Do You Cook in Cast Iron?

Do you own a cast iron skillet?  If so, do you use it?  Like good newlyweds we registered for a Lodge Logic cast iron skillet and didn't know what to do with it.  I made cornbread occasionally and that was the extent of my cast iron usage.  On the way back from my aunt's in North Carolina a few times we stopped at the Lodge Logic outlet and picked up a few more things, including a small skillet that needed to be seasoned.  Now, five years later, we don't even put the skillets away because they are used the most.

Farmer's Market sugar snap peas with a drizzle of olive oil, scoop of sesame tahini, salt, pepper, teriyaki and sesame seeds.

Lately, I've been reading about the health benefits of cast iron, especially for women.  Women are especially prone to anemia, as well as not taking care of ourselves.  If there's something we can do for ourselves that's simple, we should do it.  Everything that we cook from scrambled eggs to vegetables to chicken breast is cooked in the cast iron skillet and the extra iron gives us a little boost.  It also makes a mean corn bread in the oven.  The clean up is ridiculously easy, we just take pour a little drizzle of olive oil in the pan and wipe out.  No water, no soap and no scrubbing.  No matter what we cook in it, all we have to do is wipe it out, the seasoning makes it almost no stick.

Here are several links to articles about cast iron skillets that I found in a two second Google search. 

Anemia and Nutrition: The Importance of Iron
Anemia- Dietary Factors
Anemia and Pregnancy
Ever So Humble, Cast Iron Outshines the Fancy Pans
The Benefits of Cast Iron Cooking

If you have a cast iron skillet you should use it. Not only does it cook your food quickly and evenly, it gives you a little extra iron that you may not be getting from your diet.

I go to bed with dirty dishes

Yep. That's right.  I go to bed with dirty dishes.  You can call me what you want, but I hate doing dishes, Munchkie's Daddy hates doing dishes and so they don't always get done.  Especially when the dishwasher is full of clean dishes because we equally dislike putting away the dishes.

(I'm having a slight panic attack about showing this)

When you get married sometimes you assume that your relationship with your husband or wife is going to be a mirror image of your parents, or you may go the opposite direction and say "I will never EVER be like my parents."  Either way, it doesn't always turn out the way you think.  Growing up my mom stayed home with us.  She cooked almost every meal and in the words of my brother as a child "we're having salad and gross stuff for dinner."  That means she always served very healthy, well-balanced and food pyramid guided meals.  After dinner we would clear our plates and then my dad would stand at the sink and do the dishes.  If the trash needed to be taken out, he would do it.  I never saw my mom asking him to do either.

So the day came that I got married.

Naturally I assumed that Munchkie's Daddy would gladly without hesitation do every dish and take out the trash whenever it got remotely full.  I guess I never thought about how the division of chores were created in my house growing up.  I also was so naive that I didn't realize my mother's frustration when she asked my dad to vacuum and it wasn't completed to her standards.  In the early days of my marriage I remember being so frustrated that I started to vent to my mother on the phone (something which I try not to do- talk about my husband and I's relationship to my parents) and I will never forget what she said to me.

Amanda, why do you think that your dad does the things he does?  It took me years to train him.

 How could I, just months into my marriage, assume that my relationship with Munchkie's Daddy could be the mature relationship of my parents?  While I know my mom was joking about the training part, it's true.  It takes years to figure out the division of household chores.  And guess what, they aren't necessarily divided because we enjoy doing something, like the dishes.  I guess that you just suck it up and do things that you don't like because they have to get done.

So for now I am going to go to bed with dirty dishes.  Since I don't like doing them and he doesn't like doing them, they will sit out for a few more hours.  Maybe someday there will be HIS chores and HERS chores, but I think those are a few more years in the making.  And in those years I will be grateful for all of the things he does do, like make dinner most nights, do laundry and pick up around the house.

Hopefully by then Munchkie will be old enough to have her own chores and we can pay her with a measly allowance to do the chores we don't like "to teach her responsibility."