works of wanderlust

Category: travel & vacations

  • New York Deli

    After my weekend foray into a batch of sourdough made with locally sourced rye flour, I got to thinking (and actually mentioned) a fabulous rye-bread pastrami sandwich that I shared with my wife back in 2016 in a world famous deli in the lower east side of Manhattan.

    As promised, I dug through my old photos and discovered this mouth-watering gem.

    for whatever one photo is worth

    In 2016 I won the lottery.

    Sadly it wasn’t a cash prize. Instead, my name got picked from a big pool of runners who had submitted their entries to run as international participants in the annual New York City Marathon.

    On a sunny Sunday morning in early November (literally hours before that infamous national US election) I ran forty-two point two kilometers through five boroughs of New York, starting in Staten Island, through Brooklyn, into Queens, over to Manhattan, and then a quick sweep through the Bronx before heading back to Manhattan to cross the line in the middle of Central Park.

    My wife cheered me in and helped me hobble back to the hotel where I crashed over a bowl of carbs and a bottle of water.

    The next day I was sore, tired, and hungry.

    We walked, spent some time riding the subway, and checked out some museums at a much more leisurely pace than I’d done the day prior.

    By lunch, we’d made our way to the lower east side, and towards one of my bucket list lunch spots: Katz’s Delicatessen.

    As you walk in the door they hand you an orange paper ticket that tracks your order. I ordered at a packed, shoulder-to-shoulder counter nearly the length of the building, and the guy sliced my lunch there in front of me handing me a small sample to taste before I brought it all back to a table.

    We shared a sandwich with each other, pushed through some fries and a pile of dill pickles, and chugged a cold beer to boot. We shared the table with a quartet of other marathoners who we chatted with and cheered before heading on our way stuffed and satisfied.

    It was a memorable trip by all accounts. Not only did I run a marathon, but we saw a show on Broadway, met up with friends at the fountain in Columbus Circle, high-fived a famous actress at a nut cart in Central Park, attended a live taping of the Late Show, and stumbled upon multiple epic bridges, towers, landmarks and sights on foot… all before fleeing the country on the morning of their election.

    Yet somehow among all of that, one tasty pastrami sandwich held it’s own in my memory.

  • Banoffee Swirl Ice Cream

    Tales from the Cast Iron Guy Creamery

    If you, like me, avoid those recipe blogs that spend the first fifteen pages of text explaining the backstory of the recipe, then I have a treat for you… merely two paragraphs, a photo, and of course a delicious ice cream recipe to follow.

    Our travel-food story goes something like this: After obsessing over the UK holiday film Love, Actually and specifically that scene where Keira Knightly’s character shows up with a slice of pie for her husband’s buddy, my wife became slightly obsessed with finding her own slice of banoffee pie when we visited the UK in 2006. It was darn good. And it turns out no one in Canada bothers to consistently sell it. Anywhere. Instead we learned how to make banoffee pie — actually a fairly simple pie consisting of a graham crust, dulce de leche, bananas, whipped cream, and a baker’s selection of sprinkled garnish. Then last year, after procuring ourselves an ice cream maker attachment for the stand mixer, I stumbled on the idea of adapting the banoffee pie recipe into a banoffee ice cream recipe… an effort I undertook for the third time earlier this week:

    Recipe

    500 ml heavy cream 
    250 ml full fat milk 
    160 ml white sugar
    2 ml  salt 
    6 egg yolks, separated 
    1 ripe banana
    5 ml vanilla 
    75 g coarsely crumbled graham crackers
    160 ml dulce de leche

    In a saucepan I combined the cream, milk, salt and sugar and heated to about 125F or until the sugar dissolved completely.

    Meanwhile, I separated the eggs from their yokes and combined the yokes with the banana which I’d mashed as smoothly as I could with a small whisk. I tempered the egg/banana slurry with the hot cream mix. This meant scooping and drizzling a few measuring cups full of hot cream mixture into the egg mixture and stirring furiously to bring the temperature up in the eggs while avoiding making the contents of banana breakfast burrito…. in other words, avoiding scrambling the eggs.

    Then, when things were up to temp, I combined the two mixes fully, heating and pasturizing the custard base at about 170F in the saucepan.

    This needed to cool. I filtered the whole thing through a fine wire mesh seive into a juice jug. There was a couple tablespoons worth of banana pulp that didn’t filter, but the flavour of the bananas was already infused into base so I just discarded that pulp and moved on.

    Four to six hours in the fridge likely would have been long enough, but I find I get best results in my particular ice cream churn with an overnight chill. In the morning I stirred the custard mix again and added the vanilla before firing up the ice cream maker attachment for my stand mixer.

    I am aware that making dulce de leche at home is possible. From what I understand it involves carmelizing (in a sealed can) sweetened condensed milk in an effort if done wrong can result in explosive-level pressurization of said can. Fortunately, I’m able to buy ready-to-serve dulce de leche from the supermarket, so I got that ready by the far less dangerous action of peeling the lid off the can.

    I also took this opportunity to crumble the graham crackers up in a bowl.

    The ice cream churn did it’s thing for about twenty minutes after which I added the cracker crumbles to the mixer. This combined for another minute or so.

    The final stage, in a chilled bowl, was to “swirl” in the dulce de leche. A scoop of ice cream into the container followed by a drizzle of the sauce followed by another scoop of ice cream… and so on until everything was layered together and ready for the freezer.

    The result of all this work is a delicious banana ice cream swirled with the cool caramel flavour of dulce de leche and provided a wee crunch by the graham crackers… or as close to a banoffee pie as I can get in ice cream form. And as much as I like pie, ice cream is darned amazing, too.

  • Caribbean Star Wars Day & That Yoda Guy

    It’s Star Wars Day. May the Fourth be with you.

    And back in February of 2013, we had a weird and wonderful Star Wars morning on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin (or Sint Maarten).

    While the idea of big ship cruising these days seems about as fantastic as starships and galaxies far, far away, eight years ago we splurged and spent seven days on one of those mega cruise ships touring a short list of tropic islands.

    On one of those islands we found an unlikely science fictional cultural touchstone.

    From where I stand Nick Maley, “that Yoda Guy” seems to be living the dream.

    After a successful career doing special effects for over fifty movies, including co-creating the puppetry work that brought Yoda to life, he semi-retired to a tropical island and opened a museum to showcase his life’s work.

    He also sells prints of his personal paintings… one of which hangs framed on the wall of my living room. A sunset over the water.

    That is roughly the extent of my knowledge of Mr. Maley. Though I do seem to remember nodding a friendly greeting to him back in 2013 when, on a morning off-ship walkabout in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten a few kilometers from the docks, my wife and I stumbled upon the “that Yoda Guy” museum and exhibit in a sand-coloured mos-eisley-esque building adorned with multiple colourful signs beaconing lost Star Wars fans hither into it’s mysterious realms.

    It’s not a big exhibit.

    At least it wasn’t when we visited in 2013.

    The website says that they expanded in 2016, and that Mr. Maley was honoured by Lucasfilm for his work that same year. The tone of the museum space was part Caribbean art shop, part Star Wars artifact collection, and part examination of the lifelong quest for the proprietor to reclaim the credit for his work for which he seemed to have been unfairly deprived. I hope he found his due, and perhaps 2016 marked a new chapter in that legitimacy he seemed to be seeking.

    We brought our art back to the ship and later that day we went snorkeling and ate a big buffet meal back on the boat. That night the massive ship fled out of the Sint Maarten harbour like a rebel transport ship off to the next destination in the inky star-filled blackness of a nighttime sea.

    If your nerdy self happens to dock in Sint Maarten and you need an hour break from shopping for perfume, diamonds or tacky souvenirs, you can’t go wrong embracing the sunny side of the force and paying that Yoda Guy a visit. It’s a sequel I’d like to see myself.

  • Moraine Lake Canoes in Pieces

    In the summer of 2018 we spent a week backpacking in the Rocky Mountains near Lake Louise, Alberta, conquering a trail known as the route to Skoki Lodge. We roughed it, camping out of whatever we lugged on our backs up the nearly-twenty kilometer hike. Dehydrated food, lightweight gear, water filtered from a mountain stream, and a couple amazing day hikes.

    It was also forest fire season, so at least two days of our time in the wilderness were socked in with a thick haze of sore-throat inducing smoke that blocked out nearly all the scenery while still somehow having zero effect on the mosquito population.

    About 30 colorful canoes rest at a mountain lake dock with a gorgeous scene behind.

    After we descended the mountain, tired, sore, and smelly, we spent an extra day in the small town of Lake Louise to recover before the long drive home.

    Lake Louise is a place of epic beauty.

    Many people come to Canada to see the mountains and find themselves in Banff.

    Banff is also a gorgeous mountain town, but it is relatively big and full of people. Touristy, with kitschy souvenir shops and parking lots and traffic lights. Some of the people who visit Banff have done their research and drive an hour down the road to Lake Louise for a day or two where a grand hotel sits at the edge of a glacial lake a the foot of a picturesque mountain.

    A subset of those folks who find their way to Lake Louise take yet another short side trip and discover Moraine Lake.

    It was still smoky and the hint of sun that broke through was itself threatening to duck behind the mountains for the evening when we found our way to the shore of Moraine. Our legs were still achy and tired from the previous day’s descent down from the Skoki valley. And we were not keen on driving back the narrow mountain road through the dark. We walked around the edge of the lake for a few minutes, and I snapped about a dozen photos including one of the colourful rental canoes tethered to the dock for the evening.

    We went home the next day.

    Weeks went by and we shared stories of our hike with friends and family.

    Summer turned into autumn and autumn into winter.

    Snow. Routine. Work.

    I had stopped for coffee in the break area of my office. As the holiday approached and people were feeling the need for some festive fun, someone had set up a jigsaw puzzle at one of the lunch tables. I meandered over to look, and picked up the box to see what the picture would become.

    The sky in that photo was a little brighter, and the canoes were arranged a little differently, but I recognized the scene immediately: Moraine Lake …in five hundred tiny pieces.

  • Travel Eats: Smoked Fish and Bagpipes

    In the summer of 2019 we spent two weeks in Scotland.

    My wife and daughter are competitive Highland Dancers with a dance school here in Canada, and every four years or so the school makes the trip overseas with a busload of dancers, parents, and teachers to participate in an authentic Scottish Highland Games.

    They all get to stress about dance. I get to wander around, take photos, and eat interesting foods.

    In early August 2019 I found myself on a rain-soaked morning meandering around the muddy grass of Strathallan Games Park in Bridge of Allan, UK, where the annual Bridge of Allan Highland Games are held in the shadow of the Wallace Monument towering in the misty, rolling hills a few kilometers away.

    The games themselves are wrapped around a race track. Running and cycling field events that happen on the track itself are more modern additions to the more familiar caber tossing and hammer throws that take place midfield. The dancers huddle around a stage at one end of the inside field, the bagpipe bands set up at the far opposite end (though their warmup hum can be heard forever away.) Scattered in the empty spaces between food and craft vendors find customers like me wandering through the games action.

    The column of smoke can be seen from nearly everywhere, and I found myself organically attracted to the action to see what was cooking at its base.

    From an article on the website itself this is what I found:

    Arbroath Smokies are famed throughout Britain and beyond for their wonderful flavour and smooth, flaky texture. For those new to this particular delicacy, smokies are smoked haddock, prepared according to highly traditional methods by a number of producers in and around the wee North East fishing community of Arbroath.

    I stood at the back of a very long line and when I reached the front I ordered two.

    Delicious. Amazing. Perfect food for a perfect morning.

    If (or when) we return for another Highland Games in a couple years, I’ll be saving some room for a second round.

    I’m a huge fan of smoked fish… which is a difficult kind of fan to be when you live in a city on the land-locked Canadian prairies. I’ve been thinking a lot about cooking (and maybe even smoking) fish over an open fire. In an upcoming sequel and follow-up post to my Suburban Fire Craft (Part One), I recently purchased a new movable fire pit for my backyard. I’ll be doing some cooking on it (so long as the weather cooperates) this coming weekend and writing about it here. It probably will not be fish. I’ll save that for when I’ve practiced a bit more. It will be backyard cooking over an open fire, though, and that’s almost as exciting as a day of Highland Games.

    Almost.

    Now, obviously, my new fire bowl isn’t an old whiskey barrel, nor is it the foundation for a multi-generational history of smoking famous fish. But my neighbours might soon be wondering what cooking at the base of a column of smoke from my backyard. I’ll save the bagpipes for another year.