works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Virtual Race Season, Take Two. Maybe.

    Sunday Runday, and on our morning ten kilometer trail run everyone seem to want to talk racing season.

    Except there is no racing season.

    Twenty-twenty-one is a racing write off.

    Or… it would be if it wasn’t for virtual races.

    Virtual racing. Oh, those virtual races. And why?

    Last year as the pandemic picked up its pace, another one of those little oh-yeah-and-that-too inconveniences was the cancellation of a bunch of running races. I was registered to run at least four big races, including the 2020 Chicago Marathon.

    None of them happened.

    Well, none of them happened as planned.

    Over the course of the summer, as the clock ticked onward, each race in turn became a virtual race instead of a real one. No, we can’t bring five thousand athletes together on a crowded street, so, here’s what we’re gonna do instead…

    Keep the spirit. Run the distance. Submit your time. Get a shirt and a medal in the mail. Virtual racing was the consolation prize for a lost season.

    And I too ran a few virtual runs. A trio of half marathons. A few ten-k socially distant weekend excuses to meet up with my friends and celebrate… something. I don’t know exactly what or why, but hanging onto something seemed important.

    Winter came and went.

    Then the emails started appearing…

    “Such and such is going virtual this year.”

    “Join us for a virtual race.”

    “We can’t run together but we can race virtually!”

    The dissonance rings in my heart something like this: I want to race and support the races but I’m finding it tough to reconcile another season of pretending. I want to be motivated to train for long races, but paying a hundred dollars or often more to run through my own neighbourhood and get a t-shirt and a medal through the mail doesn’t seem like the way. Not this year. I want back that feeling of participating but I’m done settling for participating from afar. And I would rather delay bigger gratification for a while if the only other option is a virtual one.

    On our morning ten kilometer trail run everyone seem to want to talk racing season because a bunch of them have been signing up for local and international virtual races. I’m going to keep running with them, but unless something dramatically changes I think my next race season will be 2022.

  • The Great Big List of 50 Pancake Topping Ideas

    Saturday mornings are pancake mornings at our house. In fact, I was looking through some old videos yesterday (on my day off) and I had recorded some footage of my then-toddler daughter and I cooking pancake shapes and then smothering them in syrup. That is evidence enough that this has been a tradition for at least a decade around here.

    This morning was no different: chocolate chip pancakes on the cast iron grill topped with some mixed berries and a generous slog of maple syrup (…did I mention we live in Canada?)

    My plate looked particularly photogenic this morning, and so I took a shot before digging in. All of this, the old videos, the Saturday routine, the fresh fruit and maple syrup of course got me thinking about how we fall into routine and stick with the things that are comfortable. Chocolate chip pancakes are amazing, but we don’t veer far off course of the toppings list.

    So, if I someday soon decided to stray a little bit from my patriotic imperative of supporting the national maple syrup industry, here are some of the things I might consider as a good starting list of familiar, unique, interesting, tasty, and maybe a little off-the-wall ideas to add to or on top of my Saturday pancakes:

    1. maple syrup (obviously)
    2. powdered sugar
    3. butter
    4. strawberries
    5. chocolate
    6. fruit syrup
    7. banana slices
    8. chopped toasted almonds
    9. shredded coconut
    10. mixed berries
    11. peach slices
    12. hazelnut spread
    13. whipped cream
    14. caramel sauce
    15. crumbled bacon
    16. lemon sugar
    17. cinnamon sugar
    18. lox
    19. blueberries
    20. fruit compote
    21. vanilla ice cream
    22. dulce de leche
    23. peanut butter
    24. baked apple slices
    25. poached egg
    26. yogurt
    27. raisins
    28. toasted macadamia nuts
    29. cream cheese
    30. honey
    31. marshmallow cream
    32. crumbled graham crackers
    33. cottage cheese
    34. avocado slices
    35. grilled ham
    36. candied ginger
    37. nut butter
    38. apple sauce
    39. corn syrup
    40. ricotta
    41. raspberries
    42. canned pears
    43. lemon curd
    44. mango coulis
    45. pineapple slices
    46. grilled spam
    47. hot fudge
    48. rhubarb sauce
    49. candied nuts
    50. chopped candy

    …and now go check out my chocolate chip pancake recipe if you need some inspiration for where to put all these amazing options for toppings.

  • Savoury Avacado Chicken in a Cast Iron Wok

    I’ve read all manner of reviews about one of the epic cast iron pieces in my collection, the fourteen inch wok, and it turns out the idea of a big and heavy iron wok is divisive and controversial.

    A traditional wok (which I do not own) is an agile tool. It is light. It’s meant to be brought up to screeching hot temperatures in which food is moved, flipped, agitated, swirled and stirred with motion of both a scoop in the hand and by tossing and lifting the wok itself. Wok cooking is truly an art form.

    It does turn out however that a residential gas stovetop with modest ventilation is not an ideal place to cook in a traditional wok. On the other hand, a wok-shaped bowl of cast iron is pretty darn good enough to replicate some of the properties of a wok. In fact, having spent the last two years learning how to cook well in my cast iron wok has been a remarkably rewarding experience.

    And a tasty one.

    Our challenge in the wok has been learning to cook dishes that have a curious cultural legacy here in North America. Not everything cooks well in a wok. Woks have a very narrow purpose even in experimenting across cultural recipes. Again, this may be a sensitive topic for some, but as a result of colonial history and inequalities among those who settled here over the generations, in the twenty-first century we have what I understand is a unique form of cuisine: North American Style Asian food. Or as one of my running pals who hails from Hong Kong reminds me frequently “not real Chinese food.”

    What I’ve read is that cooking styles and spices mingled with availability of ingredients and limited by tastes linked back to various European ancestries meant that traditional cooking was almost impossible. Immigrants who crossed the Pacific rather than the Altantic set up restaurants as a means to make a living and a life here. They found that they needed to invent dishes that brought the knowledge and experience from their homelands but would be palatable to western tastes (so people would buy and eat it) so dishes like General Tao’s Chicken, Chop Suey, or Ginger Beef became locally known as “Chinese food” but were never dishes that one would actually find in China.

    Fast forward to my kitchen, and decades of savouring those shopping mall food court noodle and rice clamshells of spicy goodness. A cast iron wok in my kitchen and a very Canadian-style of recipe that brings together a mish-mash of cultural and regional styles, ingredients, and flavours that results in many various stir-fry-style dishes something like Savoury Avacado Chicken:

    The Recipe

    First, mix up the following as a deglazing sauce and then set aside.

    125 ml water
    15 ml of cornstarch
    small packet of chicken bouillon powder
    15 ml of lemon juice

    As you heat up the wok to get it screaming hot, mise en place your main ingredients, frying in succession the chicken, then the peppers and mushrooms, then adding the spices and diced avacados until it all comes together into a lovely stir fried jumble.

    vegetable oil and/or sesame oil for pan
    450 grams chicken breast meat (cubed)
    handful red bell pepper (diced)
    handful white mushrooms (sliced)

    10 ml curry powder
    salt and pepper to taste
    1 large avacado (diced)
    toasted sesame seeds to garnish

    Deglaze the whole thing with the boullion/lemon juice mix from earlier, and serve over rice garnished with a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds.

    Thus, the controversy of the cast iron wok: not an authentic wok, sure, but I’m not cooking authentic recipes. It all evens out, right?

  • Doubled Down. Do You Carry Multiple Cameras, too?

    I have a habit that I have not completely decided if it is a problem… yet.

    It results in lots of great photos, hours of video footage, heaps of social-media ready content, and nary a missed moment.

    It also results in a sore back, full hands, and often being the guy standing back recording the action rather than fully participating.

    The maybe-a-problem is that I usually carry multiple cameras on vacation.

    Actually, while these days I’m often lugging a dSLR with multiple lens, an action camera (like a GoPro) with a video stabilizer, and a smartphone (for snapshots or panoramas, and because it’s a phone), I only occasionally doubt the practicality of this approach.

    After all there are some pros to having more than one camera:

    The Pros.

    • I usually have the “right” camera or lens for the scene.
    • I’ve taken some amazing pictures over the years and often this comes down to having appropriate equipment.
    • All the tech I’ve invested in gets a turn.

    On the flip side, I have been known to just bring a single camera somewhere so I can focus (no pun intended) on a single style of picture-taking.

    This makes me think of some of the cons of carrying too much equipment, such as:

    The Cons.

    • I only have two hands, and spend a lot of time switching or juggling gear.
    • It’s tough to travel light when you’ve got so much technology and an extra bag for it all.
    • I’m likely a higher target for crime or theft.
    • As a photographer I’m not growing as I’m taking the easy way out of switching to the easier equipment for the scene, rather than getting better with what I have in my hand at the moment.

    And to be honest, it’s probably writing down that last one that hits me the hardest, the idea that I’m becoming creatively stagnant because I’ve shifted my focus to gear over improving my technique. Learning happens, after all, because we challenge ourselves to solve a problem that we haven’t encountered before.

    I don’t want to make any grand gestures or statements here claiming to forever shift to one way of doing things, but I do wonder if I’m in good company with the multi-camera approach to photography… or if I’ve instead shifted to a kind of photographic FOMO: fear of missing out on some perfect shot.

    It’s something to pause and think about next time I set out on a photogenic adventure: should I take just one camera, or a whole bag worth?

  • Season

    Three months into writing daily missives here on this blog and it occurred to me that there is one particular word woven through my stories to which I have not given much thought. It is a word with multiple, distinct meanings, and that fact should have been obvious for a guy who writes about the outdoors, cooking, and cast iron cookware.

    SEE - zunn

    Simply, to flavour or preserve food with salt and spices.

    Or… simply, to ready a cooking surface through the application of heat and oils.

    Or… simply, the delineation of winter from spring, spring from summer, summer from autumn, and autumn back into winter.

    Trees, Mountains, Sunshine, Snow

    Maybe not so simple?

    The etymology of the word season seems to come from the Latin satio, which is itself entwined in the word to sow, or to make something ready.

    One readies food to be eaten or a pan to be cooked upon.

    Nature readies the world to grow, blossom, produce, and come to life …and then resets itself to make ready all over the next year.

    Seasoning is an act of maturation and preparation.

    It is purposeful conditioning.

    To season is to make something richer and more ready.

    These concepts strung together clearly form a broader theme for the things I’ve been thinking about and writing about and sharing here. Three months in, ninety disconnected posts, and some forty thousand words spent has distilled down to one not so simple word: season.

    To season. To be seasoned. To welcome the changing seasons. To ready the heart and mind. To sow a space for good food in one’s home. To mellow the harsh cold iron of a skillet against the delicate organic surface of food. To flavour life as one ages one’s mind and soul against the cyclical reset of the universe. To season.