works of wanderlust

Intersecting Lines and Paths

Sunday Runday and on my nine kilometer trek through the asphalt ribbons of my neighbourhood I once again ran solo through the spring sunshine.

Except I didn’t, not really.

I kicked off along the long curved edge of the park near my house and dodged and passed a familiar face walking her puppy on a Sunday morning. We’ve chatted in the past when our dogs greeted each other on walks.

I ducked into the short connecting trail that squeezes between the two rows of houses, and waved to a neighbour I know biking with his kids in the opposite direction.

I turned onto the asphalt trail climbing up to the footbridge over the freeway and paused for half a minute to talk to one of my running crew friends descending the same path and making his way toward the river valley.

I sped along under the power lines then turned back onto the south-bound road, passing the house of one of my old running pals who was sitting on a bench on her porch and waved to me as I ran by.

I crossed at the traffic lights, and started the third long leg of my run down the path leading beside the main road and waved to another runner who was wearing the same race t-shirt as I had on.

I looped around the lake on the final leg of my run and shortcut across the field to catch up with a woman with whom I frequently run, out on her own Sunday runday run, and we walked the last hundred meters to my house as she waved goodbye.

In a week or so I am hopeful that we can start to put the long list of mandatory solo runs behind us, but while I may still be running alone as of this morning I’ve already had to stop claiming I’m lonely. All these intersecting lines and paths have made short work of that.

May 23, 2021
Campfire Salsa

I’ve been looking for an excuse to break away from the purely carnivore approach I’ve thus far taken with my backyard firepit culinary experimentation.

I may like my fire-grilled meats, but I’ve also had some great vegetarian fare that partook of the smoke and flame. And here I’m thinking well-beyond the starches like wrapping a potato in some aluminum foil to sit in the hot coals or pan-frying some mushrooms atop the heat. Both are excellent, of course, but I was hoping to branch out and be a little more adventurous.

Inspiration struck from a variety of sources, but the mere notion of getting some peppers over a bed of charcoal got ramped up to a full-blown idea when a Youtuber I watch spun up a wicked salsa recipe over the fire in his backyard.

A trip to the local grocer found me with the following fresh ingredients:

4 vine-ripened tomatoes 1 head of garlic 1 medium white onion 1 large spicy pepper 1 sweet yellow bell pepper 2 limes 1 bag of locally made tortilla chips

The Roast-ening

The ultimate plan was to cook up some seasoned flank steak that could be chopped up as a kind of psuedo-barbacoa taco filling and to make a full meal centred around that same theme. The salsa would be the side dish and filler, and a necessary one for tacos some might say.

I got a fire ready and let the wood burn down for a good hour before I dared put any actual food on it. I’ve learned some tough lessons over the last month when it comes to being too anxious to get your grub on the flames.

I will admit I got a little cautious with my yellow pepper and pierced the skin with a knife as it sat among the other sizzling veggies. The bell pepper seemed to have a life of its own, rocking to and fro on the cast iron grills. I’d just watched a video last night about food bursting explosively from overheating so I was feeling nervous as my blackening pepper seemed to hiss and crackle over the coals.

Fire roasting vegetables, by the way, smells amazing. I didn’t think I’d notice much, but the heat brought out the scents of the garlic and the onions and the tomatoes as I hovered nearby tending and turning them. Yum!

When it was all done I brought them inside to cool and finish the preparation.

(Garlic stays really hot, I will tell you. Even after ten minutes when I accidentally touched the core of the garlic stem I burned the tip of my finger!)

Char scraped, seeds scrapped, and stems sidelined, all the good roasted bits went into the food processor with some salt. I squeezed the roasted limes in too, and even put in a bunch of the pulp which flowed eagerly out of the rind. Pulse blend magical.

Result… a mild and delicious salsa.

Were I not cooking for a spice-hesitant family, and were I not (surprise!) allergic to jalapenos I may have spiced it up a few notches. I like my spice but the fam does not. The flavour, though, makes up for the lack of spicyness … and you could, of course, add as much spice as you wanted to bring up the temperature.

My only mistake was not doubling the recipe and jarring some of the extra.

May 22, 2021
May Long Weekend

Just like the saying goes not to wear white after labour day, locally there seems to be a start line for the summer season: May long weekend.

As of posting this I’ve wrapped up my work week and I am planning how to spend the first official three day weekend of the vague, loosely-defined stretch of relative seasonal warmth that begins… um… now.

Planting the Garden

As evidenced by the mid-week snow storm we experienced on Tuesday night I was right to put off planting my seeds until, as my grandmother advised me, the May long weekend. Now I’ve got a small collection of packets containing seeds for lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, beans, peas, and other eclectic veggies that caught my eye… and they are going in the ground before I go back to work.

Priming the Yard

While I’ve casually poked away at this for the last month because the weather has been cooperative, it’s time to get serious and get up to my elbows in soil and grass clippings. Everything needs either a trim, rake, edging, turning, tossing, or pruning, and this weekend is prime time to tackle that chore before the real growth season kicks in and I can’t keep up. That new lawnmower is going to get broken in by the end of the three-day break.

Summer Training

The trails are bare and the weather is perfect. While I may not be tuning up for any particular races, for the last dozen years spring and the May long weekend has always meant that it was time to get serious about summer running training. I would like to run a half marathon this summer, even if it is just a quiet, lonely run tracked by nothing other than my watch. That said, my whole crew is vaccinated and the restrictions start to lift next week so something more social is probably on the agenda somewhere.

Family Campfire

I’ve already been excitedly posting about my early dabbling with the backyard campfire, and have posted a couple learned lessons from the action-so-far. That said, the summer plan was to crank up the heat (literally) on my outdoor culinary efforts and May long weekend is looking to be a beautiful, sunshiny opportunity to spark up some coals, break out the cast iron and roast up some meals outside.

Local Adventure

And finally, while we still can’t go too far I plan on taking the dog and the family for a good local hike to explore some river valley trails or the winding paths through the local creek ravine. The news was already warning folks to heed crowds in popular parks and recreational areas around town and outside the city, but my years on the trails have earned me some secret knowledge about interesting places to check out that will likely be less crowded.

May 21, 2021
Our Well-Loved Cookbooks: Cooking with Friends

Bear with me.

Just as I may be accused of jumping on the pop culture bandwagon (following my twitter and news feeds being filled yesterday with the sensationalized announcements that some middle-aged actors from a television show that ended fifteen years ago are having a reunion episode) apparently authors of cookbooks do the same.

Back in 1995, when the sitcom Friends was barely a season old, some bandwagons were jumped upon by a couple of folks who (with motivations unknown to me) published a collection of recipes co-branded with a soon-to-be generation-defining television show.

I don’t remember exactly who or why… but someone gave me this cookbook as I shipped off and moved out of home setting out towards University.

I’d be lying if I told you this book had been cracked open as more than a curiosity in the decade prior to this morning.

But, for a very long time, it was one of approximately three cookbooks I owned.

Was I a fan of the show? Well. I watched it, but mostly because in the nineties as a student without cable television, we watched whatever was broadcast over one of the four channels that reached our apartments via the little rabbit ears antenna.

Yesterday I couldn’t help but open my twitter feed and see countless people promoting the reunion episode trailer that had been posted online. Serious news agencies devoted writers, resources, and space on their properties to dissecting the cultural impacts of a ten-year-long, millennium-spanning sitcom.

I was reminded that I had this book on my shelf.

Still.

On my shelf mixed in among the other mostly-serious cookbooks.

Latching onto popular culture to inspire recipes is not an obscure thing, tho.

Beside the Cooking with Friends cookbook on my shelf there was also (I kid you not) a copy of The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook (which technically belongs to my daughter) and a more recent acquisition Binging with Babish: 100 Recipes Recreated from Your Favorite Movies and TV Shows, which I bought to support Youtuber Andrew Rea who runs a remarkably well-produced and genuinely brilliant cooking channel where he instructs and entertains around a very similar premise. (After I’ve cooked a few more recipes from his book I’ll post a breakdown in a future post.) I’d also be obscuring my fascination with pop-culture-inspired recipes if I didn’t mention that I own a healthy digital collection of PDF cookbooks containing such titles as The Geeky Chef Cookbook, Minecrafter’s Cookbook, The Nightmare Before Dinner and of course The Wizard’s Cookbook: Magical Recipes Inspired by Harry Potter, Merlin, The Wizard of Oz, and More.

All that said, one season in to the show Friends there was insufficient inspirational fodder for the Cooking with Friends cookbook to be anything but a co-branded cash-grab. The recipes are broad and basic. Italian food (because one of the characters is Italian) or coffee-house treats (because they all spend a lot of time drinking coffee in a café.) Later seasons would turn one of the main characters into a working chef (which certainly would have provided some interesting recipes) and revolve entire episode plots around eating, cooking, dining, drinking, and other food-related activities. But little of these stories is to be found between the covers of this book.

The little blue page flag visible in my photo above opens to a page with a recipe for pesto pizza a recipe that, yes, we did cook a few times, using both the pesto and the pizza dough recipe from this cookbook. I don’t recall the characters ever having much to do with pesto pizza… but the pizza was pretty delicious if I recall.

My twitter feed has already forgotten about the Friends reunion episode trailer that was the star of the news cycle yesterday. Maybe the bandwagon has rolled on. I spent half an hour as I started my day with a cup of coffee flipping through the recipes in this old, once-treasured book. It was well-loved, and perhaps now long-forgotten, but it served us well for a time.

Like an old friend. Friends? Friend.

May 20, 2021
Spring Snow

It’s the latter half of May and after weeks of sitting in the backyard sun, cooking out on the campfire grill, starting the garden work, and contemplating the birds, bugs, and flowers, it snowed last night.

It snowed a heap.

So much for spring. Well, for today, at least.

Of course, I stepped out into the yard and checked my trees. The apple tree was covered (no, COVERED) in blossoms and while snow does not equal freezing or frost (mind = blown?) the chill temperatures are not great for those delicate little flowers-soon-to-be-apples.

The dog on the other hand was in her glory.

Born in September, our eight month old puppy spent the first couple months of her life with her litter inside, in a heated garage, cuddled up with her siblings.

Then we adopted her, and brought her home in a minor blizzard, and set her in the backyard to do her puppy-business in a hand-depth of powder.

The first four months of her life here were bound in snow, covered in ice, and braced in chill winds. In short, she grew up in the snow covered city and will likely forever be a snow dog.

It’s probably not surprising then, that when I opened the back door and let her into the yard as the flakes began to fall, her reaction was…

Nostalgia?

Elation?

Unfiltered puppy excitement?

I didn’t think I could express this any other way than to share a bit of art with you: she ran in circles for nearly ten minutes, chased snowflakes and leapt through the patches of accumulation settling into the greening grass. She shook and jumped and played, and in the end I had to coax her inside with a treat to dry off and warm up.

At least one local was excited about the temporary change in the weather, I guess.

May 19, 2021

about

Welcome. I’m one of those weirdos who still writes a personal blog. In fact, I’ve been writing meandering drivel online for decades, and here you’ll find all my recent posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, travel, and overthinking just about anything and everything …since early 2021.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me. Enjoy!

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