Month: December 2022

Posted on

What a fruitcake?

December 17 of 31 December-ish posts

First, before you read any further and must feel that crushing disappointment of yet another recipe blog that doesn’t seem to put the recipes at the top of the page, while you scroll to the bottom and try to find something resembling an ingredient list, let me be honest and up front: if you’re here looking for a fruitcake recipe, there isn’t one.

I often post recipes. This is not a recipe, this is:

… something I should have cooked in 2022, but didn’t.

Fruitcake.

You know fruitcake.

Cake. Fruit. But somehow both and neither at the same time.

The cake that is more of a dense loaf full of what should be healthy ingredients but is masked in sugar and spices and alcohol to the point that no is even sure if they should hate it or love it or mock it for the curious monstrosity that it is. Booze-soaked gluten gluing together colourful lumps of sweet, sticky globules that may be candied nuts or sugary, dried fruits, or mystery orbs summoned from the Christmas dimension to haunt our dreams.

I love weird things, though, and I especially love weird foods. A well-made fruitcake is weird and wonderful and a baking curiosity that often defies logic, reason, and sensible palates.

I have never made a fruitcake.

And it seems like it is one of those deserts where there is really only a short window, sometime around Halloween or early November, when bakers should be thinking about fruitcakes that might be needed for the holiday season, when fruitcakes will be tolerated in small doses for the holiday season, and outside of that short window fruitcakes are just not done.

I thought about making a fruitcake in mid-November. We had just come back from New York and I was pondering my next bit of time off around the holidays and thinking I would like to break out the cookie recipe book and get some serious baking done. Fruitcake popped into my head, because while I do admit fruitcake is not everyone’s jam, if you’ve tried good fruitcake you understand how this concoction has survived the eons of time since that first batch of fruitcake was made… some of which may still survive in your grandparent’s holiday stash.

I thought about making a fruitcake in mid-November, and then I went to the grocery store with a list. Yes, I made it as far as the market with an actual recipe that I’d researched online, suffering through hours of endless recipe scrolling, reading heartfelt, keyword-stuffed stories of precious family Christmas memories vaguely connected to the recipe hidden at the bottom of the page. I found a recipe that had ingredients I thought looked like something I could both find at my local grocery market and which collected together resembled a fruitcake I would enjoy.

I thought about making a fruitcake in mid-November, but then pricing out the ingredients in the store gave me some serious pause. Pause. As in pause, put down the bag of dried apricots and step back slowly and carefully from the merchandise. I mean, we keep a well-stocked kitchen, but the collection of fruits, spices, nuts and booze that I needed for this recipe was creeping up well into the triple digits at the cash register.

For my international readers, some comparisons: locally a 10kg bag of flour is worth about $15 right now, a liter of rum is worth about $30, and a week’s worth of groceries for a modest family of three averages at about $200. My fruitcake was going to set me back over $150 in ingredients. Y’know, like almost a week’s worth of groceries for cake ingredients … and all this for a cake that most everyone was likely going to turn up their noses because of it’s reputation. (You know what I’m talking about.)

I thought about making a fruitcake in mid-November, but I didn’t.

To that end, if you have read through this sad-sack story of fruitcake or merely speed-scrolled to the bottom looking for a recipe here’s the rub: I neither made a cake, nor saved the recipe, nor do I have a happy ending to this tale. I just didn’t do fruitcake in 2022.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Maybe that one time I had great fruitcake will forever be a magical, weirdo memory untarnished in my mind.

Maybe I would have crushed fruitcake, or maybe fruitcake would have crushed me.

This will not be the year I figure that out.

All that said, next year in 2023 when mid-November rolls around again there is one post I would like to scroll to the bottom of and find a great fruitcake recipe. This one? Maybe? Maybe you have a recipe you can post or link to in the comments. Maybe this could be an amazing fruitcake recipe page afterall? And like all those terrible recipe blogs, we can keep it hidden at the bottom of the page, tucked into the comments for someone to find after scrolling right to the end of the heartfelt story. Maybe.

Posted on

Welcome to the Fediverse

December 16 of 31 December-ish posts

I think it’s fair to say that for anyone who has been online this year, 2022 has revealed itself as another parade of madness in the growing poli-cultural mishmash that we call modern society.

I’ve decided to take a year long break from corporate social media for my forty-sixth year on this planet. Understanding that (a) blogs are social media and (b) I write a blog, it becomes obvious pretty quick to most readers that I’m not taking a break from ALL social, just the big, morally-terrible ones.

Y’know. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit.

I was active on all of them before and into most of 2022, but then…

Describe your 2022 in politics, culture, and the universe?

This is supposed to be a blog about uncomplicated things, right?

Last year I wrote on this topic about my massively inconsequential place in the universe and how that shaped most of my purpose-seeking mentality in 2021.

This year, here I am again ranting about social media.

Tho, I be ranting because it’s worth being ranty about.

And the cray-cray for the nay-slay, as my teen daughter would put it, has me thinking more and more about how I can use this space over the next year to focus in on the stuff that brings joy and meaning to my days, and not focus on the absurdity of politics, culture, and the universe.

To that end, I’ve been dabbling in other ways to connect with people out there in that universe through platforms that are not owned and operated by lunatic billionaires. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what the content I put here is going to look like in 2023.

I may have started all this to write about running and cooking, but those are foundation stones for a life that has a lot of interesting stories to tell… I think so, anyhow.

While I should have spent the last ten days or so doing what I promised, which was, y’know, reflective writing and posting here, I’ve actually spent that little bit of free time doing something a bit more promising. I’ve written some software, I’ve built some networks, and I’ve drafted a script for a weekly comic strip that I’ll be launching here in 2023.

(I even have two weeks off work, starting tonight, to start drawing!)

I’ve also plugged this blog itself into that great big interconnected not-twitter network called the fediverse, so you should be able to search for @bardo on your favourite platform, for example, Mastodon, and you’ll get updates from me right there in your feed.

Politics and culture might be crazy right now, but I think my newly-remeasured reaction has been to start adding my less-crazy contributions to the mix, to attempt to balance things as much as I can help do that.

A million rational voices whispering wonders about the amazing universe in which we live might just drown out the thousands screaming madness.

Posted on

Inflatable Summer

December 7 of 31 December-ish posts

Following my (un)inflatable winter, when last spring finally rolled around I was able to unpack my inflatable kayak from it’s box, spread it out on my small backyard lawn, and figure out how to work this fabulous new toy that had spent the winter taunting me from my basement storage room.

What excited you most in 2022?

We took the new kayak out multiple times over the spring and summer.

Our inaugural trip was a twelve klick journey down part of the river that winds through the middle of our city, the dog perched with her paws on the edge of the craft and all of us watching the world drift by as we slowly paddled downstream to where we’d left our truck.

The rest of the season had us carting the gear around the province in the back of our car wherever else we found ourselves travelling. To the lake with friends where the boat rarely left the water for the entire day as everyone took turns, or out to the mountains for a chilly traverse of an expansive reservoir, we pumped, paddled, and deflated our new vessel on many of our little local adventures.

Enjoy some photos I didn’t get around to posting earlier this year.

Our not-so-new-anymore kayak is all dried and folded up for the winter, now, but I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of it next year again.

Posted on

Wisdom, Courage, Justice, Temperance

December 6 of 31 December-ish posts

I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius.

Specifically, I’ve been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor circa 161 -180 AD and noted Stoic philosopher.

What do you want to learn in 2023?

Wisdom is acting on knowledge, experience and understanding.

Courage is willingness to confront pain, danger or uncertainty.

Justice is seeking equitable treatment for all and for all what they deserve.

Temperance is voluntary restraint, patience and forgiveness.

These are four principles of a philosophical mindset and system of personal ethics that form the basis of what is modernly known as formal stoicism. I’ve always been cautious about pigeonholing myself into belief systems or rigidly categorized frameworks of ideology, but I’ve taken a liking to the tone of this particular way of thinking over the past year and adopted some of it’s practices as a way to tune and manage my own approach to the world.

For one, I’ve been journaling more. Arguably, blogging is a form of public journaling, but I’ve taken to recording more personal notes on paper with ink, and making a habit of self-reflection and adaptive growth around the notion of philosophical-based meditations.

Writing words on paper and noting the moments of success, gratitude, error, or struggle through your day, even through something as simple as a bullet-point journal, this is a moment of personal reflection that has helped me find a bit of center in the swirling chaos of my otherwise hectic days.

It is part of the way I have found a new kind of balance in my participation online, and my goal is not to suddenly start blogging about all this on the regular. It’s part of the reason I took a few months off. It’s part of the reason I’ve come back with a bit more focus of mid-life perspectives and my personal balance stemming out of these things that I write about, and not as some kind of social media influencer trying to get likes and shares and ad revenue from the words I post.

This next year is not at all going to be me jumping in and preaching any of this or really even writing about it (much), simply that as I reflect on the close of this year I’ve been contemplative on the benefits brought to my life so far from mindful practice and thinking about these principles and virtues. That will likely reflect more in what I write about, but only tangentially.

That said, I really do think that there is some clear parallels between all this stoicism thinking and the little blurb I’ve had for forever in the about section of this blog, that Cast Iron Guy is ”a journal of uncomplicated things, life lived, and a mindset that reflects the philosophical practicality of well-seasoned cast iron frying pan: enduring, simple, down-to-earth & extremely useful.”

Thinking about and acting through wisdom, courage, justice and temperance are all wrapped up in many of the kinds of folk who seek out simplicity, nature, healthy lifestyles, and positive contribution to the world, all things that I’ve written about here over the last two years.

All this is what I want to learn how to do better in 2023.

I’m aware that there are some fairly high profile folks out there marketing this philosophy as a way to sell videos, courses, and books, and perhaps it is all in good faith but the skeptic in me just needs to put that out there as what you may find if you were to do a web search for any of this.

I’ve watched some of it.

But so far I’ve just let these ideas flow through me, tried to frame my own interpretation of it all, and in doing so have though about them loosely and lightly framed around my everyday life. Now as we enter into a new year it seems like not that I’ll try to make a study or rigorous convent with this stuff, but simply that I want to learn to be a bit more mindful about how my own personal approaches to food, outdoors, and participation in the universe can benefit from a formalized philosophical approach.

Or, maybe that’s pretty deep for a Tuesday morning.