7 Ways to Use a Cast Iron Frying Pan (Besides Frying) Personal Pizza Baking Stone "Preheat the skillet on the stovetop over the highest possible heat, then put the pan in your broiler upside down. That's right, bottoms up. Slide your topped pizza onto the pan's underside, and broil it for just 1 minute and 35 seconds. Your pizza will come out cooked through and bubbling, with artfully charred edges and crust and a chewy inside. A larger pan will give you more surface area to bake on, but even a normal-sized cast iron pan is large enough for personal pizzas". Want to get started making your own pizza dough? Here are a few favorite recipes.
Not only does this make great pizza, but it removes all those years of stuck-on grease from the bottom of the pan. Win-Win!!
The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets—and typically no more than fifteen—that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Cast-Iron Ghazal Michael McFee My mouth won’t ever forget her skill with a skillet, my father’s mother, cooking with her mother’s skillet. Looking deep into its heavy antique mirror, I see her wedding day: white dress and this coal-dark skillet. Heaven was bacon’s sizzle waking my ears and nose. Or was it one of her chickens slow-frying in the skillet? Her husband once took it hunting without asking: she said she’d bust his skull with that upraised skillet. Fire-born bell whose clapper was a plain dinner fork, juicy fauna and flora notes rang out from her skillet. I see early widowhood, cooked-for children gone: darkness lends its seasoning to every cast-iron skillet. She hid its teardrop handle inside her strong grip when pouring red-eye gravy from one lip of the skillet. What went into the oven as batter we two mixed came out as cornbread glory, steaming amen in a skillet. Black as her Bible, black as her once-maiden hair, black as a panther howling at midnight, this skillet. I see her funeral day, the kitchen filled with food not made by her, no flame kissing the empty skillet. I say McFee into its circle, hear her savory voice giving back the family name from her (now my) skillet.
Cast Iron Marriage Dawn Wright Dear (adorable newly married couple), I thought a long while about a good wedding gift, something practical but thoughtful. What you need is a cast iron frying pan. I come from a long line of Southern mothers, and cast iron is how we do. Why a cast iron frying pan is a practical reminder of How to Do Marriage: If properly cared for, a cast iron pan lasts forever. You may even have to pass it onto your kids. It has to be seasoned first with some good fat. I recommend bacon, cooking with real butter, and frying some stuff. You can do this when you’re young and don’t have to worry about cholesterol and crap like that. There’s nothing artificial about cast iron. There will be no chemicals leaching into your food. It’s been around for thousands of years (literally) and so far, there isn’t a superior replacement. Cooking with it regularly even supplements your diet with iron. A cast iron pan can take some serious heat. Like, you can put this puppy directly in the oven or over a campfire. You can cook in your fireplace when the zombie apocalypse comes. Just remember to let your pan cool down slowly after high heat. Otherwise, it can crack. You can’t use soap to wash away a failed cooking attempt. You should only rinse with water & let it air dry. The mistakes become a part of the pan’s flavor and make it more complex. Don’t let it sit dirty overnight. Otherwise, the next time you make pancakes they’ll taste like fried salmon. If it starts to rust, which sometimes happens, scrub gently with some fine steel wool. You have to get back to black, use a little soap and warm water, and dry it well. Then you have to oil that puppy back up and put in the oven for an hour. Sometimes, a cast iron pan needs a good reboot. (Like at the Hotel Del Coronado for a weekend. With massages. And room service.) You can cook ANYTHING in this pan. Pizza, sausage, pancakes, eggs, steak, fish, roasted veggies, anything baked, anything fried, anything roasted, anything grilled. Cast iron makes any dish better. You can also use any kind of utensil. Cast iron can handle it. Wait: just be a little careful with tomato sauce, or anything super acidic. It slowly eats away at the seasoning you’ve carefully cultivated. In an emergency, it can be used for home defense. Against an intruder, I mean. With practice, you can make restaurant quality food, like seared steak. Spend the money for Prime cuts; don’t settle for Choice. You’ll only get high quality results from high quality ingredients. If you’re vegetarians, you suck and I want my pan back. Never doubt the healing power of a good meal made at home. No, really. It’s nice to go out and be waited on, but it’s even nicer to be home and wait on each other. Love, prayers, and blessings, The Wright Stuff
♫The next thing you know, old Nancy's a millionaire♪ ♪They said "Californie is the place you outta be"...♫
Granddaddy's Cast-Iron Skillet Fried Corn (link) Corn by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books "One of the distinctive characteristics of living in the New South, cookie-cutter suburban Atlanta, is that the Old South, the rural, hardscrabble life that James Agee and others wrote about is never far from view. Reminders can be as vivid as the tar paper shack I drive by on the carpool run - rusted refrigerators and livestock in the yard, enclosed with a barbed wire fence. Or it can be the cast iron skillet that I keep on my cooktop, ready to fry up a pan of corn the way my granddaddy did. Used to be every family had a cast iron skillet, just as dear and useful as a family bible". (Continue)