I love my cast iron skillet. Even though I have had it for less than a year, it is the most used piece of cookware in my home. Perhaps it is nostalgia for what I perceive to be the good old days – think Pa and the boys cooking up some chow on Bonanza – or simply a longing to, in some small way, shun our spit-shined, high tech society.
Whatever the case, I am now really “in” to cast iron.
If you were lucky enough to get some cast iron cookware from Santa, you probably have some anxiety about using it. And even if your are a cast iron diva – well experienced in its glories – you may have some questions about it’s use and care for the long term. Today I offer some suggestions that will guarantee your cooking adventures with cast iron succeed.
1. Seasoning is your friend.
Cast iron needs to be seasoned in order to acquire non-stick capabilities. An unseasoned piece is a disaster waiting to happen. You food will taste like, well, rusty iron. Food will stick like crazy. And clean-up? Forget it.
These days, if you are starting new, you can purchase a pre-seasoned pan. That is what I did. Lodge as well as other manufacturers sell pre-seasoned pans for just a few dollars more than the unseasoned kind. But not to worry if you acquired an old rusted out or unseasoned pan from a friend, relative or thrift store, You can find my instructions for seasoning a cast iron pan from scratch in the tip area below.
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This is a cookbook for you to keep, to print, and to share. Enjoy!
When you think about being out in the woods, what do you envision as a staple meal? Do you see yourself sitting by the fire roasting some fresh venison on a spit? Maybe you live in an area with a great deal of waterfowl, and you can see yourself enjoying some roasted duck? What you imagine in your mind is probably in large part dictated by the environment you live in. Wherever you live, one food that should be on your list of wild food is freshly caught fish.
In this article, you will learn the basics of cooking, cleaning, and cooking fish in a survival situation.
As much as I enjoy reading and learning about living off-grid, nothing interests me more than off-grid cooking using a wood burning stove. Sure, there are rocket stoves, and all sorts of grills available for use outdoors but it is a big, beautiful, antique-style wood-burning stove sitting in the kitchen that captures my imagination.
Alas, at present I do not have the space to add a full-sized wood burning stove to my modern kitchen. That does not preclude my desire to learn as much as I can about off-grid cooking using wood and biomass.
Today I am thrilled to bring us one step closer to learning our way around an off-grid kitchen.
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