works of wanderlust

Tag: shopping for food

  • the cupboard of the real

    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…

    What is something you ate 25 years ago that you’d never eat now?

    Saying “never” is always a bit of a tall order. 

    See, I’d like to tell you that I am not a picky eater—and I think I’d be telling the truth writing that—and that depending on the circumstances (and my mood) I’d probably conclude that me in 2025 likely has a wider palate than me from twenty five years ago in 2000.  

    But I guess the vibe in this question-slash-thought experiment is leaning into what kinds of things I might lean into when I actively choose the food and tastes that make up my day-to-day eating habits now versus then… in which case I’d tell you that me in 2025 would probably lean into real ingredients and spices and flavours where me in 2000 would have been reasonably content with powdered mixes and faker foods and ready-to-eat frozen foods.  

    It’s not that I’d never eat those other things now, no. And also this post is not about food snobbism. I eat junk and fast food and convenient ready-to-serve stuff on the regular. 

    It’s just that when I am actively planning meals and prepping to feed myself and the fam in a clear state of mind, and with everything else being equal, I will make my pasta sauces from tomatoes and herbs and onions and garlic… and not from a little red pouch of powder with a picture of spaghetti on the front, as I would have even a decade ago. I would make pizza dough from flour and yeast, and grate my own cheese and slice my own toppings, I wouldn’t pull a square box out of the freezer and heat up the oven.

    Et cetera, et cetera…

    It’s those types of things run amok in my cooking in 2025: choosing to take an extra effort to make “real” meals when I have the time and resources to do so, rather than quicker “faker” options.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • ohhhh … ‘merica

    I’ve been thinking about our recent trip to (and back from) Florida and how it fits into the core context of this blog … because, frankly, it doesn’t much, really.

    I mean, I ran. I raced in three official races with start lines and medals and free bananas at the end and everything. This, of course, is something I consider on topic for this blog.

    I also did a lot of sketching in my off hours. I’ve written a bit about sketching in the past, and so again, that’s something that is mostly on topic as well.

    But then the rest of the time I spent in and around a theme park. I didn’t cook. I didn’t camp. I didn’t season a single cast iron pan. And to be completely honest, what we did wasn’t so much “travelling” as it was “vacationing.”

    Or, to be fair, the trip was split about ninety-ten vacation to travel.

    The travel parts? Well, for example, we made a couple trips to Florida grocery stores to stock up on quick breakfasts and race fuel and cheap drinking water.

    For the most part, shopping for food in a foreign country is pretty routine. But I’ve been in food stores all over Europe and the UK, Iceland, and multiple places throughout North America.

    And it’s the little things that throw you off.

    Like, for example in the UK, eggs are not refrigerated.

    No big deal, but it’s just enough jarring to remind you that you are in a foreign country.

    In Florida (albeit I took the photos attached to this post two days before New Years Eve) I could have loaded up my basket with as many fireworks as I could carry. Back in Canada fireworks are treated like Grade A contraband with (I assume) thirty seven pages of government paperwork required to even discuss buying fireworks, let alone actually exchanging hard cash for explosives alongside my blueberry muffins.

    As my daughter pointed out, mostly because we wouldn’t let her buy any, there were also a lot of doughnuts to be had among the shelves and aisles of the two markets where we shopped.

    One particular Publix where we bought our first round of groceries was an anchor store for a cluster of smaller stores, one of which was a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop. Yet, fear not, those same doughnuts could be purchased inside the grocery store saving busy shoppers a five minute stroll to the stand-alone doughnut store.

    None of this is judgemental, by the way.

    I mean, I’ll take a fried egg and some sourdough toast over a glazed doughnut for breakfast every time. Ten times out of ten. Not interested in chocolate frosting with my morning coffee. But then that’s how I was raised and what I like, and that’s why we travel … to see those little cultural differences, no?

    Back inside the park there was a cultural uniformity that comes from existing inside the boundaries of a massive corporate juggernaut like Disney World for nearly two weeks. One tends to forget for a bit that it takes effort to actually leave the park, when even back at one’s pirate-themed hotel room, one is still in Disney, enveloped by the intellectual property and profit-driven fantasy world of such a vacation.

    Yet, even in that, snippets of travel are possible, and as simple as exploring a more real part of the country and culture surrounding that park with something as simple as a trip to buy fruit and cheese at the grocery store.