works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Fire Smoke

    We’ve been routinely waking up to the smell of campfire, and not in a good way.

    Last year I had this idea of creating a video series to accompany this site, and I actually produced a couple early episodes, where I would have a sit around a campfire — maybe in my backyard, maybe in the woods, or maybe in a park somewhere where you can do that sort of thing — crack a beverage, cook some food, and enjoy the mood.

    That channel would have been on hiatus this month because there is a number of cascading fire bans in place all around me. No open flames. No solid fuel fires. No burning of any kind.

    Why?

    The hot and dry conditions, strange for May, have resulted in an early and angry wildfire season.

    My phone pings with alerts routinely noting local evacuation watches for small zones just outside of the city, people being told to be ready to run because a fire is looming close enough to their rural homes that they may be in danger at the whim of the wind direction.

    Inside the city we’re relatively safe, though there have been a couple of major house & yard fires that have resulted in multiple adjacent properties in our suburbs burning out of control.

    So. Fire ban.

    Don’t burn anything.

    Yet, as relatively protected as we are here, there is one aspect to wildfires that won’t be stopped by meandering rivers or highways breaking the burn. The smokey air goes where it pleases, and so as the atmosphere fills with particulate carbon, ash, and who knows what other dangerous chemicals (formerly trees) that poof into the sky as wildfires rage, that smoke swirls into and descends on the whole province, city, town, and rural land alike, and makes for a gloomy (as my kid would put it, post-apocalyptic) atmosphere… literally.

    Small beans, I know, compared to the loss of property and ecology that is happening just over the horizon, but I’ve been attempting to train for a marathon these last few months. My runs have been getting longer and more intense. The volume of air I need to suck into my still recovering-from-COVID lungs is increasing by the workout. This becomes a ridiculously frustrating calculation as the days press on and I skip a few sessions here and there citing air quality and the inverse effects of training in smoke. Again, small beans in the grand schemes, but it does make me think about the impact on anyone who isn’t a mostly healthy middle aged man, someone with compromised health, asthma or whatever. If it’s too bad for me, it’s really bad for many more.

    The weather spirits need to summon us a week of rain to quench the fires and wash the smoke out of the air, and no one is too sure if that will happen.

  • garden boxing

    I take a few months off blogging and, woops! There goes all the news and activities piling up.

    I upended my vegetable garden.

    Well, not literally, I guess.

    When we moved into the house I was resolute on the idea of devoting a chunk of the yard to a vegetable garden. It was a family thing. My parents had a huge garden. Both sets of my grandparents were avid gardeners. My in-laws have a huge garden. My wife’s grandparents lived in their garden and even maintained a second one on their old farmstead after they moved into town. It seemed like gardening was almost hereditary.

    So we devoted a full third of our backyard to a plot of black soil and for a solid decade tended, cared, enhanced, refined and evolved it into a pretty respectable garden plot.

    I don’t know why it slipped, but it eventually did.

    It’s been five years since we’ve had a respectable harvest from our respectable garden plot.

    Invasive weeds. Mice eat all the carrot tops. Wasps took over our lettuce patch last year. The potatoes seem to have given up completely as fewer come out of the ground than go in as seeds.

    I didn’t want to call it quits, but I decided last fall that I needed a rethink.

    The rethink came in the form of a raised garden box.

    I built a square box (atop where the old box-bed had sat, which I demolished) out of 4×6 by eight foot treated posts stacked three tall. I lined it with mesh and recycled cardboard. I filled it with a blend of salvaged soil (from lowering the grade slightly around the box), peat, and free compost from the City’s green-waste composting program. Around the box I’ll grow in the grass as a lawn, but all good things in time. As for the box itself:

    I mixed and raked it.

    I irrigated it.

    I hung up some stuff to startle the magpies.

    And I planted a few tomatoes, a couple peppers, a squash, a bunch of carrots, beets, lettuce and a scattering of radishes.

    It’s May long weekend, the weekend in Canada when all good gardeners are fully planted for the season. I’m fully planted. Does that make me a good gardener again?

  • another sourdough day

    It’s a random Wednesday morning in March and I’ve just pulled my starter out of the fridge. The lovely box of yeasty goodness will celebrate it’s fourth birthday next month and my daughter is keen to break out the sourdough recipe book and try some recipes that are not bread.

    In the meantime, I’ve been writing quite a bit in my daily thread this past month and a half about my sourdough and it felt like a good day to combine, mix, fold and proof those words into a proper post here.

    Set oven to hot and…

    sourdough loaves

    I’ve stopped counting how many loaves of bread I’ve made with my starter. It passed the three hundred mark about six months ago, and I ran out of room for tick marks on the lid of the container where I keep the magic.

    I made two more last night, sandwich loaves in little cast iron loaf pans, crispy on the outside and fluffy and delicious on the interior.

    This morning (February 13th) there are about one and a quarter loaves left. That’s what happens when four adult (or at least three adults and one not-quite-but-eats-like-an-adult) lives in your house. Fresh bread does not last long.

    sourdough first day

    I sometimes tell people who ask about my bread that sourdough isn’t difficult. It’s just twenty minutes of work spread across two full days.

    On day one I start in the morning and take my starter out of the fridge. Some people will tell you that you need to keep in on the counter, feed it every day, and care for it as if it were a child. My starter will be four years old next month and he comes out of the fridge for about 12 hours at a time, just long enough to prime for action… then fed, watered, and right back to bed.

    My starter comes out of the fridge at about 7am, before I head out to work, and by the time I get home it’s warm and bubbly and active.

    I mix my dough, and while I’ve got the flour out on the counter, I replace the half of the starter I used with two parts flour and one part water and double him back up to his regular size with a good mix.

    The starter goes back in the fridge. The dough has some countertop time and some folds over the next couple hours, and it joins the starter.

    Ten tough minutes of work, spread across that first day and I’ve got a fed starter and a bowl of dough resting for tomorrow.

    sourdough second day

    The dough spent the night in the fridge and this morning, shortly after I got up and while I was bustling around the kitchen to feed the dog and make coffee and wake up, I put the covered bowl onto the counter to warm up a bit.

    It was still cool an hour later when I weighed, cut, kneaded and rolled the dough into a pair of loaf blanks and dropped them into my parchment-lined cast iron loaf pans.

    Those two loaves will rest and proof on the counter, out of the way from disturbance, covered and quiet and warm at room temperature until later today. Maybe it will take ten hours, twelve hours or even fourteen — it all depends on the mood of my yeast this week. (But I’m guessing 12 hours.)

    When those loaves rise up over the lip of the pan and start to look and feel ready, I’ll heat the oven up to 450F and put them inside for a thirty minute bake.

    When the timer chimes, I’ll pull them out onto a cooling rack and savour the smell of fresh baked bread through the house while it lasts. It only lasts a while, sadly.

    Ten more minutes of work, spread across the second day and I’ve got two loaves of fresh sourdough ready to enjoy for breakfast in the morning.

    sour flour power

    The flour makes all the difference to the end product… at least according to my daughter, who will devour a half loaf of bread in a sitting when I use 100% white bread flour to make my weekly breads versus a slice here and there when I substitute even as little as 10% for rye, whole wheat or some other blend into the mix.

    I prefer the grainy breads and the darker results.

    But there is something captivatingly powerful to the teenage mind for white bread, it seems.

    This is doubly strange when one considers that we never buy white bread. Not that we buy bread much (or ever really) now anyhow but back when loaves of sliced bread were still on our shopping list we would always go for the grainy, wheat-ish, non-white bread every time.

    Hamburger and hot dog buns, sure. White bread.

    But sliced loaves? Never.

    So, all this means that I’ve had to limit my flour experimenting to alternate bakes, white one week, blend the next, repeat, to surrender to the allure and power of white bread flour.

    dough, soured

    The thing about sourdough is that there is an advantage to a long proof.

    So, when you mix your dough on Wednesday night, say, and intend to rest in the refrigerator overnight and then countertop proof it the next day so that, say, you can bake it on Thursday evening… but you forget and go to work instead and leave the dough in the fridge…

    Well.

    You can countertop proof it on Friday and bake it up Friday evening (instead of Thursday as you had intended) and not only is the final bread fine, it is arguably better for the longer rest in the fridge. Better flavour. Better rise. Better all round.

    Amazing.

    This may have definitely been a true story.

    bread journaling.

    Do you keep a baking journal.

    I know, if you’re not a hardcore baker or sour-bread-head, then maybe that sounds a little nutty.

    But after nearly four years of baking sourdough from my little kitchen and having a few of photos and plenty of tasty memories, I realize I haven’t kept great notes on what I made, how I made it, or when or why or how or whatever…

    I blogged a bit, and you can find it here.

    I made lots of tick marks on my starter-ware to denote a baking event.

    But I couldn’t tell you the specifics.

    Specifics and details and notes are how you learn and get better.

    My bread is pretty good, but it could always be better, right?

    So. Maybe a journal isn’t a terrible idea.

    How do you keep a bread journal and what kinds of things do you write in it?

  • while I worked…

    …and my daughter had the day off from school, she baked.

    Tomorrow is Pi Day. March 14th. 3-14, if you write it out the proper way to look like the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi, 3.14…

    She baked a pie.

    It is an apple pie, with ingredients she found stuffed away in various cupboards, pantries, and freezers.

    While I worked the smell of fresh apple pie wafted through the house.

    Tomorrow is Pi Day.

    Tomorrow.

    There is a fresh apple pie on my countertop filling the house with lovely apple pie smells, and it must wait until tomorrow.

  • three-sixty-five.

    I don’t want to say I’ve been saving up for this post, but after two years and two months of keeping a so-called “daily” blog, this — what you’re reading right now — is post three-sixty-five. One post per day for one full year. This should have been the post I wrote on December 31, 2021, but instead I’m writing it at the end of February 2023. A little more than a year late, and not exactly a great score for a “daily” writing plan.

    Obviously I missed a few.

    Yet, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of daily practice in the last couple months.

    For example:

    In February I’ve been trying to write every day. I’ve started a more succinct and back-to-the-daily-spirit and original intention of this site called “daily bardo” where I focus less on long-winded articles looking to have complexity and draw, and instead just write something every day. But I’ve also been writing a bit of fiction every day (not here) and flexing my creative writing muscles this month.

    In March, I’ve decided I’m going to try and do something call #mARTch wherein I’m hoping to draw and paint and sketch and do art every day of the month. Daily art. Most readers who pass through here probably don’t know but I’ve got a couple blogs that I write on, and one of those I started mid-last year and is very much an art and creative digital studio site where I post much more about that personal journey.

    In April, with my knee almost fully (seemingly) healed, I’m hoping that a few things come together with respect to my fitness and state-of-injury and the weather and I can work towards a daily run. Running every day seems obvious and a lot of people ask me if I already do that. “Do you run every day?” No. Of course, not. There are people who do, who have, run daily for years. But I can usually keep it up for twenty or thirty days before the body just goes “ugh” — tho, ultimately the payoff is worth it with the increase in fitness at the end. I’m going to try to do a daily run streak in April, all factors cooperating.

    I haven’t given much thought to the rest of the months of the year, but I’m sure something will occur to me to take on as a daily challenge for May… June… maybe even July and beyond.

    Daily practice isn’t about volume, nor output, nor streaks, and neither is it about simply filling a calendar.

    Daily practice is about doing something on repeat, routinely, no matter the mood or state of mind you happen to be in or the place you are at physically, mentally, emotionally, or whatever.

    Daily practice is about building a creative muscle that performs whenever you need it, not just when you feel like it. It’s about controlling the creative process, the writing mind, and the physical being — and being able to call upon it at leisure, and not merely building a skill that requires an external factor to be present and available and in control of you.

    Also, I like the idea of daily because you can go to bed each night fulfilled in accomplishing at least one thing. And tomorrow is always just one sunrise away.

    I originally set out to write the Cast Iron Guy daily. I started this blog in January 2021, in the middle of the pandemic and in search of something normal, simple, fixing me towards sanity, something to write about, think about, every day grounding me here. Ultimately, it took me over two years to write a year’s-worth of daily blogs, and I’m fine with that. It’s not a failure. It is 365 posts after all. It is 281,000 words and over 28,500 visitors. It’s something rather than nothing. So? Here’s to the next three hundred and sixty-five.