But about as easy as I expected – namely not easy at all.
I’m working on a side-hustle, trying to exploit all my hard-won knowledge surrounding cooking, baking, making YouTube videos…
I cook every day. I bake… Rarely… I make YouTube videos even more infrequently but that is more because of the astonishing amount of work that goes into producing an even half-good video rather than my inability to get things shipped out the door.
The side hustle is a series of videos on making gingerbread houses and selling templates for the houses. I don’t plan on making much money from it, but I do want to learn more about e-commerce, sales, production, that sort of thing. Photography hasn’t been that busy recently and I wanted to fill in the cracks with something a little different.
I won’t be set up for this Christmas, but that’s ok. I can only move so quickly on this project and I certainly don’t want to make too many (expensive, time consuming mistakes)
But I have made a few mistakes. It hasn’t been easy, this project. Harder than I expected, actually.
Editing video, especially if you’re not very good at it, takes a long time.
Being a perfectionist also slows one down, somewhat
Learning as you go isn’t too bad unless there is a camera rolling and you say one thing and then quickly learn that it isn’t quite what you thought.
YouTube puts videos without any context or help at the absolute bottom of the heap.
There is a lot to learn, a lot to do and a lot to re-do and re-do yet again until it works, somewhat.
And there is a lot more to go.
I was wondering this afternoon if it was all worthwhile. I have no idea, but so far it has been interesting, if nothing else. For now I’ll keep going.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2021-10-12 21:48:512021-10-12 21:48:53Not As Easy as I had hoped.
I didn’t make it, but it was fantastic all the same. Maybe because I didn’t make it…
Yes.
Now that is out of the way, now that we are done with the dinner, I think some musing on Thanksgiving are in order. Not the existential commentary on what we’re thankful for (healthfamilykidslife) but more musing on the zeitgeist of producing a turkey dinner and just how much suffering has to go into the creation of it.
In Canada we generally have two yearly occasions for turkey: Thanksgiving and Christmas. It feels like I have had more than my share of turkeys and several of those I have made myself. In fact, one Thanksgiving about 15 years ago we had 3 turkey dinners in 3 days – none of which I had to cook. Thereafter it was known as the tri-turkey weekend and we promised ourselves (that is, my wife and I) we would never do it again. Mae West might have been on to something but when it comes to turkey you can have too much. The Thanksgiving following the tri-turkey weekend we spent at a beach apartment in Tofino on Vancouver Island – one of the most amazing places on this planet. It remains one of the most magical Thanksgivings we have ever had. Oh, I boiled up some crab for dinner that year. It was epic.
This year my folks could finally come for dinner and we had them over along with my nephew who is studying nearby. They joined my family – my older daughter was back from university for the weekend. Plus the dog, of course. Her counter-surfing is shameless but rather impressive in its effectiveness.
I digress. We did the turkey in the oven following the recipe out of The Best Recipe cookbook. Ditto on the gravy and the stuffing. The brussels sprouts were a recipe from Nightingale Restaurant here in Vancouver (roasted, with concord grapes) and the squash was from the cookbook Nopi, by Yotam Ottolenghi. Mashed potatoes were done by the spud-master himself, my father. My kids snickered (actually snickered. It was audible) when I suggested I could mash the potatoes. Apparently there were plans in place to stage a coup if I reached for the potato masher. That’s the thanks you get for being in the kitchen all day. Cranberry sauce was the recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook.
Everything was… Perfect. Well, the bird was cooked about an hour too early but a large metal mixing bowl and a beach towel took care of that issue. It rested. For quite some time. I also scorched the bread for the stuffing (I don’t stuff the bird – you get a better tasting turkey when it isn’t stuffed). That required a bit of fancy footwork, but we avoided catastrophe. (Lucky). Besides, what were the guests going to do? Not pay the bill? Put a negative review on Yelp? Feel free.
It got me thinking, as these things sometimes do, about festive meals gone by and how they seem to have an importance much more than what one might find at a non-festive meal. It isn’t Christmas time yet, so I don’t want to get too carried away about how challenging Christmas can be, but for Thanksgiving (and we’re talking Canadian Thanksgiving – a lite version of the American holiday, for sure) it’s rather interesting.
How important is authenticity? What I mean by that is how important is it for things to be from scratch and to be from the hand of the chef? My mother often talks about how great it would be to order everything from Whole Foods and have it delivered, ready to eat. But then in her defence she has done more than her fair share of turkey dinners and many of the early ones for her involved intoxicated family members arguing vehemently over the design of the flag (the Maple Leaf, that is) or whether or not the Prime Minister was a communist.
Can you imagine trying to put the dinner on the table in that household? And would you get any thanks for it afterwards? I somehow doubt it. Any food item would suffice in those circumstances.
Thankfully sober heads prevail these days and I can cook with relative abandon.
This year’s choice of pie, though, got me thinking. What happened is that Rosa, who cuts my wife’s hair and who has excellent taste in fine food, suggested that a local chain restaurant not known to me for their pumpkin pies had fantastic pumpkin pie. Worthy of buying and serving to guests and close family, no less.
And it was excellent. The turkey was fabulous as well, even if it wasn’t organic. Still cost $85, though.
But to what end must one go for the perfect mashed potatoes? Or the perfect brussels sprouts? (full disclosure, I like brussels but they do need to be roasted to near-oblivion and a good dose of bacon never hurt).
If it is about the family and if I’m fairly certain the reviews will be good regardless of the level of ingredients then perhaps it’s not out of the question to buy the pie once in a while. Or to just bake the damn brussels and be done with them.
But I draw the line at a processed turkey, pre-stuffed and cooked from frozen. That’s heresy. My mother-in-law had one a couple of years ago. I don’t know what got into her. Perhaps she has tired of the unending work involved in getting a Thanksgiving dinner on the table. She is 80, after all.
And now I must grudgingly admit that the turkey was amazing. Must have been the hand of the chef. It’s the only possible explaination.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2021-10-11 23:03:182021-10-11 23:03:20Should I have made the pie?
Yesterday I took an opportunity to go and see a photography show on at The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver. I got a ride downtown and then we zipped across the harbour on the Seabus, wandered in to the magnificent building and took a look at what was on offer.
It was rather interesting. Of course they had typical images such as Edward Weston’s Pepper and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Sunday on the Banks of the River Seine’. The show also had images from Martin Parr and other notable photographers.
Of course you can’t include everything one might want to see in a show about food photography. They did the best they could to show a broad range of images, but personally speaking, when half of the images need to have the blurb next to them read in order to understand the context or what the viewer is looking at, it might be time to reconsider some of the images.
One thing I loved was the image by Sharon Core of a tableaux looking all the world like an old-master painting. Apparently aside from being an excellent photographer she also grows her own heirloom fruit and vegetables in order to perfectly re-create paintings from several hundred years ago. That’s dedication.
It did cross my mind that they also could have included an instagram image of pretty much anyone who has a zillion followers. That would have been the embodiment of a lack of dedication.
Regardless, the show did make me think and, most importantly, it made me want to pick up my camera, which is always a good sign.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2021-05-31 15:15:322021-05-31 15:16:10Not quite what I expected, although I’m not sure what I expected
When it comes to cooking I’m more a technician than a planner. I think of myself as a ‘Man of Action’ rather than a ‘Man of Ideas’ although I have enough of the latter to make myself appear in equal parts annoying and dangerous.
Regardless, I do a lot of the cooking – and my lovely bride does most of the planning. It’s a process that works out rather well, actually.
Things do fall through the cracks, from time to time, though. Generally we read through the recipe ingredients and make sure we have it all, but recently we missed the listing of chia seeds as part of a salad we had planned to do.
Of course I was 90% of the way through the salad before I noticed the listing of chia seeds. After humming the jingle from the Chia Pet ads, I figured before I give up looking I had best at least take a look. I did build the (too small, filled up too quickly) spice cabinet, after all.
So I looked under ‘c’ and sure enough, there they were.
Of course.
Filled to overflowing before a single day of owning it. Next time I’m making it twice as big.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2021-03-22 15:17:292021-03-22 15:17:31Do we have…?
Not a fan of the name – ‘micro greens’. I keep thinking that they’ll be tiny little plants and the only way you can eat them would be on a massive white plate with a small pile of them in the centre. Kinda 1990s era nouveau cuisine.
Aside from the name, though, they’re rather cool. We planted some pea shoots which, well, shot up and grew so fast we couldn’t keep up. Next time I’ll plant them a few every day.
We also have some baby kale, and something else that I didn’t recognize but tastes rather good.
If you like salad and live in Canada, like I do, then these grow light contraptions for micro greens are rather cool. As long as you stay on top of them, the greens keep on coming. The grow-op that we have also has a nifty contraption for keeping the plants watered. Once every two weeks you can fill a bin and the water wicks up. It’s brilliant.
And if you really hate the name ‘micro greens’ just don’t harvest them for a few days. They turn macro rather quickly. But then they get unwieldy and the flavour suffers somewhat.
This is what happens when you let your mind wander
Ok, the caption on the photo isn’t quite right. The above is what happens when you let your mind wander and you don’t set a timer.
Once, many years ago, I forgot a pot on the stove at my mother-in-law’s house. I was reducing some sauce and headed out the door in a clueless moment without a thought to what I was doing only a few minutes before.
Then I remembered I had left it on the stove and I tried to call someone at the house to see if they could take it off the heat. By that point it had already been found by another family member, all dried out and in a rather bad way, sauce-wise.
Incredibly, I actually managed to resurrect it. I felt rather fortunate about dodging that bullet.
And my luck went downhill after that. I remember my mother reminding me to crack the oven door a little bit when I was broiling things as it gets rather hot in there rather quickly, and before you know it your broiling will turn to charring.
But the oven door let out too much heat, I argued. When I had the opportunity, I broiled with the door closed. Things certainly moved more quickly, that’s for sure. So much so that after clearing all the smoke out of the main floor of the house, I promised myself that I would set a timer every time I broiled anything. Same for anything I was cooking, especially if it was over high heat. I kept nattering on to my kids about not turning their back on a pot on the stove, set a timer, pay attention… You don’t want to burn anything.
And I took my own advice right up until I didn’t. Mercifully, I had more pine nuts in the pantry and no one else happened to be in the kitchen and had to know about my hot pan oversight. But you see? This is what happens when you get cocky. Your perfectly browned pine nuts end up biting you in the ass. It was the stove version of a marshmallow over a bonfire. I spent a ton of time and effort getting a perfect brown char all over and then in a moment of inattention I set it aflame.
Secretly, I’m always a little relieved when I make a mistake like this. It was relatively harmless (although pine nuts are horribly expensive) and it reminded me to be careful and pay attention. When a lesson like that comes along I always try to heed the message. At least a little bit.
For my mom, candied ginger, this ginger, that ginger – everything goes… If a recipe calls for ginger she’ll add twice what is called for.
She has been making gingerbread from the same recipe, year after year. I’m not sure where the actual recipe is from, but given that we have made about a zillion batches of gingerbread, I’m going to say it’s an old family recipe.
And it is great. Best gingerbread on the planet if I do say so, myself. Or if I say so for her benefit. Every other time I have had gingerbread it has lacked something. No idea what, but it doesn’t matter. Mom’s gingerbread rocks and however she does it – the ginger is exactly the right amount.
There is more, though. Her gingerbread is structural as long as you cook it long enough for it to get a bit crunchy. It holds together in house-form perfectly.
So that said, about 20 years ago mom started doing gingerbread houses for her kids (us) and our cousins. I always thought that everyone did gingerbread houses like ours – you know, built like a bunker and perfect for decorating with zillions of candies. Then, once the candies had all been pried off, the gingerbread was there for the eating. It does get a bit stale but every year there doesn’t seem to be much left no matter how dry the air in the house might be.
This year she decided that this year would be her last year to build the houses. I don’t blame her, as it’s a lot of work. She did, however, go out in style, making 11 houses for all the young relatives. Quite the swan song.
Now, I would be remiss in not mentioning that the gingerbread house creative process is a team effort. My mom makes the dough and crafts the pieces for the houses; my dad takes care of quality control in the form of sampling the off-cuts and he is in charge of trimming the slabs and gluing the houses together.
He uses melted sugar. It hardens like hard candy and it’ll hold slabs of gingerbread in perfect harmony even with a couple pounds of gummy bears and icing. What is more, it’ll stand for days on end. The only drawback is that things get a bit sticky when you’re demolishing the house, but that sort of goes with the territory.
They have a system set up, honed from years of practice. How long to bake the gingerbread slabs; how to fix any breaks; how to trim to size; how to assemble properly and not burn yourself… It’s a rather impressive process.
Now we just have to get them to write it down so we don’t lose the technique. It’s golden. Best gingerbread and best gingerbread houses around made with love from a great team.
Are there any cuisines, world-wide, where there isn’t a treat of some sort that you can have with your coffee?
So I had a rough couple of days. Nothing earth-shattering, just those days where it’s hard to keep your mind straight because of some issues, here and there.
A friend (Joe) who has a studio a hundred feet from my studio (down the hall and up a flight of stairs) offered me a cup of coffee. He just bought himself a stellar espresso machine and was well on his way to match any shot from any decent coffee shop pretty much anywhere. I was happy to accept.
We talked – about this and that – some about my concerns, some about coffee, some about lighting and photography, about the view…
And then he brought out a small loaf, he said, “my mom made this”.
Mrs. Borrelli, his mom, came to Canada from Italy, gosh, in the 1960s? She never got around to learning much English. I have met her before and she is lovely.
And my goodness can she bake. It’s not biscotti. It’s too soft. Joe couldn’t remember what it was called, but he sliced off a couple of pieces for the two of us and we enjoyed it with our coffee. Apparently she sweetens it with honey. The flavour is subtle but sublime.
Conversation, great coffee and a biscuit to go along with it. I can’t imagine a more perfect way to spend a few minutes on a rainy November morning.
Takes even longer if the butter is cold. Don’t ask me how I know that.
I was asked to make cookies. Actually, my wife was making cookies and I stepped in when she had a call with a family member. The call was long enough that I got through the whole batch of cookies. Making these cookies got me thinking…
Thinking about my aunt Hylda. Hylda was my dad’s aunt – his mother’s sister. She took care of my dad and his siblings when my grandmother was convalescing after losing a lung to tuberculosis. My grandmother living into her 80s is something miraculous that I will always be grateful for.
Hylda would take care of us kids, too. When I was young, I never realized how close my dad was to my aunt and how much of a role she had played in his young life – if I had, I would have probably been nicer to her. She and I didn’t have a particularly combative relationship, but we certainly didn’t see eye to eye. She didn’t suffer fools gladly and I was just the right age, and enough of an insufferable fool to, well, you know.
She tolerated me well enough, but she really liked my older sister, Rosemary. This isn’t a case of ‘you were loved better than me’ – it was a point of fact. A fact that I’m happy to acknowledge. They had a great trip to England one time and there were all kinds of fun times which I was pretty happy to just not be a part of.
Anyway, Aunty Hylda would come and take care of us after school. She would make sure we didn’t kill each other and she would keep us fed with all kinds of baked goods. She never married, as she had lost a boyfriend ‘during the war’ and just never really got around to finding another. Can’t say I blame her, after surviving that time in history all bets are off.
We never spoke about it. Not that it was any of my business. We learned that his last name was the same as hers – Chambers – and that he was an air gunner on a Lancaster bomber that was lost over Germany in 1943. She was a Spitfire mechanic and they met at the airfield, apparently. He had asked her to marry him and she had said that she would agree once he met her family. He was lost a few days later in a raid that took the bomber to Munich, which was about as far as a Lancaster could go from an air base in England.
He was her third boyfriend who was lost. ‘Red’, as he was known, (officially Walter Owen Earl) faded away, except in memory. No one knew anything about him. Hylda died in 1988, never having known much more about Red, except that he was gone forever.
He was gone, that was true, but there is a ton of information on him. In a very strange stroke of luck I had a conversation one evening with a fellow and we were talking about wartime service from our families. He mentioned there was a book on Canadian airmen who had been lost and he offered to look Red up.
We found Red. He is buried in Durnbach Cemetery near Bad Tolz, in Southern Germany. He is buried with the other members of his flight crew who perished on the 7th of September, 1943.
My dad and I went to visit in 2007. God, it was a while ago. It was a lovely day in Germany and we found the grave without any trouble. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission does an amazing job keeping the cemeteries in perfect (and I mean perfect) condition.
We brought some of Hylda’s ashes so they could finally be together.
And so every year, about this time (near Remembrance Day in Canada – November 11th) I think about Red and Hylda. And I take advantage of the ancestry.com offer of free access to their war records to see if I can find anything more about him.
This year I downloaded basically his entire military file – mostly forms and details. Red was a typical guy, had a couple of issues with being AWOL but not too bad (docked a day’s pay). He was “Of good appearance. Keen and alert, nervous temperament. Good physique and carriage. Capable of full flying duties. Air Gunner”.
Guess you didn’t have too high a bar to cross to be able to blast away at incoming fighters.
His service record is full of entries, this and that. And, of course, the last one is ‘Presumed Dead 7-9-43’. I fear whoever wrote that entry wrote it often.
Red was a simple guy. Only son of a widow, 30 years old, salesman for a sewing machine company.
When I cream butter and sugar together to make a few dozen chocolate chip cookies to keep my teenagers from starving, I think of Hylda.
I think of how she used to cream the sugar and butter together with a wooden spoon, even though we had all kinds of electrical devices in the house. It was her way of making it just right.
I don’t have the patience for that, I use beaters and suffer the indignity of imperfectly creamed butter and sugar in my cookies. Still an insufferable… Well, you know.
I think I would have enjoyed Red’s company. We probably wouldn’t have much in common, except that we would probably eat too many fine cookies, which is as good a common ground as you can ever ask for.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2020-11-04 14:14:022020-11-04 15:31:08Apparently using a wooden spoon makes it harder to do. But taste better.
I’m a sucker for rationalizing an expensive purchase. I do it more than I care to admit, but I have to say that I think the math usually works out in my favour.
For instance, I just re-did a bunch of stuff in my backyard. New back fence, new roof on the garage, new flagstone patio. As far as I’m concerned, the money I saved by doing the work myself more than covers the rather expensive cedar I used in the fence and also covers the rather needless ridge vent that I installed in the garage. The garage is cooler in the summer, for sure, but it was by no means necessary. A building inspector wouldn’t have failed the work without it and the fence would have been fine if I had bought some pre-made panels.
The more I think about it, the more I can find these rationales in my life. Make dinner at home? Rationalize a decent bottle of wine. (but not a super expensive one because I just can’t quite get there)
However, for coffee I can spend into oblivion without even thinking about it. To wit, my current setup: A Rocket R58 and a Eureka Atom grinder. The coffee machine dealer had a deal on – 20% off or something like that and although it was more than I wanted to pay, I knew a couple of things:
Coffee is like $5 a cup at a coffee shop.
I like coffee and I drink a lot of it.
Oh, and my kids have started drinking coffee from time to time, as well.
The Eureka grinder keeps track of how many double shots of espresso it has ground. A few days ago we passed 1000 double shots.
At $5 per coffee, the machine has more than paid for itself. Of course, I’m leaving out inputs and the fact that if there is a coffee machine nearby I drink a lot more coffee.
Regardless, even if we cut it in half I’m well on my way to paying the system off in a few short months.
Then I’ll have to find another purchase to rationalize. I have been eyeing a new gas range…
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2020-10-26 13:09:432020-10-26 13:09:45At this rate, soon I’ll be rich!
