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?
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 not sure I can identify any of those greens. They were tasty, even if they were a mystery.
So typical. I’m not even sure why I was surprised, as this is a regular situation at my mother-in-law’s place. We were up over the weekend closing up the cabin. *sigh* When we left, it was decided that facing yet another awful fast-food meal on the drive home was more than we could handle. My wife made some quick egg salad and my mother-in-law cracked open her collection of lettuce from her garden to put on the sandwiches. I think she used one of each leaf she had. I bet there are half a dozen different greens on that sandwich.
Tasted great, I’ll admit. But I’ll also admit that I nearly burst out laughing when I saw the collection. My mother-in-law does nothing in half-measures.
Her father was in France, and he was supposed to be home for May.
I’m not particularly nostalgic. Wait, never mind, I can’t possibly defend that. I’m not excessively nostalgic. Much better.
I had an opportunity to do some work in a city in the centre of the province – Kamloops. Nice place, amazing scenery – it’s actually a desert – gets about 2 inches of rain per year. Three hours north of the border. Strange place, Canada.
Kamloops is about an hour’s drive from Salmon Arm, where my father grew up. He emigrated with his family after WWII. They came from Birmingham, or what little was left of it after the War.
My brother commented once that our grandfather wasn’t much of a traveler. However, he did pick up and move his family to Western Canada from the middle of England, which as far as my brother was concerned (and I agree with him) probably used up all of my grandfather’s wanderlust – what little there might have been of it.
I knew both grandparents rather well. My mother (for which I will be eternally grateful to her for) insisted that we get to know them. As a consequence spent a lot of time with them, and with my aunt Hylda, my grandmother’s sister, who was the one who actually found Salmon Arm and got them to move West.
To the title of this post – my lament is that I didn’t pay near enough attention when my grandmother was cooking. Well, baking. She could do a decent meal, even though she was British (ha) but my God, could she bake a pie.
I lament I didn’t pay more attention. It wasn’t up to her to show me her secrets – which she would have done, no question. It was up to me. I lament that the dominant paradigm was that men (and boys) just didn’t spend much time in the kitchen and were never really asked to help or given much instruction. I close my eyes and I really want to picture her making her pastry. I think I can remember her rolling it out, and I certainly remember this great floral apron she had. I remember the tiny kitchen of their split-level house; I remember the fact that there was no dishwasher and we all had to take turns washing dishes – thankfully my gender didn’t preclude me from that task. But picturing her deft touch with the pastry eludes me.
I really want to ask her about her cherry pie. And her apple pie… And the pumpkin pies she used to make…
I want to know how she did it. How she survived the unrelenting bombing; survived having measles when she was 3 and losing an eye ; surviving tuberculosis and living for decades with only one lung… And, of course, how her pastry was just so much better than anyone else’s. The British Reserve was in play, of course. Not for the pastry, but for the rest of it, definitely. And she didn’t want to talk about such things. She was always much more interested in politics and current events.
I can find the perfect pie recipe in a book, but of course it’s not quite the same thing.
Actually there were other cookies. My mother made Lunch Box cookies that were pretty darn tasty, too.
…but these! These chocolate chip cookies rule. They are just the right amount of chewy and substantive, with enough oatmeal to make you *think* you’re eating something that isn’t terrible for you. The 4 cups of sugar (but only 2 cups of white sugar. Brown for the other 2 cups) in the recipe and the 4 cups of chocolate chips don’t do anything to help the healthy street-cred of these treats.
I think it was my grandmother’s recipe, on my mother’s side. Which is noteworthy, because my mom never really talks about her mother and her mother’s cooking. I get the impression that things in mom’s childhood home weren’t really that great kitchen-wise (and, quite possibly in other ways) which is why my mom had to cook from an early age and (possibly) why she never really cared for it. Being forced to cook is a different beast than choosing to cook.
At any rate, my maternal grandmother’s recipe. If it’s not the case then it really doesn’t matter. Honestly, I don’t have it in front of me but I’ll try to post it when I track it down.
Regardless, they are a challenge to make, as the recipe makes enough batter for like 5 dozen cookies. Thankfully, having that many tidbits means the sugar and chocolate chips are spread out among a great number of final cookies.
My mom made these continuiously when I was growing up. My brother and I ate them faster than she could make them. We lived on them. Before school, after school. In later years it was with a cup of coffee (heck, it was my pre-breakfast snack this morning, but I limited myself to just one rather than the half-dozen I would have when I was 12)
it wasn’t long before I was making them, myself. I would churn out a batch on a regular basis. Once I made them a few times it got to the point where they were always the same. Same process, same ingredients (which were always stockpiled – thanks mom!) and 9 minutes in the oven at 375. My wife made the most recent batch – she was achieving superstar status yesterday with both a batch of cookies and a huge pot of hamburger soup. (another post will be forthcoming regarding that recipe)
The cookie I had this morning – It brought me directly back to my parents’ kitchen 4 decades ago. Tasted exactly the same way, and I had exactly the same response.
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.pngAlastair2020-08-31 12:54:422020-08-31 12:54:44My childhood, contained in a single cookie.
When my family and I visited London last year, a friend insisted that we go to Nopi. He told me that we could sit anywhere – even the basement was fine. And so we made reservations and went. We did end up downstairs, sitting at a massive marble table, surrounded by racks of storage for the kitchen.
Dinner was amazing. I remember being totally blown away and even the kids thought it was great.
We came back to Vancouver and at some point in the following months I ordered the restaurant cookbook.
I might have been in a bit of a funk, post-London. It might have been the grey fall weather. Maybe I needed some new eyeglasses. Possibly all three, but in any case I found the cookbook really unimpressive. I looked through the recipes and nothing jumped out at me at all. It felt like the entire volume was not to my palate.
But I decided I had better try something, so I settled on the ‘Burnt Green Onion Dip with Curly Kale’.
Holy cow. I was absolutely amazed. Other recipes have followed and they have been roundly incredible. The only drawback is that if you want to cook any of the meals you had best read the recipe really carefully several days in advance because some things take several days to create. The ‘Strained Ricotta with Blackcurrant Compote and Rhubarb’ takes a week to make, I swear. It’s worth it, but man, days pass.
But I’m writing about the burnt onions. The intro to the recipe states:
“One important point to remember: there’s no such thing as overcharring your onions, so hold your nerve at the grill… The more burnt they are, the better and more smoky they will taste.”
After charring my pizza, this was music to my ears. I love recipe instructions like that.
Getting there – need a bit more time
I love the idea of not being able to go too far when cooking something. I guess it’s like roasting eggplant. More is better.
Of course, I do wonder if maybe I should have kept them on the grill for longer? There always seems to be something to improve upon.
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.pngAlastair2020-08-28 11:41:572020-08-28 11:43:09You want me to what? Ok, if you insist.
Boy, we have this question a lot in our house. Sometimes it comes from me, sometimes from the kids, sometimes my wife. Strangely, the dog only worries about whether or not she is going to be fed, not what it will be. I guess years of kibble will do that to anyone.
But what a loaded question for the humans in the house:
Sometimes it’s a request for information, as in, “Can you check the calendar and see what we have on for dinner tonight?”
Sometimes it’s a gauge as to whether or not one (or both) of the kids are interested in sticking around or figure it’s not worth the wait. Ever wonder why we don’t have any meals that everyone hates but ‘should’ eat? It’s because no one would show up to enjoy it with me. And I’m not eating liver and onions alone.
Sometimes, though, it carries a lot more weight. Sometimes it’s a plea, “Please figure out what we’re going to eat this evening, as everyone will be hangry and I just don’t have the resources (time and mindspace) to figure it out.”
The first two options are easy to field. For the third, thankfully, we usually have a few dinner items in the freezer for times like these. Tomato sauce and meatballs isn’t particularly pretty (visually or health-wise) as a dinner but it feeds everyone and it means we don’t have to spend a bomb on ordering in marginal, lukewarm food. I’m not sure how things are in your town, but having something delivered from a restaurant in Vancouver is generally underwhelming.
Thankfully, dinner plans at our house haven’t yet involved Biblical serpents and the knowledge that we brought down the entirety of civilization, but there is a certain raised stress level until we can figure it out. Once dinner plans are in place, the day is easier to tolerate.
Of course, if a certain someone forgets to pull something out of the freezer or pick up ingredients at the grocery store then it’s all for naught. Not that I would ever have had that happen to me. Nope.
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.pngAlastair2020-08-27 13:24:132020-08-27 13:24:15What’s for Dinner?
