works of wanderlust

Category: tucking in

  • Glacial Stares

    Sometimes things just click.

    Sometimes you need to do a hike up the side of a mountain to an interesting place, lay on the bare ground and get the moment just right for things to work out how you want.

    Describe the best picture
    you took in 2021.

    We had booked a week in the mountains during the lull in the pandemic, checking into a hotel we wouldn’t have sprung for if the borders had been wider open and tourists were filling them for higher prices than we were paying.

    We spent our days exploring, day trips mostly, driving from short hike trailhead to short hike trailhead, snacking in the car on the way between and keeping the dog calm on one of her first (of many) family adventures.

    Mount Edith Cavell is a short drive from Jasper, Alberta, and for the price of forty five minutes of hiking up a steep-ish but well-worn stoney trail one can sit beside a glacial lake in August and overlook the remains of the Angel Glacier and her various small bergs afloat in the freezing cold water.

    We did just that.

    And among the small crowds of other tourists we found a quiet spot to sit and look out at the view and admire the natural beauty of this place, pausing for a moment in the (then) nearly year-and-a-half long frustration epic that had been lockdown.

    I did what every good father and camera guy should do. I laid down on the rocky beach and tried to get at least one epic photo of my family.

    A photo from this short series, one where my daughter’s face is far more identifiable in the shot that would be suitable for a public blog, is the picture we sent out on the front of our Christmas card this year. It seemed appropriate and poignant and pretty much summed up the mood of our year.

  • Salted Toffee Crisps

    For the span of a whole weekend in early December it seemed like I couldn’t look on my social media feeds and subscriptions without seeing a recipe for some kind of homemade chocolate toffee bar.

    In fact, I saw this (or a variation of this) recipe online on Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter no less than four times before I got curious enough to copy the ingredients into my shopping list and try my hand at baking my own version.

    What is your best winter treat recipe this year?

    It turns out it was a fast and simple treat with lots of room for variation (particularly in the topping) making it a year round sweet with opportunity for a holiday twist only limited by your imagination in substituting the nuts for candy, sprinkles, or whatever.

    Salted Toffee Crisps

    150g Crackers (Saltines or Graham)
    250ml Butter
    250ml Dark Brown     Sugar
    500ml Chocolate, Chips (Semi Sweet)
    250ml Chopped Nuts (Cashews or Peanuts)
    5ml Sea Salt

    While you are preheating the oven to 400F you can line a baking sheet with some parchment and tile out the crackers to completely cover the base of the sheet. The butter and brown sugar go into a saucepan and combine to a boil for a minimum of three minutes. An experienced candy maker is going to jump in here and substitute some exacting time and temperatures for the right crack stage of cooking sugar, but I did this blind without a thermometer (because that’s what the internets promised me would work) and it worked just fine. After the boil, the mixture coats the crackers and the baking sheet goes into the oven for five to six minutes. A dash of salt is followed by spreading the chocolate chips on the hot toffee and smoothing it even as it melts into a decadent coating atop the still-hot candy layer. I topped with chopped peanuts, but online I saw crumbled candy canes, M&Ms and other kinds of nuts, too. Cooled, this cracks or cuts into cookie-sized pieces and (if it lasts longer than a few days) holds up in the freezer for the holidays.

    Enjoy!

  • Sourdough But Not Bread

    It’s been a long twenty-one months of pandemic craziness, but I’ve kept myself a little more sane by baking a lot of sourdough bread.

    A few loaves per week. A regular diet of sourdough toast for breakfast. A healthy source of bread for the family.

    But in all that time I haven’t explored much further into the sourdough family than experimenting with basic flour blends and a bit of beer hydration. I haven’t explored all the possibilities that a fine-tuned sourdough starter has to offer.

    What’s something you
    should have cooked in 2021,
    but didn’t?

    In the coming year I’d like to try at least three new sourdough recipes.

    I don’t yet have these recipes, but I’ve encountered them in the past, online, and I know with just the right search words I’ll likely be able to find something that lines up neatly and to my satisfaction.

    First up, bagels.

    Bagels? You know the dense and chewy bready rings popular in different styles around the world, Montreal-style or a’la New York. A bit of cream cheese with some smoked lox from nearby British Columbia seems like it would suit a sourdough experiment just fine by me. I’ve seen a few Youtubers spinning up a delicious bagel recipe with a sourdough base and I’ve never had the nerve to follow all the extra steps to get that job done, but in 2022 I think this is something in my cooking queue.

    Second, english muffins.

    We’ve been buying only one type of bread with any consistency since the pandemic started and my adventures with supplying the household with sourdough loaves began. English muffins are the classic ingredient in a hearty breakfast sandwich, which also happens to be one of my daughter’s self-sufficiency foods: she cooks herself a breakfast sandwich for lunch on the weekends or whenever a teenage hollow-leg syndrome strikes. A fried egg, a slice of ham, a bit of cheese all squeezed between a toasted english muffin is also an ideal thing to prep on a cast iron griddle, but I think I can go one step further in 2022 and try making my own english muffins using my sourdough starter.

    Finally, doughnuts.

    Like our neighbours to the south, we Canadians can be fiends for our doughnuts. In the past I’ve used my big dutch oven to deep fry multiple batches of yeast doughnuts. My daughter loves this because not only do they turn out delicious but she enjoys decorating them with chocolate, sprinkles, or all sorts of other toppings. Like bagels and english muffins I’ve come to appreciate that store bought yeast has nothing on bready treats that start with a bit of mother dough instead. I’d like to put this theory to the test.

    Next year, it seems, is going to be one where I explore the tasty potential of my sourdough starter. And who knows, I might even find a new specialty. If nothing else, you’ll be reading about it here.

  • I Heart Sourdough

    Describe your 2021 in food.

    I had a lengthy post planned about all the different ways in which this blog has forced me to think about how I cook and what I eat and the enjoyment I get out of both those things…

    …then this morning I sliced open a freshly baked loaf of sourdough bread and saw an air bubble in the shape of a heart, and I couldn’t really top that with any more words.

    So.

    That about sums it up I think.

  • Legacy

    I’ve never grown older before, so forgive me if you have and I’m just being obvious.

    The older I get the more I think about the balance between the entropic impermanence of all things and the human urge to continue creating and planning and hoping in the face of that impermanence.

    I think it is all twisted up in this idea of legacy.

    What excited you most in 2021?

    I thought about legacy a lot this past year, and when I paused to reflect on what gave me back some of that hope and excitement during the past twelve (give or take) months, this idea of legacy kept popping into my head.

    I’ve had no shortage of unplanned opportunities since starting a blog called “the cast iron guy” to explain my connection to that particular style of cookware, particularly since I can’t fallback to a simpler explanation such as “I sell it” (which I don’t) or “I collect it” (which my wife may argue is where I’m trending but my collection is not worth writing home about) or “I’m an expert in it” (which would be a stretch to sincerely claim.)

    As I’ve often alluded to, occasionally openly written about, this whole “cast iron guy” idea strays into a universe where I adore all things ferrous, but is actually more of a clue to an overarching philosophy of lifestyle that I’ve been trying to embrace more fulsomely: uncomplicated things, life lived, and a mindset that reflects the philosophical practicality of well-seasoned cast iron frying pan, enduring, simple, down-to-earth & extremely useful, as I write in my snippet.

    It’s also deeply entrenched with the idea of legacy.

    Instilling in my daughter a legacy tied to objects like cookware and sourdough starters.

    Building a legacy of lifestyle through travel, exploration and curiosity.

    Maintaining a legacy of worldliness and environmental stewardship.

    Leaving behind a legacy of ideology and an approach to the universe.

    I think as we get older we may not all panic about the dwindling time we have left, but in some small way many of us start putting more effort into shaping what will remain behind when that time dwindles to nothing.

    Maybe it’s imprecise to say I got excited about legacy this past year. Though it is clear that I thought and wrote and waxed poetic quite a lot about this idea of legacy, even if those thoughts were not strictly labelled as such.