works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Objectively Looped In

    December 3 of 31 December-ish posts

    What’s your favourite subject in school, I ask a kid.

    Recess, he replies.

    What’s the best part of your job, I ask myself.

    Working from home a few days a week, I almost write.

    Except that’s not really true.

    What made your job
    interesting in 2022?

    I’ve spent a few posts this year writing about the possibility of job change.

    And I’ve been serious. Last week I marked the twelve year anniversary at my current employer, and at times like that, birthdays, anniversaries, new years, one tends to get reflective and contemplative about life, the universe and everything. It’s a double-shame for me because all those things tend to fall within roughly one month and I have a heckuva December feeling all philosophical about my life.

    I try to keep the line between work and my words here pretty fuzzy because, well the thing is, I’m a public servant. We have strong codes of conduct, by which I mean documents that tell us how we should conduct ourselves in our roles inside and outside of the office, and those codes of conduct do include things like internet participation and having a public opinion particularly under the flag of our professional role. That gets tricky to navigate especially when I want to write about all the things I do in our parks and the runs and walks I take on our trails and even the various fun I have in my own backyard. Why? Because those are spaces sometimes managed or governed by bylaws and services provided by my colleagues.

    For example, I have a fire pit in my backyard that I use to build adventures and that leads to me sharing stories and content here on this site.

    But there are rules for how fire pits are allowed to be used properly. Minimum clearances. Fire bans get declared routinely. Good neighbour policies exist and overlap with smoke dispersal, and noise bylaws and ash disposal. If I was to declare myself such and such an employee and suggest (which I’m definitely not doing) that my job gave me some kind of authority to set an example or declare exceptions or shrug off proper processes (all of which I also am definitely not doing) I could get into a bit of hot water for implying that professional connection.

    So, I keep a fuzzy line.

    This guy who you are reading here is just a guy, a guy who lives and plays in this place. My expertise is personal, and I (and this is actually pretty true because all I really do is work in one of our technology teams and not any of those more hands-on services) have no special knowledge or influence on anything related to these places or spaces about which I sometimes write. And I definitely have no power over decisions or budgets or political stuff. I’m just a dwarf in the silicon mines.

    That said, things do get interesting because I’m a guy who seems like he should have special knowledge, but doesn’t really. That I’m in this weird position to see behind the curtain of the show, but I’m little more than a set designer, and usually go take my seat with the rest of the audience when the show starts.

    In the context of what I do, why I do it, why I continue to do it amidst the possibility of so many other options, and deep down how that is rooted in why my job can be interesting is this: I could have a different job. I could be selling or buying or moving or building or driving or talking or any of a hundred different tasks. But at the heart of what I do is that I’m creating and informing.

    That is why things are so fuzzy.

    I try to create and inform for fun. I build websites, I draw pictures. I write stories. I grow and cook and explore and tell more tales about all that.

    And then for a job I build websites. I commission pictures. I post information. I watch as everyone else at work grows and makes and cleans and serves, and we share more information about that.

    I work daily with the teams doing the interesting work of keeping this place running.

    I know people who are integral to the functioning of our community.

    I help a million folks who live here stay informed about all of it.

    Objectively, I’m looped in. That’s a pretty sweet (and interesting) place to be even if it’s often a lot of hard, thankless work.

  • Preconceptions of Eats

    December 2 of 31 December-ish posts

    I’ve been dabbling in making pizza as of late.

    Except.

    Except having just been in New York City and now having a trip to Chicago planned for later next year, defining what exactly kind of pizza in which I’ve been dabbling is not so clear.

    Pizza is bread with stuff, right?

    After watching a dozen videos online with titles something like “ranking styles of pizza” or “why is New York pizza better than Detroit pizza” my brain has been aflutter with the actual definition of the food I’ve been trying to create, let alone setting down a strict approach that would serve me for the long term.

    I have this preconception of pizza, and it comes from the fact that I grew up eating a very specific variety of medium-crusted disc with a slab of various meaty toppings sluiced between a layer of sauce and a top layer of cheese. I also worked for a summer in a pizza chain (formerly) called ‘Panagopolous Pizza’ (but now and since rebranded to ‘Panago’ likely because they got tired of people trying to order Greek food, as what happened to us numerous times over that summer in the mid-90s.)

    All that is to say: pizza, at least the mental picture of pizza in my head, is something very, very specific and yet, open to interpretation.

    Who or what are you leaving behind in 2022?

    Preconceptions of eats.

    I mean, that’s the goal, at least.

    I’ve been dabbling in pizza-making lately, and none of that pizza I’ve made recently fits neatly into my former preconceptions of what my mid-90s self would have considered pizza made so-called correctly.

    Up until the aforementioned “lately” I’ve long strove to make good pizza at home. I added a cast iron pizza pan to my collection about five years ago, and that fourteen inch circle of seasoned iron was the latest (and one of the greatest) additions to my pizza-making toolkit. Amazing crusts, for one. But alas, still merely another kitchen gadget geared at my goal of matching that mental image of the perfect pie.

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that approach.

    Not that seeing the thing in your mind that you want to create and striving to replicate it is at all a bad approach. Arguably, it is the foundation of understanding and education. By many measures, it is the core of becoming better at that thing you are trying to get better at. Practice by immitation.

    I can’t say we ever really managed it tho.

    That is, I can’t say that trying to create the pizza that existed in my mind’s eye was a goal that I ever really reached. We made great dough and in the last year our sourdough crusts have been tasty and devine. We’ve dabbled in ingredients and cheeses and sauces and temperatures. The thing is that homemade pizza in a standard home oven probably cannot ever compete with what any local pizza joint can crank out every five minutes with high-heat pizza ovens. Our idealized pizza was restaurant pizza and I don’t live in a commercial kitchen.

    Preconceptions fall hard.

    New York pizza is a style of pizza that seems to be as much religion as it is culinary art form.

    Sitting in a little shop a couple blocks from the 5th Avenue branch of the Public Library, I don’t know if we found the best pizza in NYC, but we certainly found a great example of it. Three burly guys-guys behind the counter asked us to pick our slice and then they heated it up in a big slot of an oven before serving it on a paper disc and a checkerboard sheet of parchment. We folded it in half and bit into it and sat facing out onto the sidewalk where folks strolled by.

    I could almost certainly find a recipe for that, a million recipes for everyone else’s attempt to replicate that, but there is more to it than making the dough just right or finding a spice that fits the right New York jive to call what I created New York style pie. As much as sitting on a wobbly stool overlooking a bustling street with sirens wailing in the distance, I just don’t have the tools in my house to do what they do in that Big ol’ Apple.

    So what’s my point? That I can’t make good pizza as I imagine it? That good New York style is out of reach? That probably the same barriers hold true for Chicago, Detroit, Neapolitan, whatever. Just why bother?

    My point is that pizza is all of those things and more. Pizza is a set of tasty food whose definition is broader than the narrow subset of examples that I happen to hold in my own personal mind. Pizza is bigger than my preconceptions of pizza.

    I’ve been dabbling in making pizza lately and it looks nothing like any other pizza that I’ve ever made.

    There’s probably a style, a name, a geography that belongs to whatever the pizza I’m accidentally making now most closely resembles. I’ve been making pizza that works with the tools I own. And it’s turning out really well.

    Thick, hearty crusts that more closely resemble focaccia than pizza crust. Salty cheese blends. Spicy thick tomato sauce that doesn’t turn watery in my lower-temp oven. Cured meats and pickled peppers and even more cheese mostly on top, but loose along the edges of the big cast iron frying pan in which I cook it. I cook it in stages. I cook it to a crusty, crunchy dark brown. I cook it so that those cheese bits fall down the edges and fry on the sides of the pan. I cook it until the meat is curling and the cheese is bubbling and the crust is crisp and cracks when you take a bite.

    If I could go back to the mid-90s and serve it to myself I’d probably like it, but I may look sidelong at my time travelling doppelganger and tell him it wasn’t exactly pizza.

    So, who or what are you leaving behind in 2022?

    I’m officially leaving that guy behind. I mean, I think I left him behind a long time ago. But I’m leaving him behind for reals and for good, I think.

    Pizza is more than what’s in my head. Just like bread or doughnuts or cookies or other kinds of amazing food that I’ve been striving in mediocrity to replicate precisely at the cost of actual good flavours. Preconceptions of eats have been holding me back, I think, and next year, both overthinking it and completely ignoring my own brain.

    I’m going to try to change that. Not just for pizza, but for a lot of things. Bring on 2023.

  • when they go high (tech) we go low (tech)

    December 1 of 31 December-ish posts.

    Oh, how those billionaires-who-shall-not-be-named would factor into a good political-type post that I’m sure would attract all sorts of readers like wasps to a honeypot.

    How would I… should I describe my 2022 in tech or tools?

    As the year wraps up I’ve dabbled in what I’m (right now) calling the addict’s last puff on the drug known as corporate social media. I tried spinning up a Youtube channel over the summer. I posted with some frequency on Twitter and Reddit. Instagram was routinely at the top of my daily digital dosage. I even downloaded TikTok for a few weeks, though I couldn’t ever figure out why I would post there.

    I grew up weaned on technology, but also I was part of that tech pioneer generation who co-opted the family phone line to connect to dial-up bulletin board systems over a 2400 baud modem hissing from beside my hulking CRT monitor.  We installed games from floppy diskettes and challenged copy protection with meticulously hand-copied versions of code sheets and game manuals.  My first website was coded by hand in a text editor and uploaded through an SSH command line to a server somewhere. I had multiple Geocities accounts and, for crying out loud, I had a paid subscription to Blogger.com before they got bought out by Google (and they actually mailed me a hoodie with both the Blogger and Google logos to thank me when that happened.)

    This has never been a tech blog, but it is tech.

    I use high tech to write and share about low tech.

    I use bare metal and code to post about cast iron and food.

    I had high hopes for social media’s role in the world. I was an early adopter of many of those platforms, bringing many people along and feeding them content on the near-daily for nearly a decade.

    Is it unfair to say I feel a bit cheated by how things turned out? It is too much to feel that lots of low tech folks have used the high tech tools we helped build and refine for things that don’t jive with my worldview?

    I’ve deleted many accounts and shuttered more. I’m reluctant to walk away completely if only because my usernames would get slurped up almost instantly and cause confusion to a few people I care about.

    This site is not corporate. I’m just a guy who wants to write. I pay for my own hosting. I run my own technology stack and manage my own updates. I write. I post. I share. I do it all.  And I feel a nostalgia for that as I round out 2022 and consider the state of our online spaces and the chaos that is swirling inside them.  Perhaps stepping out of the “digital public square” will mean fewer people will read these words, but not caring as much about size of my audience versus writing for myself and few quality people, like you who has found this site in other ways, is where I am right now.

    And as we creep into 2023 when I need to think less about the moral and ethical impact of my high technology use, I can spend more time thinking about and writing about my low tech fun, fire, food and cast iron cooking, right?

  • December-ish (but still November-ish)

    Every year I tend to get a bit sentimental and reflective when December rolls around.

    As I close in on the end of my second full year of this blog, I’m hoping to channel some of that sentimentality into some productive creative motivation here (and also in other online and offline spaces I’ve been inhabiting lately.)

    Following my strict-ish rule of trying to keep this blog as fuzzily attached to my real persona as possible, I won’t point you in the direction of those other creative pursuits, things like posting a daily watercolour painting, writing fiction every day in December, and taking one photo per day. But I can let you know that I’m opening up my creative floodgates here too, particularly so, and plan to relaunch my December-ish daily blogging effort once again and fill your December reading with some of that aforementioned sentimentality.

    Each day I’ll try to write and post a little something on this site based on the same prompts that I wrote to on the same day of the month as last December.

    And if you are clever, like I know you are, you can find when you click on an actual post (like this one and not just the front page or an archive list) on the side bar (or bottom if you read on a phone) there should be a little widget called “on this day” that points you at the post I wrote on the same date but in previous years. Handy right?

    It’s cold outside right now. I walked a couple city blocks outside this morning and the wind was gusting and biting a raw cold that is hard to explain unless you’ve felt it. Walking in minus twenty five degrees Celsius is like touching a frying pan that has cooled enough not too burn yet is still far too hot to hold… that, but with cold. And with your face.

    It’s a good kind of weather to sit inside and dream of warmer days and write.

    So, stay tuned. Here comes December. Ish.

  • Sourdough Bagels, New York Style

    It’s been a couple weeks since we got back from our trip to Manhattan. While my daughter loved Broadway, I really got into the food, in particular hunting down a couple good bagel bakeries and sampling their authentic wares.

    Of course, this left me yearning for some New York back home, and wondering if I could replicate them in my own kitchen. And, this particular recipe seemed to do the trick:

    New York Style Sourdough Bagels

    200g active sourdough starter (stiff)
    430g cold water (less for looser starter)
    30g maple syrup
    750g all-purpose flour
    10g salt
    15g baking soda (for boiling)
    15g brown sugar (for boiling)
    150g toppings, eg sesame seeds

    First, you should know that I use a fairly stiff starter with about 70% hydration. If you have a looser, wetter starter, your measures should calculate for less water. Bagels tend to target a stiffer dough with a hydration of around 60% so definitely account for that in your water percentage or else you’ll make breadier, lighter, maybe-not-bagels. For example, with a wet starter, say 90% hydration, you probably need about 100g less water.

    Otherwise, you’re going to mix up these ingredients — starter, water, syrup, salt and flour –into a nice stiff dough that you can rest for a few hours to a couple days. Longer rests are going to develop the flavours better, of course, but work with the time you have.

    After you’ve rested the dough, divide into eight (8) equal pieces, rolling these into balls that you can rest for another ten minutes or so. These balls eventually need to get shaped into the bagels which is an effort that involves rolling out a log that is 20-25cm long and then looping and pressing the ends together into that familiar bagel shape.

    Because this is sourdough, you’re in for another 6-8 hours or rise time on your freshly shaped bagels, but when they have risen (which because of the stiffness of the dough is going to seem a bit less than you might get with bread) you can set up your cooking assembly line: a pot of boiling water with the baking soda and sugar dissolved, a plate or shallow dish with your toppings, and a cooking sheet with some parchment.

    Boil the rings for about 20 seconds on each side, then as you pull them from the water dip or sprinkle on the toppings and set them onto the baking sheet with a little room to rise (so they don’t stick together!)

    Bake at 450F for about 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

    My results on the first try were fairly authentic from my week in New York. Tasty. Fresh. Firm on the exterior and chewy-soft on the inside. They cut and toasted beautifully.

    My biggest problem is that I’m gonna need to go find myself a vat of whipped cream cheese to schmear atop them.