love thursday 09.15.11 ~ another labor of love

Surely the earth can be saved by all the people who insist on love.

Alice Walker

Yes, that is a cast iron pan. We are switching over to using cast iron and getting rid of all the non-stick coatings and undesirable materials.

This pan is old. You can see the pits in the bottom from rust. In fact, when I got this pan from my mom, the entire thing was rust. My dad used to use it in his homemade smoke house when he smoked the salmon and steelhead that he caught. He put vine maple chips in the pan to give the fish flavor. I can't remember the last time he smoked fish. Probably sometime in the 80s.

I used electrolysis, steel brushes on the electric drill, and sand paper with elbow grease to clean it up. Now it's ready for cooking. We probably won't be able to cook eggs in it--at least not with out breaking them--but it will be plenty good for many other things.

Just one more piece of my virtue of reusing.