Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we’re on a walkabout near the Wok About. I’m your Spiritual Stir-Fryer, Jon O’Guin, and today’s dish is a blast from the past, both personal and national, as well as something of a hefty work load if you want to make it, but it’s just about the perfect time to start. So if you want to blaze your own trail and get straight to the recipe, here’s a link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

A Talent Scout

One of the things that I love and hate about Leavenworth is how, to an interesting degree, it draws some of my opinion, goals, and personal failings into sharper contrast. For instance, in recent years I have undergone something of a mental conversion into a full defense of a nebulous concept of urban planning mostly aligned with the principles of New Urbanism: I think that we should be redesigning American cities, or at least shaping plans for their continued growth and expansion, around the concepts of walkability, a move away from single-family housing units, and accessible public spaces. I think it would be greatly beneficial to our collective health, our community stability, and several other issues.

Places that look like this, basically. Because Food Trucks will definitely help our health.

And Leavenworth often reinforces this belief for me: When the streets aren’t buckling under the weight of 10,000 tourists, running errands downtown during a lunch break feels vastly more reasonable and doable than needing a similar errand done in Port Orchard. Hell, even DURING peak tourist season last December, I was able to hit 4 different stores on opposite ends of town through a mix of walking and a quick bit of driving, and eat a hurried lunch in my car, all in around 70-75 minutes. And that was with some time lost “waiting for an elderly woman to pay for groceries by check”, “struggling to find parking”, and “having a minor emotional breakdown at how many damn cars were in my way.”

On the other hand, man, at the end of the day, the walk from work to my place, a trek of around 3/4s of a mile, can be frustratingly difficult. Like, the walk TO work takes about 8-12 minutes, depending on how fast I’m walking, and I do it all in one go without a thought. Which…shouldn’t be something to remark on, but the walk FROM work…I tell you, that’s a beast of a time. We’re talking “heart rate hits 160, walk takes twice as long because I have to stop 2 or 3 times” levels of additional effort. And I don’t really know why, unless it’s that I’ve let my core get so weak that sitting at a counter wears it out. The important thing is that I am also very familiar with the idea that sometimes, walkability is a bit overrated.

I used to live in a town with 1 bus per 1,000 people, and 2 full time bus drivers per 3 buses.
So I’m saying let me roll onto a bus so I don’t lie in road gasping for air.

That struggle is particularly frustrating for me, however, given my history: As we’ve mentioned on the site before, I am an Eagle Scout, as are both of my brothers. I used to go hiking at least once every other month. I got the cycling merit badge by doing a 50 mile bike race, where I GOT LOST and accidentally did 64 miles, and it wasn’t that big a deal. But that was years ago, and, as they say, if you don’t use it, you lose it…however, that connection is ALSO our in for today’s recipe, since it was in the annals of Scouting that my family first encountered this recipe. See! I wasn’t just…whining? Bragging? Even I don’t know what the emotional through-line of all that just was. Let’s quickly move on rather than burden ourselves trying to sort it out.

The Hudson Bay’s A Long Way Away

So, this is a recipe for “Hudson Bay Bread”, which, it should be noted: not a bread. It’s named for the Hudson Bay Company who are…man, do you remember when I talked about the Stroganov family? Russian power players and wealthy merchants for like, 400 years? Well, let me tell you: that isn’t just a Old World game. The Hudson Bay Company which is still technically in operation was chartered in 1670. They’re an American company in the sense of “Formed in the Americas”, in that confusing time where who owned what between Britain and France wasn’t certain, and 100 years before Britain’s colonies on the continent’s East Coast got some ideas about how to run the joint. When they were originally chartered, they were given dominion* over the Hudson Bay drainage basin, a region that encompasses something like 1/3rd of ALL OF CANADA.

Every where the blood touches, we can skin beavers.

And do you know what they had to pay for all that land? Let me tell you, it is fucking wild: per the written charter, they had to give 2 Elk skins and 2 Beaver skins to the reigning English monarch whenever they chose to visit the region, which no English monarch DID until 1927. They owned the fur trading rights to 1/3rd of Canada for 250 years before they had to PAY ANYONE. Then, they paid it 4 times before agreeing to abolish the clause in 1970. That’s a HELL of a damn rental agreement. As noted, they still exist, and own the high-end clothing store Saks in New York, as well as a BUNCH of commercial real estate around Canada and Europe. (* - As alluded to earlier in this paragraph, they didn’t straight-up OWN all the land in that third of Canada, but instead held the sole legal right to hunt for fur in that region.)

However, it’s not actually FROM the Hudson Bay company that today’s recipe comes to us…probably. The lineage here is a little messy, but what’s generally accepted/known is that the recipe first broadly disseminated through Boy Scouts, thanks to communications between…okay, this might be a little tricky to explain. Basically, if you don’t know, the area from Lake Winnipeg to Lake Superior is absolutely riddled with lakes, rivers, falls, and so on. This is core “Land of a Thousand Lakes” territory. The border between Canada and the US for most of that range is directly following one river flowing down into Lake Superior. As such, there are several groups and businesses based on canoeing, rafting, and so on in the region, and one of them supposedly learned it from another, who claimed to have learned it from Sir Edmund Hillary’s team: the “Hudson Bay” moniker being a local addition (along with a bit of maple flavoring.)

As noted back towards the top, the recipe isn’t actually a bread, rather it’s basically an early configuration for a protein bar, but mostly PACKED with sugar, starch, and fat, in order to provide both short and long term energy, so you don’t end up cramping while burning through around 500 calories an hour canoeing in the region.

So let’s sort this recipe out!

Easy Peasy, Honey Squeezy

Yes, as Title Jon suggests, this is considered a fairly easy recipe, though it’s not without its burdens: the way my family makes it often takes a couple hours, as we like to let it cool/harden after baking, and if your baking sheet isn’t properly prepped, this mixture is sticky enough to set and cause you some real troubles.

At its core, as I noted, you’re basically dealing with a lot of sugar, fat, protein, and starch. And by cooking it low and slow, you’re drying it out, and allowing the sugar permeate the mixture, and form a kind of anti-bacterial “shell” around the more vulnerable fat.

So the first thing you want to do is cream the sugar products with the butter.

Whip it good.

The most important thing is, and this is not a joke, many of the early recipes directly recommend “Mapleine” brand Maple Extract. OURS just says “Maple flavoring”, which is a weird distinction to make, since we have and also use Mapleine.

I’m sure you think that you know what joke we’re going to make.
But Maybe. Just Maybe….
Maybe it’s Mapleine.

To that, mix in rolled oats, and some nuts. And I’m going to be frank with you: I don’t think my family does the nuts. Like, we almost always make a double recipe, and I have no pictures of us grabbing 2/3rds of a cup of nuts, nor do I recall the texture of a nut while biting through the bars. Just the fat mixture, and a crap ton of oats.

We make it with a quart of oats. A Qoart? Nope. That didn’t work.

But if you want to add nuts, I say feel free. Hell, I bet you could add some peanut butter to this mix and it’d be pretty good. Once this mixture is combined, you want to put it in a pre-heated pan. For a double batch, you want a 9x 13 pan, or a larger baking sheet, depending on how thick you want the bars to be. IN some recipes, they’re like, an inch thick, while we tend to spread the mixture over a large baking sheet to about 1/2” depth.

You can even slap some parchment paper to make it easier to get out.

Bake that for around 40 minutes, checking and turning at the 20 minute mark, and when it’s done, take it out, and immediately press it with the flat side of a spatula: it’s going to have lifted and “puffed” while baking, and you want to try and flatten it back out a little, so it’s denser. This will help it keep longer, since there will be less surface area to dry out/get exposed to pathogens.

Then, depending on how brave you are, you can let it cool somewhere between 10 minutes and an hour. We tend to let it cool for about 5-10 minutes, and then put some big cuts in the mass of rations:

You could TRY to eat the entire sheet, but it’d be a hell of a task.

And then let it cool down further before cutting it into smaller personal servings, and storing it in Ziploc bags. The trick is that it’s going to be easier to cut the warmer it is, but it will also be more likely to fall apart when moving it. So waiting gets you more stable pieces, but the cutting takes some real work, while cutting early is a breeze, but half your pieces will fall apart when you try and move them.

In the end, you’ll have little bars/chunks of calorie and macro-nutrient dense food for outdoor activities.

Well, TWO of the macronutrients, at least.

And since we’re soon to be moving out of the “April showers”, this is a great recipe to throw together if you’re thinking of doing hiking or canoeing soon. You can even use them as a (not-advised, but there in a pinch) meal replacement bar: if you make a double-recipe, the baking-sheet slab of “bread” is going to be roughly 8,800 calories, so if you cut it into 16ths, each piece is going to be around 550 calories. Sure, it could use some vitamins and/or protein, but you can run on raw energy for a while. And once you get the recipe down, you can modify it however you want. Or not, in case it turns out that Hudson Bay Company secretly owns your house.

THURSDAY: WE DO SOMETHING A LITTLE EXPERIMENTAL.

MONDAY: WE MIGHT START A THEME MONTH A LITTLE EARLY, BECAUSE OUR CUP RUNNETH OVER. THAT’S NOT, LIKE, A CLUE, WE JUST HAVE WAY MORE POSTS THAN WE NEED FOR ONE MONTH OF CONTENT, SO MAYBE WE’LL GET A LITTLE MESSY WITH THE EDGES. OR MAYBE SOMETHING WILL COME UP.

RECIPE

Hudson Bay Bread

Makes 8 bars

Ingredients

¾ cup butter (1.5 sticks), softened

1 cup white sugar

3 tbsp Karo syrup or other light corn syrup

3 tbsp honey

½ tsp maple flavoring

1/3 cup ground nuts of your choice (optional)

4 cups old-fashioned rolled oats

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees, and warm cooking vessel in the pan. (If using one recipe, use a 9x9 pan. For a double recipe, use a 9x13 or full baking sheet.)

2. Cream together butter, sugar, corn syrup, honey and maple flavoring. Incorporate ground nuts and oats. Grease warmed pan, and fill with mixture. Press mixture down to flatten.

3. Bake for 25-30 minutes for single recipe, 30-45 minutes for double recipe. Remove from oven and press down again. Let cool, and cut into bars.