works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Why I Cook on Cast Iron (Part One)

    Do you remember the first time you got the perfect sear?

    I do.

    We had come into a couple thousand dollars as a small inheritance. The decision had been made years prior that any windfalls like that would be rolled back into our house. It was simple: money from a family legacy transformed into value to our home.

    Our choice then was to extend the gas line to our kitchen and replace the electric stove with a gas range.

    We had been living the post-university student lifestyle for years at that point, but had been watching too much Food Network. The cheap aluminum frying pans were not cutting it anymore. They needed to be replaced, and I couldn’t help but notice that serious chefs didn’t cook gourmet meals over a glowing red coil burner.

    Gas range installed and burning, life went on. We upgraded some of our cookware to stainless steel and expanded our repertoire of recipes. We cooked better, ate well, and thought the world of amazing food was our oyster.

    At one point I had been curious about cast iron (for just a few months back when we still had the electric range) and I had fished a cheap pan from a discount rack at one of those surplus merch stores. On the electric range it was unimpressive. Couple with that the fact I had no clue about seasoning cast iron, and the whole thing was a succession of crusty messes. The pan got shoved to the back of a cupboard…

    …until one particular experimental recipe we’d found specifically asked for a cast iron skillet on our new gas range.

    The breaded chicken seared with a crisp, beautiful, crunch that I would have paid real money for at a nice restaurant. I had cooked it in my kitchen, with my limited skills, and I was hooked.

    My cast iron mission had begun.

    to be continued…

  • I Would Do Anything for Run (But I Won’t Do That)

    Sunday. Run Day.

    It’s lonely out there on the trails these days.

    I laced up and logged a quick eight klick run through the locals this morning. The snowy paths were worn down with thousands of footprints. The crisp air was calm but dry. Stragglers from another universe were out walking their dogs.

    For the last decade I have run almost every Sunday morning.

    For the last year, company on those runs has been sporadic or limited at best.

    The pandemic gave us a summer of cautious gatherings. This was followed by an autumn of wary runners. In turn, that was followed by a strict lockdown with little tolerance for mixed company.

    So I run alone lately.

    Others bend the rules. Only a little, true. But bending is bending.

    Running solo is lonely, with just the trail, your thoughts, and maybe some tunes. Eight klicks is well under an hour of action, but as the year presses on and the prospect of actually training kicks into full gear, those eight klicks are going to need to stretch to ten … fifteen … then over twenty. Twenty klicks is an easy two hour run.

    Two hours of solo running is lonely.

    So lonely.

    And my motivation is fueled by good company.

    But bending is bending.

  • When Good Iron Goes Bad

    My beloved twenty inch cast iron grill pan developed an ugly blemish over the autumn months.

    A scar. A scab. A patch of failing seasoning crusted, bubbled and flaked off leaving a rough spot the size of a medium pancake on the middle edge of an otherwise awesomely seasoned piece.

    This isn’t beauty-shaming. A good quarter of the grill was rendered useless for cooking by a spot of flaking seasoning.

    I worked around it. At first.

    Then I ignored it.

    But it only got worse.

    Three years ago I had cleaned this particular pan down to bare iron. I ran it through the deep cleaning cycle of the oven and burned off all of the seasoning. It was a mess. It took some serious love in the backyard and four rounds of reseasoning love to get it back into service as our Saturday pancake grill.

    But a January mid-winter in mid-Canada is neither the time nor the place to strip a pan to bare iron.

    Solution? Elbow grease, some steel wool, and an hour of grinding the blistering patch of dead seasoning into a smooth, bare spot. Then three rounds of hot-oven-baking-on some fresh carbon layers.

    The results were successfully tested this morning… and those pancakes were delicious.

  • Hello World

    This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

    Ok.

    It’s the first day of 2021. New Year. New hope. New blog.

    I went looking for something fun and positive to add to my daily reading list and wow are we ever dropping the ball guys!

    You’ve all been feeding your socials and mining the gold for twitter and facebook, it seems. Gah!

    I present this as your alternative. This is my new daily blog. Nothing complex. Nothing deep. Nothing newsworthy. Just words about a good life, well lived, and enjoyed aloud.

    You may want to bookmark it.