works of wanderlust

Category: tucking in

  • Gaige’s Famous Inside-Out Grilled Cheese

    Some day I’ll dig into my second-favourite cooking topic after cast iron, and write some posts about sourdough bread.

    In the meantime, know that my classic sandwich loaf sourdough serves as the base for a mouthwatering recipe that blurs my passion for cast iron cooking with fresh bread and delicious lunch foods.

    It’s a simple hack for your grilled cheese, but add a bit of grated cheddar to the buttered outsides of a classic grilled cheese sandwhich (bread, butter, cheese and heat.)

    2 slices of sourdough bread
    1 tablespoon of butter or margarine
    1/2 cup of grated cheddar cheese

    Grill as normal. (My normal is on a hot-hot cast iron griddle.)

    If you’ve got a soft spot for fried cheese, the crisp exterior of your sandwhich will warm your heart (and probably clog your arteries … did I mention that this is a sometimes food?)

  • Saturday Chocolate Chip Pancakes

    My twenty inch cast iron grill pan sees service at least once a week (when we’re home, that is) on Saturday mornings as a pancake making workstation.

    For at least a decade our family tradition is a fresh batch of these simple breakfast treats.

    1 1/3 cups of all purpose flour
    3 tablespoons of granulated sugar
    1 tablespoon of baking powder
    1 egg
    3 tablespoons of vegetable oil
    1 teaspoon of vanilla
    1 1/2 cups of white milk
    1/2 cup chocolate chips

    The flour, sugar, and baking powder get mixed together in a medium bowl.

    The egg is whisked in a 2 cup measuring cup, then I add the oil, vanilla and milk and mix again.

    The wet and dry are combined, mixed lightly, populated with the chocolate chips, and let to sit for about 10 minutes to hydrate.

    Batter is poured in 1/4 cup portions onto a hot cast iron grill pan and cooked to desired doneness.

    We serve it all up with maple syrup and a hot cup of coffee.

  • Book: Campfire Cuisine

    For Thursdays I was thinking about starting a regular feature called Tuck & Tech that would let me muse about gear, books, recipes, and other kit. I’m neither sponsored nor provided any of these things. I just find them interesting or useful.

    A curious recipe book showed up in my stocking this past Christmas: Campfire Cuisine by Robin Donovan seems to be a hearty collection of tasty dishes that meet a couple basic criteria around food transportation and storage as well as ease of preparation over a hot campfire.

    A lot could be said about the fact that the wife and I have already conversed about trying some of the collection of marinades, breakfasts, sandwiches, and main courses at home first. There is nothing necessitating a campout cook style for many of the dishes … which, I guess, means that the collection is a solid book of hearty dishes that also happens to be amenable to cooking and eating in the great outdoors.

    It’s the middle of deep winter as I write this, and I did have a short campfire in the chilly backyard for New Year’s Eve, but we used it to symbolically torch the 2020 calendar and I wasn’t comfortable cooking on those flames afterwards. Our simple go-to would likely have been pulling out the marshmallows to make s’mores, after a round of grilled hot dogs.

    Yet this book definitely seems to be more than one-dish meals or meats-on-sticks.

    I re-read the introduction this morning again and it lit a feeling of kinship between myself and the author. There was a symmetry of philosophy in those words, even as I set off (it’s still my first week) to write a daily blog checking boxes that Donovan checked long before me, and in print to boot.

    Living to eat well.

    Travelling to taste and experience.

    Savouring experiences.

    I’ve yet to try any of the recipes, and definitely not over a firepit, but for that synergy alone I’ll be pouring over the hundred-ish recipes in the book now (and as warmer tent camping weather approaches) to construct the menu for our next outbound excursion.

  • 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…

  • 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.