works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Ten Bread Creations Worth Warming Up Your Cast Iron

    An idea that often blows my mind is that a handful of ingredients like flour, water, salt and sugars can be blended together to form some of the tastiest food staples.

    Bread is one of those few universal foods, and cast iron turns out to be a great way to cook it …in a whole variety of ways. Here are 10 Friday ideas for adding some gluten to your day.

    A pair of sourdough sandwich loafs.

    1. Sourdough. Baked big and bold in a Dutch oven and crackling as it cools waiting for a dab of butter, slice of fresh cheese, or dipped in oils and vinegars.

    2. Cornbread. Served on the side or to swipe up the leftover sauce from your plate, a hearty bread hot from the oven.

    3. Biscuits. Buttery and buttermilk, light and fluffy and served with a hot stew or a big bowl of fresh homemade soup.

    4. Banana Loaf. Browned bananas blended into a batter and baked in a cast iron loaf pan into a warm, sliceable serving, then toasted and topped with butter.

    5. Rolls. Simple bread sides to make a handy sandwich or accompany a big meal.

    6. Corn Tortillas. Squeezed thin and round in a cast iron press.

    7. Doughnuts. Deep fried in a Dutch oven full of hot oil and sprinkled with sugar or drizzled with sweet glazes.

    8. Naan. A little spicy and charred, washed with a bit of ghee and dipped in a delicious curry.

    9. Yorkshire Pudding. Added to a rich roast meal, puffed and golden brown.

    10. Discard Fry. A hot pan and a bit of sourdough discard destined for the bin, instead sprinkled with spices, or sugar & cinnamon and fried into a tasty treat.

  • Guinness Sourdough (Part Three)

    A little more than a week ago I ran a bread-making experiment involving a loaf of sourdough and a can of Guinness stout. The results of that experiment were a less-than-ideal loaf of sourdough with a strong taste that didn’t quite make the repeat list.

    I thought a quick follow-up was due.

    So, yeah… the family didn’t rush to make that loaf disappear, and sadly the bread went a bit stale as the week wore on.

    Yet, the bread did not go to waste. No. Not at all.

    In fact, I turned about half the loaf (or what was left after I’d made a couple cheese sandwiches for my lunches) into crunchy, tasty croutons.

    Here’s how…

    Recipe

    1/2 loaf of slightly stale sourdough bread
    3 tablespoons olive oil
    1 tablespoon garlic powder
    1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
    salt & pepper to taste

    I cubed the leftover bread into bite-sized bits and spread them on a baking sheet with a bit of parchment paper. Drizzle the olive oil and toss to coat. Sprinkle the garlic and seasoning and, again, toss to coat. Salt and pepper to taste.

    I baked the sheet of bread bits at 275°F for about 25 minutes (testing for dryness along the way) then cranked on the broiler and toasted them for a few more minutes until they were a lovely golden brown colour.

    I assume they will store for about a week in a sealed container, but honestly they didn’t last long enough to know for certain. Yum!

  • melt

    thin films of water
    painting asphalt
    with spring sounds
    klooksh! kloompsh! klunsh!
    me treading carefully
    across
    around
    astride
    black reflections on the ground
    and remnants of winter
    crunching underfoot
    glinsch! grensch! glansch!
    grit
    stones
    pebbles
    traction against icy slickness
    sweesse! schweesh! swaasse!
    that linger in shade
    cast by naked limbs
    leafless
    thawing
    melting
    into puddles
    becoming wet toes

    - bardo

    I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.

  • One Last Trek

    During the summer of 2017 we travelled with friends just across the Alberta-British Columbia border to one of the highest peaks in Canada, Mount Robson and to climb the Berg Lake trail.

    Lucky those friends came along, because they remembered to bring something we forgot: strong tape.

    A pair of nearly-destroyed hiking boots wrapped in blue tape sit in a pile of hiking gear.

    Good boots are one of the most important pieces of hiking equipment you can own if you are a serious backpacker.

    Pictured are not my boots.

    They were the boots that belonged to my wife.

    And up until they crumbled on the trail they were good boots. They were, in fact, fantastic boots… when she bought them as a teenager nearly twenty years before that hike.

    They were even reasonably solid pieces of equipment for the first three days of our adventure, hiking all twenty-some kilometers up the mountain, and then accumulating another twenty or so klicks on the day-hiking trails near the campsite.

    The problem with old equipment though is that every day that you use it, more wear and tear accumulates, more seams are exposed to the elements, more aging glues and stitches weaken, and more chances loom for failure.

    Her boots failed just as we started our downward hike back towards home.

    At the top of the mountain, these boots looked like the good boots they had been for two decades. At the bottom of the mountain I took this photo and then we dropped them in a nearby trash bin.

    Every couple of kilometers we would stop and I would sit at my wife’s feet wrapping them as tightly and securely as I could with a borrowed roll of tape. The glue under between the tread and toe had failed and like an ill-timed puppet show, began flapping open like a mouth at with each and every step.

    The takeaway lesson of these fall-apart boots was not that equipment fails, but rather that you never know when equipment might fail, and being properly prepared means expecting failure and setting yourself up to avoid or mitigate the negative results of that failure…

    …like carrying tape, or not hiking in twenty-year old boots that might fall apart.

  • Two Months of Blogging Lessons

    The thing about writing a daily blog is that you’ve got to, well… write daily. I’m not looking for pity or sympathy. In fact, I signed up for this and I’m loving it as a way to start my weekdays or settle into a weekend.

    It does often take effort to figure out my topic, though.

    A wintery city scape of downtown Edmonton, Alberta.

    Today is the start of month three of daily blogging, and this post is number sixty.

    Yes, sixty!

    I’m not looking to ramp up my traffic. Obviously I’m not making money from more traffic. (No ads!) But I am interested in why people are visiting. Two months of data and fifty-nine previous posts are not much data to go on for a tried and true analysis of what people are interested in reading about, but it might be enough to give me an insight or two into coming up with some new topic ideas.

    According to my internal stats, my top five posts of the last two months are:

    1. Comics: Backpacking with Kids, a post where I shared some of my old comic strips recalling the deep woods inspiration and the struggles of parenting in the wilderness.

    2. Snowshoes on a Frozen Suburban Creek, a fairly long “adventure journal” post about an afternoon spent snowshoeing on a local frozen creek, and had some pretty photos to go along with it.

    3. Honey Brown Sourdough (Part Two), a post detailing the results of my honey brown been sourdough experiment, and a post I dropped into the daily thread of a local morning radio show conversation about bread giving me lots of new visitors.

    4. Backpacking: Foggy Mountain Bridges, a post talking about a multi-day backpacking adventure, the experience of hiking with kids, and with a pretty nice photo to accompany it.

    5. Guinness Sourdough (Part Two), another post detailing beer bread and the results of my Guinness beer sourdough experiment, and not unintentionally dropping the name of a famous stout into the title.

    Yet none of this makes much sense when it comes to what people are actually searching for and clicking on. Based on my Google Search Console results, the searches that castironguy.ca appeared in most were:

    chasing waterfalls iceland
    backyardultra
    cookout cast
    rome waffle iron
    campfire waffle iron

    The only reasonable conclusion I can make from these bits of data is to mash this all together and generate some random blog posts I should probably write.

    Right?

    For example:

    Backyard Ultra Race Comics could be a series of dramatic cartoons detailing the epic story of an underdog runner training for an ultra-marathon but then ultimately settling for the disappointment of an online-only virtual event hosted on Zoom during a pandemic where instead of traversing the wilds of Canada on foot, he does laps around his suburban neighbourhood. I could probably re-use a lot of my background scenery art.

    Backpacking Beer Bread for Kids could be a deeply researched article on the effects of the family spending a week in the woods with a bag of flour, a sourdough starter, a case of beer, and two teenagers who are still too young to consume alcohol (at least in Canada!) The premise of this writing would be that since kids complain about nearly everything they eat (unless it’s chicken fingers and french fries) eventually, far from civilization, they would come to love and cherish the nutty flavour of campfire baking.

    Icelandic Sourdough Campfire Waffles could be an article (or a series of articles) about a weeklong trek to a remote Icelandic waterfall under which I will set up a campsite, make some batter from a blend of fresh glacial water and my sourdough starter, and then cook waffles in a hot cast iron. The photos will be spectacular. I’m currently open to a sponsor to pay for this trip after the pandemic ends.

    …or, maybe I’ll just stick to my regular, simpler topics.