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Her favourite flavour is strawberry.

Doreen, with her strawberry ice cream.

I was asked to photograph Doreen McKenzie Sanders quite some time ago. She was, by this time, in her 80s and she was a delight to spend the afternoon with. I’m not sure who had the idea of photographing her with an ice cream cone – the store was a regular haunt with her, it would turn out – maybe she had the idea.

The shoot was fine – one of my best images came from it that day. It’s still in my portfolio easily 15 years later.

…but I want to talk about the ice cream for a moment. I want to talk about how we all have our favourites. When we went to shoot Doreen had the strawberry she is pictured with here. In fact, we had to have 2 cones to finish the shoot. She was allowed to eat the second one. Strawberry has never been my favourite ice cream flavour. Not by a long shot. I like strawberries and everything, but more in the context of breakfast. My ice cream choices are either salted caramel or raspberry cheesecake. My older daughter, who actually works in an ice cream store, would gag at those flavours, while chomping on Mango. My wife might agree with my older daughter, unless there is hazelnut in the store. My younger daughter? Well, when she was younger it was bubblegum. Now I’m not sure.

Regardless. We all have our favourites. And we are all convinced that our favourite is the best and that all the others pale in comparison. Food can be like that. Heck, life is like that but at least with food it’s generally a lot less problematic.

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Some things are universal

Watermelon is a hit with just about everyone.

I’m sure there are people who don’t like watermelon. Just like there are some people who don’t like coffee or tomatoes. They’re strange and probably untrustworthy, but what can you do?

However, for the rest of us, there are some universals. Watermelon is a universal. Put out a plate with kids and it vanishes in a cacophony of slurps and drips. If the older, non-seedless version of watermelon is involved, expect seeds to be spat at each other. Or flicked.

All bad behaviour is forgiven, though. Because it’s kids eating fruit. Raw. And here’s the kicker – I was listening to a radio show on the most nutritious fruit. Obviously guava came first, but second? Watermelon. The interviewer commented to the scientist that he thought watermelon was like flavoured water. The scientist agreed and was as surprised anyone how well it fared.

So, not only is it kids voluntarily eating fruit. It’s kids voluntarily eating really nutritious fruit. The perfect situation. Too bad it seems to happen so rarely. One always hopes that soon the kids will be banging back shucked oysters or eating a quinoa salad without any complaint, but while one is hoping for that, one might as well buy a lottery ticket and ask Santa for a Pony.

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Kitchen tools. Essential.

Oldies but goodies

Just don’t put them in the dishwasher, and they’ll last forever. Seriously. Knives, wooden spoons, measuring cups – all need to be washed by hand.

And they’ll last pretty much forever. This photo reminds me that I need a couple of smaller measuring cups. I have the metal ones for dry ingredients, but these glass ones are indispensable for a lot of cooking. The retro look of them doesn’t hurt, either.

But you have to wash them by hand. If you put them in the dishwasher after a while all of the lettering just rubs off. You can still see it, but if you’re like me (as in, your eyesight isn’t what it used to be) pretty soon it’ll be too hard to read the measurements. And then you’ll make a mistake. Not that I would know, or anything.

My current 4-cup measure is too big, except for large amounts. My current 2-cup measure is from my mom, and it’s Tupperware, which is fine… But plastic gets trashed in a kitchen pretty quickly and I do like the glass – if for no other reason than it’s easy to see what’s in there and how much is in there.

Kitchens deserve good tools. Heck, everyone deserves good tools and thankfully these measuring cups aren’t very expensive. I’m sure you could find a super-pricey set on some website, somewhere, but these are just fine. Preferable, in fact.

And it’s darn hard to break them, too. It’s possible, but not easy.

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Where does this food come from, anyway?

Grain elevator, Dorothy, Alberta.

The grain elevator in Dorothy is pretty darn cool. Check out those hills in the distance! I was driving by with my brother-in-law a few years back and we just had to pull over to take a photo. As far as I know, it’s still there and in OK shape.

But it brings up a question – one I can’t answer here given my lack of time to write, but one that I’ll pose anyway – how many of us actually know where our food comes from? In this case the grain was taken from the fields right nearby and then stored until the train showed up. Then (I believe) it was brought by truck to the elevator and the conveyor in the elevator would bring the grain up and fill the railcars. At least that’s my understanding. This elevator isn’t for storage – it’s for loading rail cars.

Then it would get moved off to market. There are all kinds of other themes here, too – transport, pooling of product, monocultures, organic farming (or the lack thereof)… The fact that it’s near-impossible to grow just a little bit of wheat and deal with it in any profitable way given the way the modern food markets work…

I took the photo for a number of reasons – namely that it was a really interesting view and I’m always worried that these vestiges will pass quietly away before they can be documented. I didn’t really take any time to think of the actual use of it until I wrote this post. Form following function, but beautiful nonetheless.

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Cucumbers. Well, they aren’t cucumbers, yet…

Brand-new cucumber plants. To be planted and then lovingly nurtured... And then who knows what will come next?
All 6 seeds germinated. I’m not sure what I’ll do with 6 cucumber plants, aside from have a lot of cucumbers…

My mother-in-law gave us some cucumber seeds. I planted 6 of them, and lo and behold, all 6 have germinated. I was asked to make (and I did) a sort of wooden obelisk (photo to come later, when it isn’t pouring with rain outside) upon which the cucumber plants can grow. The idea is that the cucumbers themselves will be kept out of the dirt and won’t be as likely to be ravaged by slugs and the like.

So, I’ll have lots of cucumbers. Apparently these plants are rather prolific.

And then what? It’s kinda like the proverbial zucchini plant. How do you know your neighbour has a zucchini plant? Well, they’ll arrive on a daily basis with gourds a-plenty. I fear cucumber is the same way, but you can’t grill them on the barbecue, you can’t make muffins or loaf out of them…

Pickles? Gherkins? Lots of salads? Not really sure what I’ll do if I have an embarrassment of cucumber riches, but I’ll deal with that if and when it happens. Currently, they’re about an inch high, so I best not get ahead of myself.

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Pizza Dough

I finally managed to make a decent dough for my pizza. Took a few tries to get it right. A friend of mine told me to write this down. Few thoughts:

The recipe often leaves things out. I remember chatting with a friend not that long ago and she commented that the biggest problem that chefs have with cookbooks is trying to make their recipes work for the home cook. It’s easy to do a pizza dough if you’re making 100 pies. Lot harder if you’re making 2 and trying to describe a process that you do every single day by memory into a few lines that the home cook can pick up and understand.

But here’s the trick: You have to proof the yeast. The dough I was making is an overnight in the fridge slow-rise dough and I had trouble getting a good rise ever since I started using this recipe. Sometimes it worked better than others, but generally it was pretty unimpressive. The recipe called for traditional yeast but neglected to remind you to let the yeast proof before you mix the whole works together.

What is proofing? Well, you need to make it active in water before you continue the recipe. Often it takes quite some time. Like 10 minutes or so. As in, mix water, sugar, yeast, oil together and then let it sit until you see activity. In my case it looked like someone was stirring the water, but the water was still.

At that point I mixed everything together and hey-presto, it worked like a charm. It rose overnight in the fridge and it rolled out and make a superior pie.

It was lucky, but it was also the product of making the dough at least a dozen times – including a particularly disastrous situation with the in-laws where the dough didn’t rise at all. Still tasted pretty good, and I wasn’t asking for the youngest daughter’s hand in marriage (thankfully that happened more than two decades previously) but still it was a bit embarrassing. Won’t let that happen again.

Soon.

Unless I’m rushing things.

Which I almost always do in the kitchen.

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I can’t remember what I was going to say

Wedding dress in Edinburgh, 2007

I had this brilliant post all laid out in my mind. This dress photo was going to be an analogy to what I was trying to say, and darn it, I can’t remember what I was going to say. I don’t think I was going to be talking about ‘always a bridesmaid’, because I generally don’t go for those analogies – it makes me look rather clueless and goodness knows we don’t need any more of that.

Maybe it was about the idea that things always look better when they’re behind glass. Print a photo. Put it in a frame behind glass and it takes on a certain gravitas that is noteworthy and amazing. It’s so simple and yet so effective.

Further to that, there is also something about things being just out of reach. Maybe I wanted to talk about how we often feel that recipe is just a little too hard, or where the hell do you get yeast flakes, anyway? Aside from Amazon, of course. Maybe the challenge of creating a meal – any meal – is overshadowed by the issues that surround it. Some personal, some systemic (time, ingredients, lack of an industrial deep fryer…)

I cook because in some cases I feel like I can’t not cook. It’s one of the few aspects of my life where I can’t not do it. But that doesn’t mean it comes easily to me. It doesn’t mean that I can conjure up things to eat out of thin air. I’m the worst for that. My wife is far better than I (in all aspects, but specifically here) when it comes to pulling together meals.

But the kids do need to be fed. And so do we, for that matter. Some sort of ‘healthy’ food. Regularly. Several times a day, in fact.

It’s hard to do, but the fact that it might appear to be behind some glass and unattainable is just a ruse. We can all do this, maybe not at the same level but that’s hardly the point. We all gotta eat, and we all have to play the hand we have been dealt.

Like every wedding it’s a lot more fun for the attendees than it is for the ones being married. Those dresses aren’t that comfortable, anyway. Better to have fun than to play by all the rules.

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Guess I should talk about the title of this blog

Not that it’s that earth-shattering. I live in Canada and dontcrowdthepan.com was already taken. But the link to the .com version of the title doesn’t get you anywhere. Maybe it’ll come up at some point. Maybe not. I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about the .com aspect of the site.

The saying comes from the idea that if you’re browning a piece of food in a pan and if you pack in too many pieces of food too close together (crowd the pan) then you won’t get good browning on the food. I’m not sure what the rationale is for this – scientifically – but it’s true. Happens to me all the time.

There is a bit more to it than that, though. I really struggle with getting good browning on my food when I’m cooking it. Maybe I’m too impatient. Maybe I pack in too many pieces of food in the pan. Maybe the pan isn’t hot enough. Maybe it just isn’t a priority.

It’s a simple thing to remember, but really hard to do in practice.

No one ever complains, either. If I don’t crowd the pan it’s for my benefit, not for my family. As long as I can get something on the table – that’s the priority.

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Organics. The organic orchards do look pretty…

You can tell it’s organic because of the grass below the trees. In a ‘regular’ orchard the grass doesn’t grow because they put down some sort of pesticide to kill it. Not sure why they even bother.

Organic food is something I don’t know much about – of course, that never really slowed me down in terms of making comments. I don’t go out of my way to buy organic unless it is bananas which, for some reason unknown to me, always seem to last longer and taste better.

Here are a few issues with organic: One, the grocery store (nearby me, independent, they have local produce unlike the Safeway not too much further away that brings in produce based on their supply chains in the USA. We get cranberries from Massachusetts. We have some of the largest cranberry bogs in North America about a 40-minute drive from my house. Yeah) …anyway, my local grocer – has organic produce but because they fear that people will try to pass it off as non-organic and pay the lower prices – have it wrapped in all kinds of plastic and labels.

I would sooner eat food from a non-organic farm or not at all than have to deal with the sort of packaging they put on that stuff. It’s organic, but it’s also encased in plastic. Kind of ironic, really.

Generally, I like local, fresh, and recognizable produce. Seasonal is nice, too. Raspberries in January are going to be expensive and unimpressive, no matter how cool it is to see them in the store. How they grow them, pick them, package them, fly them from Bolivia to Vancouver, drive them to the grocery store, stock them, and mark them up for less than a zillion dollars a pint is beyond me. But I ask the same questions about Australian wine.

Back to organic. I have had great organic produce. I have had some really forgettable organic food, too. I just wish I understood it better.

The bananas, though. They’re tasty.

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Salt. Simple and yet, so complicated

Maldon salt, my favourite type.

So my mom (hi mom) never cooked with salt. As in, for my entire childhood all of the food I ate was basically unsalted. We had a salt shaker on the table but it was one of those things that was made in the 1920s and in all likelihood the holes weren’t big enough to allow safe passage of most salt crystals. I don’t recall it ever being an issue. I don’t think my mom was trying to keep us from the evil of salt, it’s just that she never grew up with it herself, and she’s rather sensitive to it. It just wasn’t a priority.

In high school my P.E. teacher was joking around one day, talking about sitting in front of the TV, dipping vegetables into a bowl of salt and eating them. I remember going home and trying it out. I was amazed – it tasted incredible, right up until I overdid it. Story of my life, really.

My wife is a huge salt fan – for the last 25 years, everything in my kitchen has taken on new life with a sprinkle of salt. In the ensuing years my mom has let up a bit as well. She has some salt near her stove which she (judiciously) uses here and there.

I can overdo it, though. I remember making dinner for my folks and it was one of those situations where the sum total of all the salty ingredients (feta cheese, olives..) along with my sprinkling of too much of the salty stuff made for a meal that had me reaching for several glasses of water soon afterwards. Even I thought I overdid it on that one. Live and learn.

Mom ate it without comment. That’s love for you. But I knew enough not to repeat that episode. And I did, right up until I didn’t and over salted a steak I was cooking for them a while later. Again, no comment from mom. Still amazes me.

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