Return of the Wonderful World of Clutter! Announcements, Questions, and Seafood Lovers in YOU!

Dear Readers,

For some unforeseen circumstances, the Wonderful World of Clutter had been on an extremely long hiatus for the past six months. But that is hopefully ending now. Why now? Well, why not now.

Let's start a bulleted list:

• The Wonderful World of Clutter now has a new home in Billings, Montana. And before you gasp, I am here to say that BILLINGS ROCKS!!! Yes, Rimrocks in fact. But that is a different story. I will present a sub-bulletted list of why Billings is Awesome:
• It has a candy store that sells Moxie, which even in Portland is hard to find.
• People are friendlier than in Bozeman.
• There is an Indian Restaurant with a lunch buffet.
• The next major point deserves its own category so I will give a bullet to it all of its own.
• Billings has a RED LOBSTER! That's right, ALL YOU CAN EAT SHRIMPS BABY. You see, I have this plan…When I meet that nice left-leaning rancher's daughter out here in Montana, I'm gonna take her to Red Lobster and buy her a Mai Tai and tell her she can have all the shrimps she wants. Because that's how you treat the ladies nice in Billings…with endless shrimps. I've eaten at this Red Lobster and the cheesy biscuits are damned awesome and when you've spent ten hours driving through the state, which is what you end up doing in Montana on occasion, you want to treat yourself to some fine fresh-frozen seafood. Bozeman doesn't have a Red Lobster…And it breaks my heart that Missoula doesn't have one. But because Billings does, BILLINGS ROCKS!
• Nightly Karaoke and the Crystal…BILLINGS ROCKS.
• Someplace in Billings is payed me to move here…BILLINGS Definitely ROCKS.

So there is my short list of why Billings Montana is awesome. I still love Missoula, and it will be the home away from home in this state. And my heart will always yearn to be back in PDX. But right now, I am discovering the Billings scene. 

So onto blog news. I doubt many people read this thing any more, but I am planning a new video portion of the Wonderful World of Clutter entitled, "Adequate Answers for Everyday Questions." This relies on you the reader to contribute. If you have a common question that no one can answer, I want to help. Feel free to post your questions to this blog, and I will try to come up with some type of adequate response. By no means to I guarantee accuracy, I just guarantee adequacy. 

I will try to respond within a few days of questions being received. 

The Wonderful World of Clutter appreciates your patronage…

Thank you for continuing to read.

Seal Rock You Like A Hurricane.

One of my absolute road signs in Oregon is in the coastal town of Seal Rock. With little more to say about it I present a picture of me standing in front of that sign...Please note, I have been sick and also refuse to look amused in photographs.

Merry Christmas from Prison Camp

Given the Wonderful World of Clutter has been in form of self-imposed exile for a period of time, I decided to pull out the most appropriate holiday card from my collection that I could find.

The tattered image bellow is of the water tower at the War Relocation Authority's Camp Granada, affectionately known as Amache. As mentioned numerous time on this blog, Amache was the home of close to ten-thousand Japanese Americans illegally detained during World War II. Here they spent a number of harsh winter, Christmases and New Years, birthdays and other landmarks of their lives.

My father was born here.

The card itself comes from my Grandparents' collection of ephemera from the camp--loose items and stray contraband photographs of their life in exile.

As much as I bitch about the state of things these days, I always have to reflect to my family's time during this era. Amache was a time of struggle. The same can be said for those who lived at any of the other camps dotted across of America. And yet, they tried to maintain some sense of normalcy. A holiday card showing the tallest landmark of the region, for hundreds of miles around, was the best Christmas symbol they could present.

 

Merry Christmas everybody…

It doesn't necessarily get better. It just get's different.

In Case You Didn't Know...

Well, ummmmmm...

That is about all I have for now...

Museums of Montana: The World Mining Museum

In Butte, Montana, mining was once king. The city was once known as the "Richest Hill In the World," and the Berkely Pit was the source of the majority of the nation's copper ore. The World Mining Museum is an homage to this history. But aside from the typical ore cars and pictures of blasting tunnels, it holds an amazing doll house collection.

These images are of a replica of 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes London abode. 

 

 

The musuem also hosts a collection of abandoned buildings brought over from the original mining camp. You can walk through an anacronistic replica of what this Butte would have looked like a century ago.

 

There are other walk-though museums in Montana. Nevada City, just south of Virginia City is a dot of the map of similar abandoned buildings arranged to look like an old Boom Town of the gold rush. 

One must wonder though if we will have similar museusm like this honoring Williston, ND, or other Oil Boom Towns now dotting the Plains States. Imagine a future museum where you wak only through row after row of single wide trailers, parked RVs, and toothless tweakers trying to score work…Could be awesome. 

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This Could Be Interesting Recipe Night: Braised Pork Belly with Mustard Wine Sauce…or…The Five Hour Sandwich

Hi Everybody, I proudly celebrate the return of the Wonderful World of Clutter with a new semi-not-so-regular feature of personally recipes that will be called This Could Be Interesting Recipe Night.  The premise is simple. I try making something without a cookbook and I then post my recipe to you the readers. 

I never really use measurements when I cook, so some of these are guesses. But here we go..

The first post in this is my Braised Pork Belly with Mustard Wine Sauce.

• 2 pounds fatty pork belly
• 1 head of garlic
• 5 large sprigs of rosemary (or at whole bunch bought from the grocery store)
• Olive Oil
• 3 large tablespoons of whole peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon of coarse salt
• 2 heads of fennel with tops
• 12 shallots
• 1 bunch of cilantro
• 1 bottle of white wine that you don't mind using for cooking
• Stone ground Dijon mustard
• 1 stick of butter

Preparing the herb rub:

1. Crush the peppercorns to they are roughly ground. I don't use a grinder for this. In fact I use a large rock. This rock, was something I found at the river and looks like a rock that might have once been used for actually grinding up nuts and other goodies. Or it could have been used for an anchor…Or it was just an oddly formed rock. But a mallet works just as well. Basically, you want the pepper to be very coarse and chunky for this, essentially just cracked.

2. Remove the rosemary from the main sprig and chop up until relatively fine. Place into a bowl with the pepper.

3. Mince the entire head of garlic combine and combine with other ingredients.

4. Add salt and 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil until you make a paste. Don't make it too runny. Mix well and set aside for a little while.

Preparing the Pork Belly:

The belly should come from your butcher in a giant slab, kind of like a giant uncooked piece of bacon. And, well, that is what pork belly is, uncured bacon, uncooked bacon. The first thing to do is to cut the slab into 2.5 inch long chunks. You should end up with 4, 1/2 lb. strips of belly. Take a sharp knife and score the fatty side of the belly about a 1/4-1/2 inch into in a checker board pattern. This will allow the rub to get into the fat.

Take the rub and mix it up again and smear it onto all sides of the the pork belly slabs. Let the belly rest for a bit in the rub. Just because, well, you know…This of it like going to the spa and getting a fancy salt scrub or something. It just feels good. 

Cooking:

In a large dutch oven, heat up some olive oil to coat the pan on medium heat. Once the pan is hot place the pork belly fat side down on the in in the pan and brown. Do this for all sides of the pork. The rub is going to fall off at this point, but that's cool. It will brown up and add flavor. You can add a couple of slabs of belly in at at a time but don't let the dutch oven cool down too much.

Once all the sides are browned up, add the shallots which have been cut in half, and the green tops of the fennel to the pot. Cover the the meet and vegetables with white wine, about 3/4 of the bottle. Cover the pot and place into an oven at 225F. Cook fat side up in the oven.Then go do something for the next four hours.

So what do you do during this time? Lots of thing…You can study for board exams, maybe drink the rest of that bottle of wine, call a loved one, go for  a walk, who knows. Basically, you want to let that belly cook slow and low until it is fork tender. If needed add some extra liquid to the pot.

Once it is tender and cooked through, take out of the oven. The fennel greens get tossed. Take the bellies and shallots out and place onto a cooking sheet. Place the dutch oven onto a large burner on medium-high heat.

Return the pork, fat side up, to the oven under the broiler and watch carefully. At this point we want the  fat to brown and crisp up but not burn. It should get nice and bubbly, and turn a golden brown. Leave the door open to the oven and broiler to make sure you don't burn your meat at this point--broilers are tricky machines to navigate. 

Once the braising liquid starts to boil, add 3 large heaping tablespoons of coarse ground Dijon mustard to the liquid and begin stirring to mix throughout. Then add one stick of butter to the liquid and continue to stir, reduce the heat to low and let the sauce simmer. It will slowly begin to thicken. Add salt to taste.

Basically you're done at this point. I typically make a sandwich out of the pork using a nice crusty bread. I slice up fennel and use a lot of cilantro as my greens for the mix. I then pour the mustard wine sauce over the meat and greens. 

So yeah, it took five hours to make a sandwich but damn, it was a mighty fine sandwich…a mighty, mighty fine sandwich.

Let me know if you try this or any future recipes.

Delays in Updating...

Dear Readers:

My sincerest apologies for not updating the Wonderful World of Clutter sooner than this time, but I have been exceptionally busy. Busy with what, you might ask? Well, I am about to finish my BSRN and make progress toward being the most awesome nurse with a mustache ever…actually probably second in line to the  ER nurse who looked like Kurt Vonnegut at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, but we can strive.

So basically, in seven days, I add one more degree to my academic belt…Start prepping for boards, and then return home.

That is all.

Sincerely,
Wonderful World of Clutter

The Trojan President

Many presidents have drawn off of Greek thought for the basis of our country. Jefferson's designs for the architecture of our nations capital was heavily influenced by the columns found in temple of the Mediterranean Sea and the very basis of democracy has origins in Greek history.

So it shouldn't be surprising that our nation's presidents, even used Greek mythology for our battle tactics. Teddy Roosevelt was perhaps the one to use this to most effective means during the Spanish-American War. President James Buchanan once tried using the fabled "Greek Fire" when a brief war began between the US and Britain after a pig was shot in the Oregon Territory on San Juan Island in Washington State. 

During the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had a number of craftsman create a wooden model of himself riding a horse. The decoy was to be used to lure the Spanish Army into a sense of calm as they were to accept this as a gift from the American Soldiers. The irony of the unfortunate Greek Fire incident in the Straights of Juan De Fuca on the Island of San Juan was not lost on Roosevelt as the only time this device was deployed was at the Battle of San Juan Hill.

It was this cunning display and use of the Trojan Teddy that helped win the battle. Stories of this success filled the New York papers and eventually he became Governor. The rest is what you read in the history books.

The Trojan Teddy was never forgotten though…When the future president went off on his big game safari's in Africa, he would bring this wooden decoy along with him to lure out lions and other carnivorous beasts. A compartment in the hind quarter of the wooden horse's leg was typically filled carrion to draw in additional scavengers so the Rough Rider could select his trophies with more skill. 

There were a few other presidents who tried with mix success to use similar use Greek Lore in their campaigns. Nixon and Reagan had secret plans in place that involved a golden fleece, falafel recipes, and gorgon blood. But the lack of success has been lost to history.

The Trojan Teddy is the last remaining relic of this era of Greco-Inspired combat era. 

Prayers finally answered...

Ask and you shall receive…

Mail Order Prayer...

A page later, in the same magazine, you can also mail away for a catalog for lingerie...

Now that is what I call the true power of prayer...