works of wanderlust

Tag: food from other cultures

  • 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.

  • Savoury Avacado Chicken in a Cast Iron Wok

    I’ve read all manner of reviews about one of the epic cast iron pieces in my collection, the fourteen inch wok, and it turns out the idea of a big and heavy iron wok is divisive and controversial.

    A traditional wok (which I do not own) is an agile tool. It is light. It’s meant to be brought up to screeching hot temperatures in which food is moved, flipped, agitated, swirled and stirred with motion of both a scoop in the hand and by tossing and lifting the wok itself. Wok cooking is truly an art form.

    It does turn out however that a residential gas stovetop with modest ventilation is not an ideal place to cook in a traditional wok. On the other hand, a wok-shaped bowl of cast iron is pretty darn good enough to replicate some of the properties of a wok. In fact, having spent the last two years learning how to cook well in my cast iron wok has been a remarkably rewarding experience.

    And a tasty one.

    Our challenge in the wok has been learning to cook dishes that have a curious cultural legacy here in North America. Not everything cooks well in a wok. Woks have a very narrow purpose even in experimenting across cultural recipes. Again, this may be a sensitive topic for some, but as a result of colonial history and inequalities among those who settled here over the generations, in the twenty-first century we have what I understand is a unique form of cuisine: North American Style Asian food. Or as one of my running pals who hails from Hong Kong reminds me frequently “not real Chinese food.”

    What I’ve read is that cooking styles and spices mingled with availability of ingredients and limited by tastes linked back to various European ancestries meant that traditional cooking was almost impossible. Immigrants who crossed the Pacific rather than the Altantic set up restaurants as a means to make a living and a life here. They found that they needed to invent dishes that brought the knowledge and experience from their homelands but would be palatable to western tastes (so people would buy and eat it) so dishes like General Tao’s Chicken, Chop Suey, or Ginger Beef became locally known as “Chinese food” but were never dishes that one would actually find in China.

    Fast forward to my kitchen, and decades of savouring those shopping mall food court noodle and rice clamshells of spicy goodness. A cast iron wok in my kitchen and a very Canadian-style of recipe that brings together a mish-mash of cultural and regional styles, ingredients, and flavours that results in many various stir-fry-style dishes something like Savoury Avacado Chicken:

    The Recipe

    First, mix up the following as a deglazing sauce and then set aside.

    125 ml water
    15 ml of cornstarch
    small packet of chicken bouillon powder
    15 ml of lemon juice

    As you heat up the wok to get it screaming hot, mise en place your main ingredients, frying in succession the chicken, then the peppers and mushrooms, then adding the spices and diced avacados until it all comes together into a lovely stir fried jumble.

    vegetable oil and/or sesame oil for pan
    450 grams chicken breast meat (cubed)
    handful red bell pepper (diced)
    handful white mushrooms (sliced)

    10 ml curry powder
    salt and pepper to taste
    1 large avacado (diced)
    toasted sesame seeds to garnish

    Deglaze the whole thing with the boullion/lemon juice mix from earlier, and serve over rice garnished with a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds.

    Thus, the controversy of the cast iron wok: not an authentic wok, sure, but I’m not cooking authentic recipes. It all evens out, right?

  • Cooking an Easy Stovetop Paella

    I want to tread carefully into the waters of writing about certain foods. Food always … always, always, always… has rich cultural roots that wrap around people and their own personal and shared histories. I respect that.

    I write this because I am aware that some (if not all) of the recipes I make and (often) write about online are steeped in the cultures of other people. And I share these recipes, writing about them here and other places, simply to express the joy I’ve been given in learning to cook those things (and then sharing the results with my family.) It is a way for me to attempt to honour and more deeply understand those cultures, and hopefully pass along that respect. It also makes me long to visit the homelands of these dishes and see how accurately the recipes have traversed time and distance to reach me here in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

    For example, Paella.

    To me Paella is a dish that feels like it has deep cultural roots, well-known and tracing back through Spanish origins.

    We inherited a paella recipe somewhere along the way that recipe has become a regular staple in our kitchen. It’s one we thoroughly enjoy making and eating even though I cannot lay claim to even a single drop of Spanish blood in my veins.

    Our Paella Recipe

    1mL saffron
    1mL salt
    1mL paprika
    500g boneless skinless chicken thighs (chunked)
    150g chorizo     sausage (chunked)
    1 whole red bell pepper (diced)
    1 medium yellow onion
    1 tablespoon of minced garlic
    2 tablespoons fresh parsley
    1 teaspoon tomato paste
    1 cup Arborio     rice
    125mL (cheap) white wine
    175mL chicken stock
    olive oil for pan

    The broth and the saffron need to come together for a start.

    The chicken then needs to be browned, and separately sweat the onion and pepper. I do this in batches in the same four quart braiser and everything turns out just a little nicer.

    The veggies all in the pan, the tomato paste and garlic should be mixed in and fried up together to coat. Shortly after drop in the rice and let that coat up and come together with everything else in the pan. These two steps shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes.

    The saffron broth, wine, water, spices, chorizo, and cooked chicken now all go into the pan, come to a light boil, and then are simmered while covered to let the rice cook. You may need to stir this every five minutes or so just so the rice doesn’t get too crunchy on the bottom of the pan.

    Stir in the parsley when the rice is cooked and let it stand for a few minutes to set up before serving.

    This becomes a rich and delicious one-pan meal and it definitely makes me hope that some day I’ll find my way to Spain to compare it to a more traditionally authentic version of the recipe.