Iron Skillet Part Deux

Remember when I told you I wanted an iron skillet? Remember I told you I use it for lots and lots of things. No hitting Kahuna over the head with it is not one of them. It might hurt the iron skillet. Well I got a call a couple of weeks ago from my other mother Doe. She wanted to know if I had found one yet. Then she went on to tell me that she had called around looking for one.

Now let me back up here a minute. Doe lives 1700 miles away which means all of her friends and most of her family are 1700 miles away. Doe married and moved in with my daddy and when she did she went through all of her pots and pans. She also re-did the kitchen replacing the old stove with a new glass top stove so she knew she didn’t have an iron skillet. She got on the phone and called her sister Ponice, who is in her eighties, and asked her if she had an extra iron skillet that she wasn’t using. Ponice, whom I have never met but have heard lots about, gets her flashlight and get’s on her eighty-something year old knees and looks through her cabinets. Now let me ask you what kind of name is Ponice? Pronounced Pawn-niece. Daddy says it’s native American and it is I-wrap-a-ho cause Ponice always goes around wrapped in a blanket. Don’t tell Ponice that he said that though because she WILL find that iron skillet and hit my daddy over the head with it. Alas Ponice didn’t have an iron skillet either. Then Doe called her daughter up in Fisher County who got her flashlight and got on her knees looking for an iron skillet that might be hiding in the recesses of her cabinets. When she didn’t have one she called her cousins down in Hill Country and they in turn got out their flashlights and dug through the cabinets looking to see if they had an old iron skillet hiding in the black hole beneath their sink or in the corner of the pantry. Basically this means that I had people all over the state of Texas whom I have never met looking through the deep abyss of kitchen cabinets for an iron skillet to send me in Montana. I tell you I am overwhelmed that these strangers were on a mission to find me a well season aged iron skillet!

You would think that I could just run down to the local iron skillet store and buy one. Alas this town is too tiny and there is no iron skillet store. Kahuna instead announced this was madness to have people all over the state of Texas looking for a 40 pound iron skillet that would cost two thousand dollars to ship. He instead loaded me up in the green hornet and drove me through the snow and the ice to Wal-mart. I told him I had already checked Squal-mart and they didn’t have them and besides I wanted a “seasoned” skillet.

We pursued the aisles of the department store looking at each new fangled skillets with me saying, no that has Teflon or eww the eggs would stick to that one and nope you can’t put it in the oven. Then he saw some that said they were “pre-seasoned”. Yeah sure but have they been really seasoned? Have they been slathered and smeared with years of shortening and rubbed with oil? Have they slid in and out of the oven a million times? Have they chicken fried steak or made hash browns? I don’t think so. Seasoned? YOU can’t handle seasoned! Oh wait that’s truth and I’m not Jack Nicholson, thank God! I acquiesced and agreed to shell out the $13.00 for a pre-seasoned Lodge Iron Skillet.

I went home and rubbed it with Crisco and put it in the hot oven. I let it cool and rubbed it with Wesson Oil and stuck it back in the oven.

This is what my kitchen looked like.

Then I turned off the smoke alarm and opened all the windows to clear all the smoke out of the condo and rubbed it down again and stuck it in the oven on 200 degrees and let it cook all day. Christmas Eve I made my very first real cornbread since I’ve been up here. Why do I say real cornbread? In my humble opinion cornbread just isn’t cornbread unless it’s baked in an iron skillet.

Hey there is a piece missing!