chimayo Sunset tea (which was quite good though I had difficulty picking out the tea’s flavor), and, because it was the day after 25 cent U-pick oyster day (more on that glorious event in a future post) and I had a bucket of the puppies crying to be shucked, he McGuyvered up a smoker with drying rack, pie tin, and skillet lid, and provided us with some to-die-for Jasmine Tea Smoked Oysters with Garlic Green Tea Emulsified Vinaigrette.

Eggs. Eggs?!? Any kind of eggs? Good lord, that’s like cutting me loose to write a lullaby and assigning the London Philharmonic as backup. The possibilities are endless. We could get seriously carried away, here.

At least, that’s what I thought at first after reading this month’s IMBB theme announcement from Seattle Bon Vivant. I had visions, see. Visions of grandeur involving salmon roe floating atop a soft boiled quail egg, resting inside a hollowed out hard boiled duck egg. Egg inside egg inside egg. A veritable Russian nesting doll d’oeuf. It would be glorious.

Then (our first trauma), Chopper Dave had to remind me that soft boiled egg yolks are slippery, and the salmon roe would probably glumph into oblivion two seconds after contact. Damn. So much for this week’s crazy idea.

And then (a second trauma), we couldn’t find a single duck egg at this week’s farmer’s market.

And then… Well, not exactly a trauma, but the simple fact that we had a huge box of regular old chicken eggs in the fridge and we really needed to be making some headway on them. (Huge sigh of disappointment. This could get boring.)

So, on to plan B: We’d use just chicken eggs (and not even farm fresh eggs at that, alas), but we had to make something that would still feature the shape and the shell of the egg.

Like single serving soufflés, served in the shell.

Or, as Chopper dubbed it…

And, I might add, know what you’re going to serve them in. We didn’t at first, and when Chopper Dave pulled the muffin tin out of the oven and started talking about photographing quickly while the soufflés still had a bit of height, it suddenly hit me: We don’t own egg cups.

I glanced around the kitchen in a panic, and a glint of copper caught my eye on an upper shelf. Well, he is calling it armor, after all, and armor is typically metallic, and those cups could look like they were made for eggs and not for Turkish coffee, right?

Right. I mean, what’s another day in the Belly-Timber kitchen without the usual healthy dose of last minute improvisation?

Let’s get this out of the way first: We’re weird.

Not only are we weird, but we are leaving for the weekend bright and early Friday morning. Now, one would think this departure would mean that we’d given up any hope of participating in either Sugar High Friday or Is My Blog Burning. Or, that at the most we’d pick one of these two events and leave it at that. But since we are, as we said, weird, we believe that instead of ignoring food blogging events when we’re pressed for time, we should embrace them. Both at once. With zeal.

And with (yes, you’ve guessed it by now) weirdness.

And so, with a cupful of grapefruit juice and a sea of aspic (ocean blue, of course), we christen the Sweet Fleet:

Puff pastry barquettes filled with grapefruit pastry cream, topped with white chocolate sails, on a sea of blue-tinted aspic with foamy wakes of egg white and a savory tropical island made of almond meal, oregano underbrush, and a palm of carrot trunk, green bell pepper fronds, and marzipan cocoanuts.

(phew!)

Note for the more adventurous: We didn’t actually eat much of this. Which isn’t to say the barquettes weren’t good, they were just…well, a bit over-the-top.

Other important safety tips (aka Chopper remembers why he hates marzipan…again.):

1. Toothpicks and marzipan can only hold together a palm tree made of sliced vegetables for so long.

(No, it didn’t fall over)

2. When photographing a regatta of white chocolate sails under hot sunlight, move quickly.

And lastly,
3. Making pastry cream on an electric range sucks ass.

For our next trick: A remake of Duran Duran’s Rio video with finger puppets!

Monday update: The round-ups have been posted. To check out everyone’s great entries for Sugar High Friday, go here, and for Is My Blog Burning, go here.

Just kidding.

With all that’s been going on around here, it’s a wonder we had time for anything at all other than cheetos, and truthfully, we didn’t have the time. It’s just that I had such a loony notion of what I wanted to do for the Orange themed Is My Blog Burning, I insisted we make the time come hell or high water.

Trouble is, my notion really was loony. As in (and I’m quoting Chopper Dave here) “This is a harebrained scheme and it’s not going to work.”

But trouble with that is, I’m the Peter Quincy Taggart of harebrained schemes. You know, never give up, never surrender? That’s me.

And this time (wonder of wonders), it paid off.

It all began with a pasta roller. That, and my fond memory of the year I turned Christmas into my own personal craft bazaar by decorating every object I could get my hands on with Fimo polymer clay. My favorite trick? Making checkered Fimo by running two colors through the pasta maker and weaving my Fimo fettuccine like a basket.

And then it hit me: Why not do the same thing with two colors of pasta dough and make checkered ravioli! Better yet, why not do two shades of orange for IMBB #14!

So, I pitched this harebrained scheme to the mister, and (shockingly) he agreed to try it. So off I went to the store for our best bet in the creation of orange pasta dough: Achiote paste. Meanwhile, Chopper Dave scoured the pantry for filling ideas and discovered a package of smoked salmon. Off to the market again for goat cheese and we’re halfway there.

Well, except for that whole basket weaving thing.

See, with Fimo, it doesn’t matter if you end up with little holes between the checks of your checkerboard design. You just push the clay together as best you can and call it done. But, holes in ravioli? Bad idea.

And that’s how the first attempt went horribly wrong. Holes, holes, everywhere.

We figured it had something to do with the lack of water, or rather, the fact that I didn’t reapply water to the pasta as often as I should while weaving it, but by this point it was mid-afternoon and Chopper Dave was due at the restaurant in half an hour. Our excitement over the possibility of checkered ravioli vanished. We were deep into impossible harebrained scheme territory.

Until I hit on the solution. Simply this: If one is making a lace dress and one doesn’t want it to be see-through, one gives it a lining.

After all, no one’s going to notice that the inside of the ravioli isn’t checkered.

So, I grabbed some more fettuccini, created another weave (this time with plenty of water), then rolled some of the leftover dough out into a thin sheet and placed it on top. I then trimmed all the edges and fed the whole kit and caboodle into the pasta roller.

And — voila! — checkered ravioli!

Of course by this point, the chef (AKA, the only one around here who knows how to make a good sauce) was off at work, so alas, my presentation is sans sauce. No matter. It still tasted quite yummy, and why would I want to cover up all that labor-intensive basketweaving with a sauce?

It may be a while before I try this trick again, considering I spent 45 minutes making five ravs. Perhaps I’ll take it on next Halloween. Only that time, I’ll tint half the pasta dough with squid ink.

Side note: And with this post, we’re off for a few days, attending Chopper Dave’s formal graduation from culinary school. As soon as we’re able to get back to the computer, we’ll take on a few more harebrained schemes, we’ll visit the local pub, and we’ll ask the question, if it stings your hands, why the hell would you want to eat it?