, , ,

Not As Easy as I had hoped.

The raw building material.

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.

/0 Comments/by
,

Scorched

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.

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , ,

You want me to what? Ok, if you insist.

Step one: Lots of heat

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.

/0 Comments/by
, ,

Crowding the pan – bacon-style

Go ahead, crowd it in there. Not going to make any difference how it cooks.

One exception to crowding a pan is bacon. You do have to place it on the bottom of the pan, but cramming it in there is nearly a rite of passage, at least in my household.

Of course, the worst is if you have 2 or 3 strips of bacon at the end, and they languish with all that extra space. Planning to crowd the pan is nearly as important as the execution. If you don’t get it right then the entire household can see your poor planning skills.

Never a good way to start the day, that’s for sure. On the other hand, as long as you don’t burn anyone (especially yourself) or over or (God forbid) undercook the bacon then the crowding transgression usually gets a pass.

/0 Comments/by
, , ,

Failure. Even if my family didn’t see it that way.

Not my best effort, but the arugula hid the worst of it. Gotta like greens for that sort of thing.

Not dignifying this with a photo, either. Well, ok, here is a shot from above. 

I burned the pizza last night. Both pies. 

In my defence (not that it helped much at the time and the failure does still sting, a little) I was cooking them over a charcoal fire in a thin metal kettle barbecue. It’s all we have here at the lake. I do have a pizza stone, though. We aren’t savages.

My technique is pretty crude: light a bunch of coals in the kettle, get them going really well, drop in the pizza stone, wait half an hour or so and then cook the pizza. 

This time I used lump charcoal, rather than briquettes. Man, that stuff burns hot. Like really hot. Like hotter than I expected. Ergo, the first pizza, as I was trying to get some heat on top (which, in retrospect, was just not going to happen in a contraption like that) burned rather badly. It was still really tasty, just, as my mother would say, “Crispy”. 

The second pizza was better, but the same thing happened again – a moment of inattention and it was black. Talk about a testament to the triumph of hope over experience. That annoying “Fool me once, won’t get fooled again” quote would also suffice. 

There is only one solution; try again. I’m getting better with barbecue pizza, but there is work yet to be done. 

On a positive note the customers weren’t too fussed. They ate it and didn’t give me a hard time. It’s nice when family is like that. In fact, they told me to stop beating myself up – that they enjoyed it and I should move on.

My wife brought up this post I showed her a while back. Apt.

/0 Comments/by
,

Meh

Not going to dignify my pizza dough failure with a photo. Actually, it isn’t a failure… yet. But still no photo.

I thought it had this figured out. Appropriate amounts of water, flour yeast, sugar, oil, elbow grease…

Still flummoxed about yeast, though. This time I used instant yeast as opposed to traditional yeast, and I used about twice as much as was called for in the recipe.

I put it into the fridge overnight… And I took a look just before lunch. The dough has risen. A bit, but it still resembles a large mass of wet flour. I put it on the counter for a few hours to see if we can get some levity. Uh, rise…

Same thing, really.

I have made this dough at least a dozen times. Probably 20, really. And I think I have been really happy with the results once. Maybe twice. The other times haven’t been terrible (with the notable exception of that one time when it tasted like rock-hard pita bread. Yeah, that wasn’t good) The other times haven’t been terrible but damn, it’s hard to get right.

Shouldn’t say that. Throwing together some ingredients and having them rise isn’t too hard. It’s the rise-in-the-fridge-overnight trick that I seem to be struggling with.

But the problem is that the dough tastes WAY better if it has had a few hours to think.

Speaking of which, I better get cracking on my tomato sauce.

**edit** Couple of hours later and the dough is still not resembling what I was hoping but a couple of things have come up:

  • My daughter, who has a birthday today, told me that my worst pizza is miles better than everyone else’s (Her words. Her birthday. Who am I to argue)
  • I’m not entirely sure what pizza dough is supposed to look like. I know, like dough. But all light and fluffy? Sort of wet? Lots of bubbles in there? Not very many? Thankfully, there are as many people to make pizza and pontificate on it as there are pizzas, so I’m pretty sure I can find someone who will agree that this is the proper way to make dough.
  • So the dough stays. I expect it’ll be a challenge to roll out, but who knows? I did give it a good knead, so hopefully that helped. How it might help, I’m not exactly sure, but I expect it’ll help.

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

But I have buffalo mozzarella, regular mozza, and some killer tomato sauce that I make myself, I do. So all is not lost.

/0 Comments/by
, , , ,

Homemade bread as a marker of social status – discuss.

In the Saturday Globe and Mail, Mark Kingwell wrote an article about how the bread making craze is a way for snobbery to manifest itself. I’m not entirely sure I’m getting this right. I have read the article many times but it’s a bit above me. And I have a degree in Art History. And I read all the time.

Basically, Kingwell sees the creation of all these sourdough loafs that are immortalized on social media as a manifestation of the snob class.

He says:

To be clear, I”m not really interested in the bread part of this equation. I have eaten bread from bakeries large and small, and also baked bread myself sometimes and eaten that. Bread is a great human achievement, sure. But like every aspect of everyday life it is also a pwn in a larger chess game of status.

Ok.

I guess.

He also says:

Well, go ahead and bake bread. But your homemade toast is a boast, and the food posts are a judgement, a declaration of authenticity. Also – here’s the kicker – so is the act of claiming that they aren’t. In fact, that last move is the ultimate attempt to leapfrog into meta-boasting and meta-judging.

Uh. What is meta-boasting? You know you’re in trouble with words like that when Duck Duck Go returns travel in Meta, Italy as the first response to that search query. And you’re in even deeper trouble if this article itself is the first non-Italian option as to what meta-boasting is.

I struggle with academic articles like this because I’m not entirely sure I’m being told off, but I do get the distinct impression that by sharing my bread photos I’m one of those nauseating, smug, baker-people. Judgemental and snobbish.

Here’s my take. I like bread. A lot. I think the whole notion of baking bread is brilliant, and I want to share. I especially want to share my successes, but I’m happy to share my failures, too. (although those last couple of loafs of sandwich bread will never see the light of day as long as I’m alive. God, those were awful.)

I get frustrated when I’m told that when I’m saying, “Hey, this worked!! Who knew?” I’m actually virtue signalling in some way. Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but I just don’t think so.

If I am, I apologize. And I plead by case by offering my usual defence: Cluelessness. I apologize if I’m being obnoxious, but I need someone to be a little more specific than this to guide me to being a better person. (Oh, the irony).

I comfort myself by knowing that when I tried to make a sourdough starter it was a dismal failure. The bread I bake is currently with yeast only. So, technically, given that Kingwell was talking about sourdough bread, I’m free to do as I please.

I’ll try sourdough again in a little while. When this all blows over.

/0 Comments/by