travel tales

Posted on episode 184

Local Big (Part Two): Kielbasa

A couple weeks ago as I was getting ready for my summer posting schedule, I wrote about the local “world’s biggest” attractions that are dotted all around the rural countryside near where we live.

As it happens, we took the scenic route home from a weekend camping trip, driving for two an a half hours along the twisting and turning secondary highways connecting various small communities throughout the province.

One of our stops brought us to a giant sausage.

Yes, that’s right.

In the town of Mundare, Alberta lives the world’s largest sausage, or kielbasa to be precise.

The forty-two foot tall fiberglass structure beckons from a roadside park across the street from a gas station and nearby to a locally famous smoked and cured meats company (sadly, closed on Sundays!)

We pulled to the side of the road, parked, and wandered around the odd monument to the rich history of Ukranian immigration to the area. A hundred years ago the settlers who left eastern Europe to settle in the middle of the Canadian prairies staked their future on this sliver of their culture.

And today (well, yesterday) I am able to park beside an obscenely oversized statue of tube of garlic-seasoned meat and ponder why this is among the tallest human-made structure for a hundred kilometers in any direction.

I could probably write an entire series on the odd time-capsule-like effect created by mass immigration to Canada over the last hundred years, how cultural heritage seemed to have frozen-in-time as large groups of people moved here with their unique memories of “back home.” What started as serious traditions or means of income, have continued to be acted out in the foods, styles, dances, and other artifacts of their ancestry, having changed or evolved little, practiced almost exactly as they were from the moment they stepped on the boat, train, plane or whatever vehicle took them from their original lands. As such there is this entire pocket of people who come from, say, one region in eastern Europe in the early twentieth century embracing a cultural identity deeply rooted in the wonderful indulgences of, say, sausage and perogies and pysanka. Meanwhile (at least from what I’ve observed travelling) the generation of cousins who stayed behind have shifted and grown and evolved their culture… as humans are wont to do.

In other words, I have no idea if modern Ukrainians are as deeply connected to sausage, perogies, and pysanka as their Canadian relatives, but I somehow imagine that connection is much more multidimensional over there than over here.

I don’t mean to call out any of my friends of Ukrainian-ancestry because that sentiment seems true of most everyone here who “colonized” this place… well, besides noting that I just drove past a forty-plus foot tall statue tribute to garlic sausage in pretty much the middle of nowhere on the Alberta prairie.

If I come across a sixty-foot tulip, or a wheel of gouda as big as my house, you can bet I’ll be posting some pictures here.

Posted on episode 180

Local Big

In merely one week I’m going to be packing up that little black truck in the background of this photo and driving north with a cargo of camping gear to spend some quality time in the Alberta wilderness.

(No) thanks to the pandemic it’s been two years since I’ve slept in a tent, and coincidentally that same tent will be pitched on about the same weekend in the same vicinity as when this photo was taken… two years ago.

for whatever one photo is worth:

It’s something of a running joke, or insider gag, that every local road trip through the rural country highways usually involves stopping for at least one photo with something big.

No… BIG.

An oversized bird statue. An obscenely large perogy on a fork. A life-sized UFO landing pad. Or the world-famous giant Easter egg, a Ukrainian pysanka, in Vegreville.

Or, for this example, a few kilometers drive from where we had been camping in the bush, we escaped the rain for a couple hours to meander into Vilna, Alberta for some ice cream and (of course) to pose with the World’s Largest Mushrooms.

Like so many World’s Largest objects scattered around Western Canada, the World’s Largest Mushrooms are a photogenic bit of roadside art propped up in a small park, tucked into a tiny neighbourhood, hidden behind the main street of a pinprick town in the middle of the Alberta prairie.

This is as much a kind of local hubris as anything else. For many of these small little towns, despite their small town beauty and unique identity in vast western expanse, the there is little reason besides a fill of the gas tank or a happenstance need for a meal to veer off the highway into their streets. They are lovely little places, but apart from a green highway sign marking their location as one speeds by at a hundred kilometers per hour, few people turn turn gaze from the road… unless as there occasionally may be, there is a World’s Largest… something… anything to be seen.

With some steel and paint and artistic license, any small town in the middle of nowhere becomes a tourist destination.

An excuse to visit. A reason to stop. A purpose for a day-long country-side road trip with a camera and a sense of local curiosity.

And of course, there is usually some ice cream close by, too.

Posted on

New York Deli

After my weekend foray into a batch of sourdough made with locally sourced rye flour, I got to thinking (and actually mentioned) a fabulous rye-bread pastrami sandwich that I shared with my wife back in 2016 in a world famous deli in the lower east side of Manhattan.

As promised, I dug through my old photos and discovered this mouth-watering gem.

for whatever one photo is worth:

In 2016 I won the lottery.

Sadly it wasn’t a cash prize. Instead, my name got picked from a big pool of runners who had submitted their entries to run as international participants in the annual New York City Marathon.

On a sunny Sunday morning in early November (literally hours before that infamous national US election) I ran forty-two point two kilometers through five boroughs of New York, starting in Staten Island, through Brooklyn, into Queens, over to Manhattan, and then a quick sweep through the Bronx before heading back to Manhattan to cross the line in the middle of Central Park.

My wife cheered me in and helped me hobble back to the hotel where I crashed over a bowl of carbs and a bottle of water.

The next day I was sore, tired, and hungry.

We walked, spent some time riding the subway, and checked out some museums at a much more leisurely pace than I’d done the day prior.

By lunch, we’d made our way to the lower east side, and towards one of my bucket list lunch spots: Katz’s Delicatessen.

As you walk in the door they hand you an orange paper ticket that tracks your order. I ordered at a packed, shoulder-to-shoulder counter nearly the length of the building, and the guy sliced my lunch there in front of me handing me a small sample to taste before I brought it all back to a table.

We shared a sandwich with each other, pushed through some fries and a pile of dill pickles, and chugged a cold beer to boot. We shared the table with a quartet of other marathoners who we chatted with and cheered before heading on our way stuffed and satisfied.

It was a memorable trip by all accounts. Not only did I run a marathon, but we saw a show on Broadway, met up with friends at the fountain in Columbus Circle, high-fived a famous actress at a nut cart in Central Park, attended a live taping of the Late Show, and stumbled upon multiple epic bridges, towers, landmarks and sights on foot… all before fleeing the country on the morning of their election.

Yet somehow among all of that, one tasty pastrami sandwich held it’s own in my memory.

Posted on

Banoffee Swirl Ice Cream

Tales from the Cast Iron Guy Creamery

If you, like me, avoid those recipe blogs that spend the first fifteen pages of text explaining the backstory of the recipe, then I have a treat for you… merely two paragraphs, a photo, and of course a delicious ice cream recipe to follow.

Our travel-food story goes something like this: After obsessing over the UK holiday film Love, Actually and specifically that scene where Keira Knightly’s character shows up with a slice of pie for her husband’s buddy, my wife became slightly obsessed with finding her own slice of banoffee pie when we visited the UK in 2006. It was darn good. And it turns out no one in Canada bothers to consistently sell it. Anywhere. Instead we learned how to make banoffee pie — actually a fairly simple pie consisting of a graham crust, dulce de leche, bananas, whipped cream, and a baker’s selection of sprinkled garnish. Then last year, after procuring ourselves an ice cream maker attachment for the stand mixer, I stumbled on the idea of adapting the banoffee pie recipe into a banoffee ice cream recipe… an effort I undertook for the third time earlier this week:

Recipe

500 ml heavy cream 
250 ml full fat milk 
160 ml white sugar
2 ml  salt 
6 egg yolks, separated 
1 ripe banana
5 ml vanilla 
75 g coarsely crumbled graham crackers
160 ml dulce de leche

In a saucepan I combined the cream, milk, salt and sugar and heated to about 125F or until the sugar dissolved completely.

Meanwhile, I separated the eggs from their yokes and combined the yokes with the banana which I’d mashed as smoothly as I could with a small whisk. I tempered the egg/banana slurry with the hot cream mix. This meant scooping and drizzling a few measuring cups full of hot cream mixture into the egg mixture and stirring furiously to bring the temperature up in the eggs while avoiding making the contents of banana breakfast burrito…. in other words, avoiding scrambling the eggs.

Then, when things were up to temp, I combined the two mixes fully, heating and pasturizing the custard base at about 170F in the saucepan.

This needed to cool. I filtered the whole thing through a fine wire mesh seive into a juice jug. There was a couple tablespoons worth of banana pulp that didn’t filter, but the flavour of the bananas was already infused into base so I just discarded that pulp and moved on.

Four to six hours in the fridge likely would have been long enough, but I find I get best results in my particular ice cream churn with an overnight chill. In the morning I stirred the custard mix again and added the vanilla before firing up the ice cream maker attachment for my stand mixer.

I am aware that making dulce de leche at home is possible. From what I understand it involves carmelizing (in a sealed can) sweetened condensed milk in an effort if done wrong can result in explosive-level pressurization of said can. Fortunately, I’m able to buy ready-to-serve dulce de leche from the supermarket, so I got that ready by the far less dangerous action of peeling the lid off the can.

I also took this opportunity to crumble the graham crackers up in a bowl.

The ice cream churn did it’s thing for about twenty minutes after which I added the cracker crumbles to the mixer. This combined for another minute or so.

The final stage, in a chilled bowl, was to “swirl” in the dulce de leche. A scoop of ice cream into the container followed by a drizzle of the sauce followed by another scoop of ice cream… and so on until everything was layered together and ready for the freezer.

The result of all this work is a delicious banana ice cream swirled with the cool caramel flavour of dulce de leche and provided a wee crunch by the graham crackers… or as close to a banoffee pie as I can get in ice cream form. And as much as I like pie, ice cream is darned amazing, too.