works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Houseguests & Hobbled Pursuits

    Long-time friends travelled from a neighbouring province this past weekend and used our basement guest room as a free hotel suite while they were attending their son’s sport tournament in our city.

    Six hours of driving from their house to ours has not been a particularly restrictive barrier for more routine visits previously so much as a global pandemic gave everyone pause for such travel over the last two years. But as the outbreak wanes (even temporarily maybe) and as such things go, our little bubble grew to six people and two dogs for four days, and glimpses of normal peeked back into our lives, however briefly.

    Much conversation happened. And as he is a creative-minded soul, much of that much conversation swirled around our respective creative pursuits both planned and paused.

    I’ve been drawing. A little. Not so much as I used to, but a little.

    For those who have dug deeper into the archives of this site and clues bread-crumbed throughout, it may come as no surprise to learn that for three years prior to this blog I drew a small web comic chronicling the based-on-real-life adventures of a dad and his pre-teen daughter. A weekly comic peppered with kids-say-goofball-things and bad-dad-puns swirled around a stick of light-hearted family humour.

    Our houseguest was one of my fans, and since we’d last spent any quantity of time in the same room two things have happened:

    a) I’ve stopped drawing said comic, and

    b) he’s started writing (but not yet drawing) his own.

    “I was hoping you could walk me through how you make one.” He asked over dinner the first night. “For example, show me how you put a comic strip together and publish it online.”

    “Yeah, sure.” I agreed, stuffing another mouthful in between thoughts. “I mean, I can’t teach you how to draw in a weekend, but I can walk you through my workflow. Sure.”

    Putting together something as complex as a web comic series isn’t a single skill after all. Ideas turn into stories. Stories are mapped out against art. Art is compiled and refined into panels and spreads, which themselves are output as files. Files are posted and promoted and shared and enjoyed. And every one of those steps breaks down into fifteen, twenty, or maybe five-hundred individual steps and skills and practiced abilities that have been honed over decades and are yet are somehow still too rudimentary to be called expertise.

    “How do you know all this stuff?” He asked as I later walked him through the multitude of files on my computer, whizzed through the act of compiling a simple strip and exporting it as a web-friendly file. “And why did you stop?” he added, mostly pondering aloud why someone who could, no longer did, while he who yet couldn’t, struggled to begin.

    “Time.” I offered. “Inspiration. Priorities. Hobbled motivation.” It all rolled off the tongue far too easily. “Honestly, I don’t know.” I said conclusively. “Sometimes you just lose momentum, I guess.”

    “You shouldn’t have stopped.” He shrugged. “You’re so good at this.”

    And I, being terrible at taking a complement, merely laughed awkwardly and continued the tour of the comic strip factory on my computer.

    Sometimes, perhaps, maybe, hopefully even… it takes a detour through an old, familiar neighbourhood, like spending the weekend with old friends, to bump one out of a rut. I don’t know if I have been yet, but …

  • Sn’oh Canada

    Well, it was inevitable.

    This morning there was a few skiffs of snow around the city, but for the most part I could have still raked the autumn leaves dawdling in my backyard.

    By this evening, a generous blanket had covered the park and streets.

    I guess it really is time to dig out the winter running gear.

  • Strip this Pan, Part Four

    In short, and to conclude this short series of posts, the effort to strip and re-season the twenty-inch reversible grill was a modest success.

    In the end, it was a combination of elbow grease and chemical oven cleaner that seemed to net me the best result of the multiple methods I tried.

    I found that using a wire brush to score the surface of the old seasoning then applying a liberal dose of chemical cleaner overnight allowed the bare pan to be the most easily exposed.

    Four cycles of re-seasoning later in the oven and I tried grilling up a batch of chocolate chip pancakes this morning. That was definitely a success.

    As far as cost goes… alas between buying scouring pads, a wire brush set for my drill, and a can of oven cleaner, I probably spent close to thirty bucks to achieve what I did here. A cycle of the self-cleaning oven is not free either, but it wouldn’t have been thirty bucks.

    In then end and all that said though, having tried all these alternative methods to remove the old seasoning, I think I might just go back to the self-cleaning oven method next time. Simple. Effective. And not so nearly smelly, painful, or expensive.

  • La Cocotte est Neuve

    I’m not sure how the rest of the world fares, but in Canada we have this side effect of those nearby American holidays wherein (despite celebrating local Thanksgiving a month ago … the right way!) we still get this post-Thanksgiving (American version) event called Black Friday falling out of their long weekend.

    I’ve lately not been much of one to line up at a retail store and go crazy for deals, but I neither do I snub my nose at wandering the virtual aisles looking for discounts on things I’ve already got on my wish list and have been thinking about buying anyhow.

    Such as, for example, new cast iron.

    Last week a Canadian retailer had an early (like, really early) Black Friday half price deals on Staub cast iron pieces. Staub is one of those higher end cast iron brands that can run into the hundreds of dollars. It’s not unusual to see them listed for four or five times the price of an analogous Lodge brand piece.

    So, for example, where you may pay sixty Canadian bucks for a Lodge frying pan, a Staub frying pan of similar size would set you back three hundred bucks at their suggested retail cost.

    The price difference comes from finish.

    At the end of your cooking day, any good inexpensive cast iron pan that is well seasoned, well loved and well practiced can make the same quality of food as its high end equivalent. After all, the art that comes from a paint brush has more to do with the artist than it does from the brand of brush she used.

    But Staub being an imported brand with a strong reputation for quality and the distinction of being in that class that wears a refined enamel coat to the party, a coat that protects the iron and eases cleanup (not to mention looks sharp in blog post photo!) raises it into a higher class of product and, usually, a higher price bracket.

    That said, you can often get a nice enameled piece on sale, and this being my second Staub I’ll note that we’ve paid full retail price on neither.

    I’ve been combing the online stores for a smaller Dutch Oven for the better part of a year. My seven quart Lodge is a beast, a sourdough workhorse, and I love it, but it is a little too big for stews, soups, or roasting meals that are appropriately sized for a three-person household.

    The new Dutch Oven (which arrived by courier just before dinner time last night) or what Staub calls a cocotte (because, I assume, the French are not going to call a fine piece of cookware by the name of their European neighbours) is roughly half the size of my old one. The four quart (or three point eight litre) is a perfect size for all kinds of future meal plans, and I’m sure it will find a quick and happy home in my kitchen and recipe repertoire, and some feature space on this blog in the near future.

    Plus the bright cherry red colour will bring a smile to my face every time I put it to the flame.

    It may still be a week or so until the actual Black Friday deals begin, but I’m happy to report that my money is happily spent and as a result I’ll be roasting up something delicious and avoiding any further shopping.

  • Strip this Pan, Part Three

    Time being limited and linear, it’s taken me over a month to get around to tackling the twenty-inch reversible grill reseasoning project.

    For reference, check out parts one and two wherein I presented my options to deal with the pitting that was destroying the five-year-old seasoned surface of my Saturday morning pancake flattop and tried the least aggressive way I had read about, soaking in vinegar, to strip the seasoning. Spoiler alert, vinegar didn’t work.

    A couple days ago I went to the store and picked up a can of oven cleaner, a pack of abrasive dish cleaning pads, a roll of industrial strength paper towel, and a pack of steel brush wheels for my power drill.

    What I’ve read online (since I’ve never stripped a pan this way before) was that spray on oven cleaner is an agressive chemical approach to degrading the seasoning of the pan enough that you can pretty much just wipe it off.

    It wasn’t quite that simple, of course.

    The instructions I had read told me to coat the surface in oven cleaner, wrap in a plastic bag, and wait twenty-four hours.

    Tick. Tick. Tick.

    Furstratingly, a day later, I had a pan with some very clean, but still very firmly attached, seasoning.

    Back to the drawing board.

    Yesterday afternoon I rinsed off the pan, and switched over to the drill and wire brush method. Forty-five minutes of shoulder aching, noisy, smelly, whirring away on the pan, I had stipped about half of the top surface down to bare iron.

    To be honest, I’ve not been too worried about the edges or the reverse side. The bottom of this pan is a ridged grill pan that I think we’ve used less than five times since we bought this piece. It’s not that it isn’t useful, it’s just that this grill is pretty much my dedicated pancake pan and the smooth side gets used weekly and so consequently the smooth side is the side that I care about.

    But even given that I only cared about the top half of the pan, a day plus forty five minutes of neighbourly-annoying outdoor cast iron maintenance had only got me part way to what I’d accomplished pretty much passively when I reseasoned this years ago by the self-cleaning oven method. That method, of course, has it’s risks not the least of which is the risk of the pan cracking in extreme heat, but with a crick in my back and a small bit of flaking seasoning embedded under my bleeding thumbnail (did I mention that part?) I was starting to reconsider the risk versus reward calculation.

    Then I had a bit of an idea … mostly because I was tired and it was starting to get dark out

    I lightly burred down the rest of the still-seasoned parts of the cooking surface with the steel wire brush, then resprayed with oven cleaner before stuffing it back in the bag and stowing it once again for an overnight.

    This morning the results of the combined method had seemed to have paid off respectably well.

    Over the pan where I had scuffed the surface of the seasoning, the chemical oven cleaner had been able to get under and into the old seasoning. It was able to do the job I had expected a day earlier. The bulk of the old seasoning flaked off and easily washed away with a little bit of light scouring from a dish pad.

    I was able to grind the remaining stubborn specks off with the drill setup, wash it down really well, dry it up, and …

    … as I write this post the pan is in the oven baking on a first coat of bacon grease seasoning.

    I’ll spend the day doing multiple coats of a new seasoning layer, getting it back up to a surface that I can attempt some pancakes on in the coming week, and of course, report back with how it all turned out!

    And hopefully part four is the part where I tell you how great it all turned out … and not me resorting to the self-cleaning oven again.