Today is a bank holiday, and true to form it rained and
drizzled and was pretty cold, considering it is almost summer. I woke up with a cold nose and in a foul
mood, and remained so for most of the day.
Lately my favourite breakfast restaurant has been toying with me – eggs
undercooked, bacon overcooked, and no free newspapers. So I thought, being foul-mooded, let them
victimise some other fool! I am staying
at home and do something useful for a change.
I figured, given the election results, the newspapers would be dire
reading, and not up-to-date anyway, so staying in with the radio seemed a good
option in that that respect, too.
While in the kitchen conducting the Great British Fry-up I
decided to clear it out a little – there is always too much stuff in the
kitchen. It is true that I have had
several clear outs already, but I had my eyes on a particularly large milk pail
and a cast iron frying pan that always has food stuck to the centre. This latter is particularly annoying, because
it is practically brand new (for a cast iron pan) – a mere 25 years ago I
bought it new in a shop. Since then I
acquired several one-hundred-year-old ones, which are much better. With iron skillets older is usually better, I
find.
I had already gotten rid of a little one – what the heck,
you can use a medium one just as easily – and a crepe maker – crepes can be
done on my griddle! – and only had four frying pans and the griddle left. Now that the sub-standard pan has been
discarded, there are just the old medium pan, the old large pan, the new grill
pan, and the griddle left.
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| Griddle after usage |
If you are like most of my friends, you don’t have a
griddle, and barely even know what it is.
Just look at the photos and you’ll see.
A griddle is basically a large slab of iron, the width of the stove,
covering two burners. Usually one side
is smooth, the other for grilling. Today
I tried the grill side. I put my egg
into the little smooth round area that is on one side of the griddle, thinking
it was the logical place for it, but it was a large size egg and it overflowed
its allotted space. So I won’t be doing
that again!
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| The grilling side of the griddle |
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| The escaping egg .... |
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| After you turn the food over it has grilling stripes! |
Griddles are great in that you have a large area to work
with, bigger than two pans, so everything you need for breakfast is right there
sizzling. Hash browns are difficult to
buy in these parts, so I used potato slices.
Because griddles don’t have sides, like skillets, food fries rather than
cooks – the water can escape and evaporate more quickly from a griddle.
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| The smooth side of the griddle - lunch works, too! |
I have always liked cooking with cast iron, ever since I
discovered it in Oregon . I started with a basic set of untreated iron,
three pots and a skillet. Nowadays I
only use unglazed iron for frying, for pots I use the ceramic glazed variety
(Le Creuset). Unglazed iron is great if
you have an iron deficiency, but the downside is that (a) everything tastes
irony, which isn’t to everyone’s taste, and (b) everything looks irony – boiled
potatoes, for example, take on a bluish hue …..
And keeping food in them for re-heating is a big No-No! I still remember a lentil stew which ended up
looking like car grease when it was re-heated the following day, and that was
25 years ago!
Anyway, the great thing about frying in cast iron is that
cleaning is pretty minimal. Once your
pan is properly ‘seasoned’ (has acquired a glaze of fat) nothing sticks. After usage I just brush off left over bits
of food. It is crucial to only fry, and
not cook, in cast iron pans, because the cooking removes the glaze and the food
start to stick to your pan again. If
after frying you do feel the need to clean it, just add a bit of salt into it
and scrub with newspaper or kitchen towelling, brush the salt and dirty bits
out of your pan, and it is ready to use again.
Personally, I mainly leave the griddle on the stove and use it as and
when, without ever removing the grease.
With the pans I tend to remove the excess oil with a kitchen towel,
because they hang over the sink and the oil drips out of them and into my sink
if I don’t.
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| Cleaning a pan with salt |
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| Nice and smooth after the salt clean |
Using my griddle on a rainy day always brings out the
Oregonian in me – Oregon is
notoriously rainy, and cast iron griddles are very pioneerish and early
American, and I totally bought into that aspect of American mythology. Would you believe it, I even used to make
Salt-rising Bread? It doesn’t taste all
that great, so I stopped doing it – nostalgia for someone else’s past has its
limits! I still make Watermelon-Pickle,
though.
Anyway, there I was tending my griddle and thinking
pioneerish thoughts, when I remembered that I used to have a Bacon Press! The trouble with bacon is that it goes all
curly and doesn’t keep quiet in the skilled, and doesn’t fry evenly all over. A bacon press is a heavy slab of iron which
you put onto the bacon – it holds it down and also makes it cook faster. No one uses them anymore, not in this city
anyway. What had I been thinking all
those years since I left Oregon ,
struggling with substandard curly rashers?
Why hadn’t I bought a Bacon Press?
Don’t you just love Ebay?
Bacon presses are dirt cheap, for ten dollars or so you can buy a nice
one. It’s the postage that kills me –
but never mind, one made in Washington – which is next to Oregon so not to be
sneezed at – is winging its way to my humble abode soonishly. Life is good.
By the way, bacon presses are also good for making paninis,
for weighing down Hamburgers, frying thin slices of ham and steaks, and for
making toasted sandwiches. I shall try
out all those things when my bacon press has arrived, especially the Woven
Bacon Sandwich – I saw a photo, looks supercool!
In case you are wondering about my breakfast literature,
Ajahn Brahm is my favourite Buddhist monk.
I listen to his talks on You Tube when I feel a bit fragile … The story ‘Who ordered this truckload of
dung’ is about the man who gets a load of dung delivered to his house. He hasn’t ordered the stuff and can’t get the
deliverers to take it back, so he makes use of it by digging it into his
garden, which improves dramatically afterwards.
The idea being, we all get a lot of crap dumped on us which we never
ordered and don’t want, but since complaining about it isn’t going to get us
anywhere we might as well use the stuff to our advantage and put in some
personal growth.
A great guy, Ajahn Brahm.
I especially like his saying, don’t bother trying to get even with
people who have wronged you, Karma will get the bastards anyway! I put a link below to one of his talks, if you are interested - but if you put Ajahn Brahm You Tube into Google you'll find him easily.
My next post should be a cheerful one, I am going to Leeds
Castle
