works of wanderlust

Category: tucking in

  • cheap eats

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in food.

    This blog rebooted with a theme on January 1, 2021: food.

    Also adventure, cast iron, the outdoors and simple living.  It was the middle of freaking covid and I was basically trapped in my house because of travel restrictions and winter and work from home and I latched onto the idea of rebooting the blog I had written for a decade and a half with a little less TMI themed introspection. (Funny how it has drifted back to that, huh?) 

    But I wrote a lot about food. Bread. Skillet cooking. Campfire recipes. 

    And, of course, needing to hit a quota for posting on a blog meant I did more of those things to have content to write and post about. The years 2021 and even 2022 were very food focused as a result.

    This past year I have been pre-occupied with other things.

    I still bake my bread (in fact I have a loaf proofing on the counter as I write this) and we are pretty much exclusively a cast iron cookware household (though I have not bought a new piece in three or four years, a testament to the durability and quality I suppose) but my dabbling in new and interesting recipes has dwindled.

    In the past few weeks or so and specifically since returning from Japan I have been to the local Lucky Supermart (Asian grocery store) and stocked my house with rices and spices and teas and more, mostly to hold onto that post-travel vibe of trying new and interesting foods every other day during our vacation,  I guess. But experimenting otherwise?  It’s been a slow year for the foodie in me that way.

    We are all experiencing the result of gaslighting government, of course. Grocery prices are higher than they have ever been. These days are the times for stretching staples and simplifying recipes to keep the food budget in check. I guess if you want a real perspective on our 2025 year in food it has been one of economics more than anything: adapting our recipes to use whatever meat is on sale or whichever frozen vegetables are cheaper than their golden hued fresh counterparts. We eat at home significantly more, cooking at home, and I eat out lunch maybe once a month weaning myself down from once or twice a week (which itself was a reduction from my daily downtown dining experience pre-pandemic.) 

    Eat cheap. But eat well. We don’t starve and we don’t suffer for variety, but we do squeeze value out of our food budget these days. Tho… I suspect that’s the answer a lot of people would give this year.

  • searching for theatre style

    Salt, oil and popping corn.

    Can you imagine how many iterations and combinations of that trio I’ve gone through over the years in search of the perfect pop-at-home theatre-style popcorn?

    I lost count long ago.

    I’ll try not to bury the lede here.

    Theatre Style Popcorn

    2 tablespoons of beta carotene infused coconut oil
    2 teaspoons of flavacol salt
    1 cup of popping corn

    That’s it. Heat the oil over a medium heat, testing the readiness with a few kernels. When they pop, add the corn and the salt.

    Stir.

    Mix.

    Pop.

    Eat.

    My personal pursuit for this particular combination is either the best kept secret behind the eleven herbs and spices …or I’ve just failed to run in the right corn popping circles for the last few decades.

    You can, after all, order all of these ingredients from your favourite online retailer’s website for prime next day delivery… though you really need to first know what to buy, I suppose.

    We grew up eating popcorn as a snack at home.

    We had an air popper, and we would melt (I want to say butter, but it was probably) margarine over it and then sprinkle table salt into the mix. It had a vibe. It was what I knew. And yet, by the time I was about fourteen I was already going to the movie theatre with some regularity and had figured out that my parent’s secret popcorn recipe was not a thing like the bag of deliciousness we scored when we went out.

    Was it a trade secret?

    I would occasional glimpse the theatre employees filling the popping machines and my takeaway from witnessing this sacred act was that whatever magic concoction they were keeping on the hush behind the counter, it was emerging pre-mixed from unmarked brown pouches. I suspected not even the teenagers making the good stuff knew what was in the blend.

    Over the years I fumbled into various online rabbit holes of perfect popcorn speculation. I mean, who hasn’t? While you were researching celebrity sightings and video game rumours, I was poking around forums suggesting that the secret was in using clarified butter or finely tuned temperatures or the stirring mechanism.

    I mean, now that I’ve figured it out theatre popcorn is actually just so simple, it almost seems that all those other theories are so much witch-craftery that they are barely worth mentioning. But seriously… that is the path upon which I strolled trying to figure this out.

    Theatre popcorn just has this, I dunno, an undefinable quality. The blur of the yellow salt and the chemistry-experiment butter-ness. I think what I had stumbled upon over and over and over and over during those years searching was people acknowledging that theatre popcorn is not necessarily great popcorn. There are definitely better ways to make popcorn. Of course. Undoubtably, the quest for good popcorn and the quest for theatre popcorn are probably not the same adventures into flavour town. There are superior popping recipes, yes. But theatre popcorn has something that is as much soul snacking nostalgia as it is food quality.

    I had figured out the Flavacol aspect about a year or two ago. Some of that online research stirred that brand name out of the digital depths and sure enough I could order it online. I popped dozens of batches and cross-mixed the fine yellow salt with all manner of methodology and popping oils. I could tell that it was close. There were hints of the theatre in whatever Flavacol was bringing to the party… but still it wasn’t quite hitting the mark.

    One night I was sitting on the couch flipping through some or other social media dreck and the second part of the clue scrolled into my feed like so much serendipitous fortune: coconut oil. But then not just any coconut oil. Of course I had already tried plain old coconut oil and it was close, but not quite right either. (Luckily it is great for seasoning cast iron!)

    Instead, there existed a coconut oil product out there specifically for popping popcorn. Dyed bright yellow by beta carotene and blended with a bit of that chemical romance of fake buttery goodness, this was the missing ingredient.

    And that’s it. Three ingredients.

    I have dabbled in variations of the trio for a couple months now, making myself a big bowl of theatre-style popcorn every other week or so, hunkering down to watch a movie at home.

    That’s the recipe. Stupidly simple, but deceptively specific.

    I mean, don’t look at the nutrition information, but Cineplex eat your heart out.

  • six years of sourdough

    Well, I have just spent the last few days working on the migration of a bunch of old blog content and… I apologize. if you clicked on this expecting a more “bready” opening paragraph, well, sorry. Nerdy things beget nerdy things, and sourdough bread and blogging are both pretty nerdy things walking hand-in-hand through this house.

    My blog archives are stuffed to the rafters with foodie content.

    That was even more evident when I realized that I had accumulated over thirty posts on the subject of sourdough while I was writing the Cast Iron Guy blog a few years back.

    My starter, the same starter I pulled out of the fridge today in what has become part of my regular routine of warming it up to start the bread-making process later this evening, turned six last month.

    No cheating. No fudging. No malarky. It’s legitimately six years old.

    And I’ve not gone longer than three weeks without making bread (and even that was just the once because we toddled off to Europe for a summer vacation in 2023 and of course I wasn’t baking bread!)

    As I moved and cleaned up all those old sourdough posts, tho, it struck me that compared to the early days of my baking I have not been nearly as experimental as I was back in 2021 through 2023. The last couple of years, in fact, have seen but a single innovation in my loaf approach and that is the acquisition of a large covered Emile Henri loaf pan (not cast iron!) which has become my exclusive go to bread baking vessel.

    Shape and pan aside, I used to experiment a lot more.

    I dabbled in flours.

    I attempted hydration with beer.

    I tried sweet breads and savoury loaves.

    Lately, tho? White bread, sandwich loaf style, ready for my breakfast toast with butter and strawberry jam. Simple, staple, and kinda boring… at least in as much as it makes for interesting blog posts.

    So I guess if you came here looking for sourdough ideas you should know that there are quite a few scattered through the archives of this site, neatly filed under “sourdough” … but you should also know that while I’ve stopped writing as the Cast Iron Guy, I am still quite a bit of a nerdy sourdough bread guy. (I’m making a batch tonight!) And I will be looking for, thinking about, and scheming up interesting ways to expand that thirty posts to a much longer list as this updated blogging effort continues.

  • cacio e pepe

    A little over a year ago we were wandering the streets of Rome in the blazing heat of an August scorcher. It’s a far cry from where I am sitting writing these words in a suburban strip mall Starbucks as the first flakes of snow for the season fall outside the window.

    It was hardly a food focused vacation, but I as whenever I travel, I had my heart set on trying new and interesting local dishes, from the unique and interesting to—of course—the typical and regional tropes. One evening, after a long walk through the narrow streets in and out of tourist shops and a museum or two, and maybe I think we strolled under the dome of the Pantheon that morning, we succumbed to the call of a barker who was standing at the entrance to the patio of a street restaurant and took a table for a mid-evening dinner. We perused the menu, ordered a bottle of wine, and noshed on some breads. It all looked great, but my eyes went to the cacio e pepe, a (literally) cheese and pepper pasta that is everywhere in Rome. 

    Properly made, this is basically a creamy pasta sauce of pecorino cheese melted over pasta and peppered with a hearty kick. Italian food likes to label itself spicy, but personally I find even the spicier Italian offerings generally on the milder side compared to Asian or, say, Mexican cuisine. But, I do find cacio e pepe, at least the offering I tried, ranked pretty high on the spicy scale. Peppery spicy, obviously,  and not melt your face off spicy, but certainly reach for the water hot.

    I hadn’t thought much about cacio e pepe since that evening Rome until, at work, I cracked open a case full of ready to serve pasta sauce that had arrived on the back of a delivery truck. This isn’t meant to be a brand specific review, so I won’t bother writing a run down of the quality or taste or any of that. Chances are you have your own brands at your own stores in your own countries anyhow. But I will say that I spun up my discount one evening last week and bought the ingredients to reconstruct a fresh-from-the-jar version of that Roman evening.

    The Kid hated it. She likes her share of spice these days, but hasn’t warmed up to pepper apparently. We had half a bottle of chianti left over from the previous weekend and so over some pasta secce cooked al dente we followed the jar directions and recreated a quick and easy cacio e pepe at home. 

    Couldn’t you have made it from scratch, you ask?

    Well, sure. But that’s kind of the thing isn’t it? It is very easy to leap to these home cooking solutions, reaching to achieve great feats of regional recreation from your own kitchen post-vacation. Sure. But I also am a strong believer in incremental steps. Jarred sauces are not great, but often they are pretty good and set a base line for what a dish should be aspiring towards. I like to think of it as bracketing. I had tried a version in a Roman street cafe and I had tried a version poured from a  jar purchased from a local grocery store. I won’t put a stake in the ground and say those were the top and bottom of the scale, heck no, but they certainly have now given me some solid context for the flavours intended for this probably-famous dish.

    The same thing happened to us in Milan. We stopped in a little restaurant and tried a Milanese risotto, a dish heavy in saffron spices, creamy and rich and oddly enough reminding me of an upscale mac and cheese. Then, when we came home back to Canada, we bought a couple packages of rice and spice “just add wine and water and heat” mixes from the local Italian food market and made our home version of it. 

    In both cases, cacio e pepe and Milanese risotto, I now have a kind of bracketed expectation of taste and preparation and final result from two very different sources. And I suddenly have the confidence to, maybe when I have some time to cook, make each from scratch.  Ambition, in my heart of hearts, blossoms from familiarity and confidence in the pursuit. Both of these things are bolstered by, yeah travel blah blah blah, but also shortcuts and incremental steps. A bag of rice and spice, or a jar of sauce—both cut a path to a bolder effort to make these from rawer ingredients. After all, that store of mine doesn’t just sell jars of ready to serve sauce, it sells pecorino cheese, too.

  • the great pasta kerfuffle

    I alluded to this in my most recent post on brand loyalty: the great spaghetti sauce change up of 2024 and the “kerfuffle that caused” in our house.

    First of all, we’re not Italian. So when I write about “spaghetti sauce” I need to be exceptionally clear that we are basically talking about the red bolognese-ish sauce that we concoct on our stove top and pour over top of spaghetti pasta noodles boiled from a box. It is a Canadian-slash-North-American bastardization of traditional Italian pastas prepared out of raw convenience, and as I wrote in my previous post, a lot of brand habit and loyalty.

    Second, I’ve tasted great pasta sauces. We have been to Italy and I have eaten cacio e pepe and ragù alla bolognese, both on the narrow street cafes of Rome, and I know—I know—that what we make at home is not even a knock off, but rather a work night meal distant cousin-by-marriage thrice removed alternate version of these dishes.

    What we are very poorly copying is a kind of bolognese sauce, probably better known in Italian as a ragù alla bolognese or more simply something like a ragù bolognese.

    The difference is that for fifteen or so years our version involved a little powdered spice pack that got mixed into some browned ground beef with a can of tomato paste and a couple cups of tap water and rehydrated into a chemical after-tasting red sauce that took about fifteen minutes from fridge to table and was “good enough” to make it through the meal rush on average once per week.

    But then we went to Italy, as I mentioned, and I had some time on my hands over the winter and I started thinking to myself that I probably could use some of that time on my hands to come up with a better version of our weekly sauce hack that (a) was just as simple and cost effective to prepare, (b) didn’t come from a spice envelope via the grocery store and (c) sure, still wasn’t an Italian sauce but probably tasted a bit closer—maybe a first cousin, only once removed kinda thing.

    So. This is my new recipe.

    bardo’s sausage ragu

    400 grams of spicy Italian sausage meat
    1 onion
    2 cloves of garlic
    1 large can of tomato sauce
    1 small can of tomato paste
    2 solid glugs of olive oil

    Brown the sausage meat. I like to break it into hearty chunks, but you can crumble it, too. Either, or. Add the onion and garlic to soften. Add the tomato paste and sauce as well as the olive oil, and simmer it all for a while. Serve over pasta.

    In that previous post I wrote about the habits connected to this thing I was thinking of as brand loyalty. We were stuck in this rut of bad spaghetti sauce from a powder for years simply because there was a lot of cognitive load to go from that weekly routine and the ingredient list we had memorized over to this updated version.  I started cooking this new version, and yet the groceries would appear after a shopping trip with the ingredients for the old version. I would make a trip to the store to buy the stuff for the new version and then the wrong one would get made, or a broken version of the new one would get made (missing an ingredient or two) and then feelings would be hurt on both sides because “we knew the old one” and “you’re complicating things” and “but this version is nicer” and “yeah, it’s good but you need to update the shopping list so we buy the right stuff.” It was a kerfuffle. 

    Six months later we’re pretty locked in on the new updated recipe, but seriously—it took some leaping and jumping and planning to break the old habit—to break the loyalty to the old, easy way.

    And that is what I was getting at in my last post: walking into a grocery store and trying to unravel the list you might have built into your brain about how to make simple daily meals for yourself and/or your family is not as simple as picking up a new brand of ketchup or a new cut of meat or a different vegetable you’re not used to cooking with. It’s an extra step. And that’s a challenge when you shop while traveling, or just checking out a new food market—hopefully you’re the kind of person who is willing to step up to that kind of challenge.