Month: May 2021

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Be Careful Out There

It’s been a couple months since I rolled up the hem of my shirt and did some serious blog-related navel-gazing. Yet today is meta-Monday and the last day of May and the day after I posted my one-hundred-and fiftieth daily blog post and just one of those days when I got to thinking about all the bits of good or bad advice online and has me wondering if I’m contributing to that in a meaningful, positive way.

Consider this photo.

Someone influenced us to go hiking there last summer. I don’t remember who. A guidebook or a blog or something we’d read in the news or maybe just a friend.

We do that. We are inspired by others and then inspire in turn.

I took this photo while standing part way on the ascent of the Wilcox pass and had turned my camera towards this mountain range vista that included the Athabasca Glacier, Hilda Peak, and Mount Andromeda. Another photo from this trip has shown up as fodder for a different blog post. Yet another pic is the profile photo on my Twitter account.

The well-trod trail served as a picturesque vantage for a collection of other peaks I’ll likely never climb but, perhaps, aspire to someday have the inclination to visit.

A couple of people who I don’t know and likely did not inspire were otherwise inspired to climb one of those pictured peaks. They got caught in an avalanche over the weekend and didn’t make it home to post their photos or inspire others to follow.

It was just one more story among a multitude of sad news over the weekend, but one that tweaked in my mind given that every day I’ve been writing words that may have the secondary effect of encouraging people to go out hiking and running into the trails, build roaring fires in their backyards, cook with blisteringly hot slabs of iron, and generally be adventurous.

That’s a big part of why I write these things.

I assume it’s a big part of why others read those words.

Inspiring each other: while none of us is fully responsible for the actions of others, whether those actions cause you to burn your hand on a hot grill, trip on a root while you’re running and bruise your arm, or climb a dangerous mountain and get buried in an avalanche, we do have a responsibility to give each other information that is correct and careful. We also have a moral obligation to remind each other to participate safely no matter what you’re up to.

One hundred and fifty posts into a daily blog has amounted to one hundred and fifty ideas, notions, thoughts, curiosities, and (I hope) inspirations for living a slightly more interesting life. I’ve probably got at least another hundred and fifty left in me right now, so as you read and ponder and lace up or light those coals or season your cast iron, just remember: be careful out there.

Reminder: Blogs are not a replacement for professional advice. Please read my note on safety and safe participation.

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One Part Perspiration, One Part Inspiration

It’s Sunday Runday and I slogged out another solo ten kilometer run this morning as I await the official lifting of a few of those pandemic restrictions later this week.

And though I should have spent yesterday afternoon running twenty-five klicks through some local trails, I found I struggled more than usual this morning just knocking off ten.

All my training, it turns out, is as much about inspiration as it is about the actual mileage.

How to Get Inspired To Run

Set a Race Goal

And even though there is not much left of this racing season save for a long list of virtual competitions, I find myself wondering if I might have been to hasty in declaring my reluctance to enter any of these. In fact, my next door neighbour (someone who is not generally a runner) stuck her nose over my fence last week to let me know that she’d signed up for the our city‘s annual ten kilometer run, and all weekend she has been logging some of her own solo mileage around the neighbourhood. She’s probably logged more than me, to be honest. A race goal marks a very specific X on the calendar with a clear objective. Virtual or not, this gets a lot of people off the couch and onto the paths.

Set a Mega Goal

Back when I wrote a more personal blog I used to try to give some additional context to my readers (mostly friends and family) about the kinds of distances I was clocking. I called these my mega-goals, as in I was going to run from Edmonton to Vancouver, a distance of about eleven hundred and fifty kilometers. I was going to do this “on paper” as in, I would incrementally log my distances day by day and week by week, plotting them out on a map and updating my blog readers with posts, maps, and explanations of how far I’d run. It was also a huge personal inspiration, knowing that I was only twenty klicks away from crossing that border or five klicks away from such and such a town.

Of course, you can combine this with a virtual race such as a couple of my friends did recently competing in the Great Canadian Crossing each logging a mega fourty-eight hundred kilometers over the last twelve months.

Write it Down

Or post it. Or blog it. Or Instagram it. I put all my runs on Strava which is a great big fitness social media network for athletes of all ability. I also previously posted a spreadsheet that I use to track all that stuff. It works. Accountability to a formalized accounting of all those numbers can inspire us to do all sorts of things whether we do it to log a streak, get the virtual badge or not be left out of showing up on the activity feed on a Sunday morning.

Run with Friends

And last, but definitely not least, the one that keeps me most inspired is having others to run with. Just this last week I was sitting at my desk feeling sorry for myself as work was wrapping up for the day. My phone chimed and one of my run crew’s name showed up on my phone with a “I’m working in your neighbourhood. Up for a short run?” I replied in the affirmative and had my gear on ten minutes later. He got off work. I got off work. We ran a solid seven klicks before supper, and probably seven klicks neither of us would have run alone that evening. I often say one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life is take up this running sport, but half the reason I say that is because of the people I’ve met signing up with a running crew. I’ve run a multitude of races, logged thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers, and kept in great shape. A year of solo-ish running has made me realize that’s in no small part to having other people to inspire me onward.

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Campfire Corn Roast

My foray in to roasting vegetables over the fire veered into more traditional territory this afternoon after picking up a few ears of fresh corn from the grocery store.

Step one was to remove the silk while leaving the husk as intact as possible. This is done by carefully peeling back each fibrous layer one at a time without breaking them off. When the final layer of husk has been pulled back, the hair-like strands of silk can be pulled away easily… tho getting those last few is a meticulous process. Then reversing the husk peel, each layer is folded back up around covering the kernels again.

Step two involves a long soak. I’ve read online that some people soak their corn for hours or even overnight. Time was pressing so mine got a deluxe ninety minute bath in ten centimeters of cold tap water in my kitchen sink. The point of this is to introduce a lot of moisture to the ears helping to (a) slow burning and (b) induce steaming.

With nearly an hour left in my soak I got to work chopping wood for step three which was, as the title of this post implies, building a roaring fire to create a bed of hot, crackling embers over which the corn could be roasted. I suppose if one wanted to settle for a charcoal barbecue or even a gas grill I would not object. After all, corn over a flame, whatever flame, is always better than a simple cob dropped in a pot of boiling water.

Step four was that point in the corn-fire relationship where the two really got to know each other. Wet corn sizzled and crackled over the glowing red coals at the base of my fire pit. I started the cook with a lot of careful clock-watching, letting the ears cook for a solid five minutes before turning them (even if it was tempting to intervene on the blackening, charring results.) After each five minutes per side, the black bits that had been rotated away from the flame flaked away exposing more unburnt husk, which in turn cooked and burned and shed. As I neared the end of the cook, the tips of the ears had burn away and the kernels at the tip charred a bit.

The whole family helped with step five which as one might guess involved some butter, salt and pepper and a whole lot of sweet, fire-roasted corn. Delicious.

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Fail Up Friday: Forked Cream

If you’ve been reading along for the last few days, I posted a comic earlier this week that tried to find a bit of humour in some recent… um… less-than-perfect cooking efforts.

Thinking about funny ideas for future comic strips means I’ve also been thinking of all the fails I’ve had over the years. Not all of them are funny or even comic-strip fodder. But, some of them would make for short anecdotes that could make for some light Friday blog writing. In other words, I might have a new recurring topic on my hands: Fail Up Fridays, because if you don’t learn from your fails you’re doing it wrong.

We had some down time last night, and the YouTube auto-play was flipping through random videos on the tv in the background. One of the chefs I watch on the regular had posted a new video inventorying some of the techniques she applies to her baking.

Half way down her list was how to make whipping cream by hand.

She measured out the cream into an appropriately-sized bowl, she grasped said bowl firmly by the rim in one hand and with the other took up a whisk. Arm extended and bowl down by her hip she expertly demonstrated the long but successful grind of beating some air into the cream to form lovely stiff peaks and create tasty whipped cream.

Simple, right? Well…

Rewind Twenty-five Years

I lived with my younger brother in university. We shared a basement suite a few blocks away from campus where various friends would stop by to hang out. We were also both dating young women at the time (the same young women who would both eventually become our wives) and being two young guys eager to impress our girlfriends with our cooking prowess (just like sitcom characters) we tried to teach ourselves some basic culinary skills, something neither of us had picked up much of along the way prior to those years.

The lesson I’ve taken away since is that sometimes it’s better to attempt and succeed magnificently at something simple, than to try something complex and fall flat on your face.

One night we tried something complex.

At least it was complex for two guys who owned four plates, a set of cutlery, and an aluminum frying pan between them both.

We tried to make a lemon pie. Y’know… to impress our girlfriends.

My Kingdom for a Whisk

Into a frozen pie shell we poured a lemon custard (a’la powder-from-a-box) and baked.

Into our one and only plastic mixing bowl we poured a cup of heavy whipping cream.

We did not own a whisk. We certainly did not own a stand mixer with a whisking attachment. We did own a fork… and a fork is exactly how we tried to turn the whipping cream into whipped cream.

Tried.

I remember taking turns. I remember getting frustrated. I remember making a mess.

There was no whipped cream on our pie.

Instead, after an hour of effort, there was a slightly-greyish puddle that we’d defeatedly poured atop our lemon pie filling and that despite our efforts to bake and salvage, was not impressing anyone… especially not our girlfriends.

Many years later when we bought ourselves a magnificent red stand mixer, one of the first things I did was spin up a batch of whipped cream to accompany a batch of breakfast crepes. It took less than ten minutes. No one questioned my choice, least of all my wife, but had she inquired I would have simply replied with… “remember that lemon pie we tried to make?”