works of wanderlust

Tag: cast iron love

  • campfire foul

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What’s something you should have cooked in 2025 but didn’t?

    It’s fifteen degrees below zero and snowing heavily as I write this so it seems pretty unlikely that in the remaining fourteen days of this year I’ll convince myself to clear a path to my outdoor fire pit and settle in for a campfire cookout in the backyard.

    I don’t know why we didn’t make that much of a priority this past year.

    I mean, we had some mixed weather this year, sure, and I was distracted with other projects, too. But not once—not even one time—did we set a campfire in the backyard this past summer, let alone have anything resembling a cookout out there.

    That is significant in the context of the history of this blog. A lot of people still hit this site via the URL that I set up way back five years ago at the beginning of 2021. My writing as the Cast Iron Guy was meant to be a reflection on a lifestyle as much as a cooking tool. We were mid-pandemic and I had it in my mind that I should give myself some motivation to live a simpler lifestyle (at least in my off time) and step away from technology a bit more. Cast iron cookware was kind of symbolic of that in both a literal and an abstract way. Abstract because cast iron is hardy and simple and grounded in an idea of legacy and making something better through using it. Literal, because part of that lifestyle was literally me buying a new and improved backyard fire pit and doing a bunch of cooking over an open fire out there, a lot of it leaning into cast iron as the key tool.

    Four summers later and I seem to have strayed from that mission.

    So here we are in the deeps of darkest winter days and I have this thing I should have done a lot of last summer but didn’t, stuff I should have seared, roasted, toasted, and grilled over the open flames in my backyard fire craft zone… but did not.

    Grilling season 2026 is a long way off as I sit here in my pjs wrapped in a blanket huddling to keep cozy and warm from the cold, but maybe realizing that I missed the 2025 season in its entirety should be a kick start to watch the weather more closely in the new year and get my matches ready.

  • cheap eats

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in food.

    This blog rebooted with a theme on January 1, 2021: food.

    Also adventure, cast iron, the outdoors and simple living.  It was the middle of freaking covid and I was basically trapped in my house because of travel restrictions and winter and work from home and I latched onto the idea of rebooting the blog I had written for a decade and a half with a little less TMI themed introspection. (Funny how it has drifted back to that, huh?) 

    But I wrote a lot about food. Bread. Skillet cooking. Campfire recipes. 

    And, of course, needing to hit a quota for posting on a blog meant I did more of those things to have content to write and post about. The years 2021 and even 2022 were very food focused as a result.

    This past year I have been pre-occupied with other things.

    I still bake my bread (in fact I have a loaf proofing on the counter as I write this) and we are pretty much exclusively a cast iron cookware household (though I have not bought a new piece in three or four years, a testament to the durability and quality I suppose) but my dabbling in new and interesting recipes has dwindled.

    In the past few weeks or so and specifically since returning from Japan I have been to the local Lucky Supermart (Asian grocery store) and stocked my house with rices and spices and teas and more, mostly to hold onto that post-travel vibe of trying new and interesting foods every other day during our vacation,  I guess. But experimenting otherwise?  It’s been a slow year for the foodie in me that way.

    We are all experiencing the result of gaslighting government, of course. Grocery prices are higher than they have ever been. These days are the times for stretching staples and simplifying recipes to keep the food budget in check. I guess if you want a real perspective on our 2025 year in food it has been one of economics more than anything: adapting our recipes to use whatever meat is on sale or whichever frozen vegetables are cheaper than their golden hued fresh counterparts. We eat at home significantly more, cooking at home, and I eat out lunch maybe once a month weaning myself down from once or twice a week (which itself was a reduction from my daily downtown dining experience pre-pandemic.) 

    Eat cheap. But eat well. We don’t starve and we don’t suffer for variety, but we do squeeze value out of our food budget these days. Tho… I suspect that’s the answer a lot of people would give this year.

  • Cast Iron Convinced-ish

    After nearly nineteen years of marriage, I’d like to think I’ve learned something about not just my own spouse, but about being married in general. One of those lessons is that a good spouse is one who can keep the other in check, balanced, and grounded. And vice versa, of course.

    Introvert and extrovert. Left and right. Yin and yang.

    I can’t tell you when exactly I became a die hard fan of cast iron cooking. It came on gradually and evolved proof-wise from an ever-growing, ever-expanding collection of pieces and recipes that validated my obsession.

    I can tell you that my wife has been — tho largely supportive — mostly skeptical of the effort and has never fully jumped into the crucible of molten iron that is my cast iron fandom.

    Insomuch as she has enjoyed the results of my cooking efforts, there have been a wave of negs from the gallery, commenting on their weight, or the space they occupy in our cupboards, trotted out like a curious exhibit for visitors who get a peek into the cast iron cupboard.

    Then last week I found her cooking dinner having unearthed a Teflon frying pan from the depths of our pantry.

    Betrayed!?

    Or, yin and yang.

    “You’re using an old frying pan?” I asked.

    “I wasn’t in the mood for a heavy one.” She replied.

    Don’t get me wrong. She knows very well that there are jobs for which a cast iron pan is just a pan and others for which cast iron is king. This past weekend she led the charge for Father’s day, frying up a sizzling pan of smoked pork chops fried to a crispy finish in my ten and quarter inch Lodge.

    But her convinced quotient still leans the “sorta” column whereas mine is camped in the “fully convinced” lot.

    Her caution is the balance to my obsession.

    And for any stray reader who stumbles upon this website or post, perhaps googling a query like of “how to convince my wife to switch to cast iron” or “great reasons to buy your first cast iron pan” the advice I would offer is simple: maybe you never will. Maybe you never should. Maybe you only need to convince yourself and then just cook. The proof is in the pudding… or pancakes. And anyway, who cares if no one else does. Do you and find joy where you need to.

    We have a cupboard full of cast iron and I use it almost daily to prepare our meals, bake our bread, or grill up interesting things to share. Years on, my spouse still doesn’t quite get it… and maybe she never will.

    Maybe that balance is a good thing.

    It reminds me to enjoy and use the pieces I have, to keep learning new skills as to bring her closer to team “fully convinced” and overthink it all to maintain that balanced yin and yang of a good marriage cast in something probably much stronger than iron.

  • Sustainable All

    If you asked me for my political position on where the world should be going, I’d tell you. After all, it’s never great to write these things down, particularly on a public website where you are trying to foster a positive, happy vibe without some means to avoid the wrath of the countless people who disagree with you.

    Instead, I’ll write about why I like cast iron so much.

    What do you think the world will be like 25 years in the future?

    We live in a disposable world, don’t we?

    We’re arguing over single-use plastics — bags, straws, and wraps — as if the question is one of convenience trumping trash. In reality, it is a question of sustainability.

    Everything we do shifts energy. Everything we do increases the general entropy of the universe. These are just laws of physics, not even opinion.

    The opinion comes into play when we ask what the accumulated effects of billions of people shifting around energy and increasing universal entropy mean for this tiny ball of dirt and water and air upon which every one of us are bound past, present and future.

    For as much as I love great cooking and hefty cookware, there is a often said but generally understated benefit to cast iron: it lasts forever.

    The thing is that a lot of things last forever. That plastic straw you sipped your cola through for fifteen minutes will last in the ground as waste effectively forever. Well, okay, sure, ten thousand years is not actually forever, but it’s a heckuva long time on a human scale.

    On the other hand that plastic straw is not usable forever. It’s usable for a few weeks under ideal circumstances, if you saved it and washed it and took care with it. But ninety-nine percent of the time a plastic straw lasts forever but is usable for fifteen minutes.

    Cast iron pans last forever, but more importantly the are usable for a very long time. Generations in many cases. We can confidently say that any well-made cast iron pan is usable for good hundred or so years because we have examples of collector pans that date back easily as far back as cast iron pans were commonly manufactured. Yes, they take energy to cast and energy to mine iron from the ground and energy to move around the supply chain to get into your kitchen, but over the usable life of a pan — which can be very long — it even out, and likely even wins out.

    On the other hand, there are much less sustainable ways to fry an egg.

    In the next twenty-five years, say by the mid-40s, I really think we’re either going to need to have our collective mind firmly wrapped around the kinds of choices we make about disposable versus sustainable objects.

    Do we drink from a straw or do we slurp from a cup? Do we love our non-stick Teflon™ or do we cook on cast iron? Do we keep the species alive for a few more hundred years, or do we turn the Earth into an unlivable wasteland?

    I think that decision, however we manage to get there — by consensus, force, or inevitability — will dramatically shift what the world in twenty five years looks and feels like.

  • Strip this Pan, Part Four

    In short, and to conclude this short series of posts, the effort to strip and re-season the twenty-inch reversible grill was a modest success.

    In the end, it was a combination of elbow grease and chemical oven cleaner that seemed to net me the best result of the multiple methods I tried.

    I found that using a wire brush to score the surface of the old seasoning then applying a liberal dose of chemical cleaner overnight allowed the bare pan to be the most easily exposed.

    Four cycles of re-seasoning later in the oven and I tried grilling up a batch of chocolate chip pancakes this morning. That was definitely a success.

    As far as cost goes… alas between buying scouring pads, a wire brush set for my drill, and a can of oven cleaner, I probably spent close to thirty bucks to achieve what I did here. A cycle of the self-cleaning oven is not free either, but it wouldn’t have been thirty bucks.

    In then end and all that said though, having tried all these alternative methods to remove the old seasoning, I think I might just go back to the self-cleaning oven method next time. Simple. Effective. And not so nearly smelly, painful, or expensive.