Monte Cristo Skillet – and Your Cast Iron Memories
This delicious recipe is at the bottom of the post. Hope you get to try it soon!
Be sure and share your special Cast Iron memories in the comments below!
(more details at bottom of post)
Today I’m thrilled to bring you a guest post from the good folks at Martha White, along with a fun announcement! The National Cornbread Festival is coming up! The cornbread festival is held each year in the neat little town of South Pittsburg, Tennessee, and this year Martha White has asked me to be a judge. So I get to participate in the festival AND taste all of the yummy entries, to boot! The festival is a weekend long family event with all sorts of fun activities taking place, including tours of the Lodge Cast Iron Factory. Click the Cornbread Festival logo at the bottom of this post to visit the official homepage and learn more.
I’m really looking forward to meeting more of the Southern Plate Family! We have a page over on Facebook where folks can RSVP that they are coming so if you plan on coming out for the fun this year so click here to head on over there and let me know so I can look forward to seeing your face and keep you posted on times and location of the Southern Plate Family meet and greet.
I’m also hoping some of you will enter the competition. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a member of the Southern Plate family won it? I happen to know that y’all are a group of extremely talented cooks – who cook for the love of family and friends – and I can’t imagine a dish tasting better than one made by one of you. For the official rules of the competition, click here. To go ahead and enter, click here.
This Monte Cristo Skillet was the Grand Prize Winner of the 2006 National Cornbread Festival. It caught my eye because I recently had my very first Monte Cristo Sandwich and absolutely loved it. Southern Living sent me to Charleston to do some presentations for the Taste of Charleston Festival. Have you ever been to Charleston? Oh my goodness gracious, is that a beautiful town! With every sight and sound I became more determined to bring my family back there someday so I could experience it with them (It is hard to enjoy a trip without the folks you want to share it with beside you).
As I’ve started traveling from time to time I’ve taken a queue from my adventurous counterparts at SL and started making it a point to try something new in each place if possible. In Charleston, I had my first Monte Cristo Sandwich and it was right up my alley. I ate it in the cafe of a beautiful hotel right downtown. The flavors were a unique combination for me: Ham, cheese, battered and toasted bread drizzled with a sweet fruit preserves and sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. It was part lunch, part breakfast, part sandwich, part dessert, and all the way good!
So when Martha White offered to guest post I got to nosing around for what recipe I thought would appeal the most to everyone and as soon as this skillet came before my eyes, my heart just settled on it.
This recipe is quick to throw together and feeds six people. I like strawberry preserves with mine but feel free to use whichever you like best. I also omit the turkey and use additional ham in it’s place. Lunchmeat ham works just fine!
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Love Your Cast Iron?
Be sure and pick up this month’s special Cast Iron issue of Taste Of The South. It is filled to the BRIM with delicious recipes for your cast iron skillet, gorgeous food photography,
and those sweet people even put my name on the cover!
I don’t know who is more tickled, me or my mother!
Can you use cast iron on the new smooth glass top stoves?
Yes you can. I have a glass top stove and I use my cast iron skillets all the time. You just have to be careful not to drop it on the stove.
I wish I had some cool cast iron memories, but I don’t. I need to get one of those babies!
I have a lot of cast iron skillets and I LOVE them! it worries me that im 23 and know how to clean them and season them and a lot of older folks dont know how to do that! I’m real grateful to my dad for teachin me all those cooking skills now! 🙂
I am the proud caretaker of my Grandmother Ogg’s cast iron Chicken Fryer. It is 12″ in diameter and 6″ deep! The lid is so heavy I have to pick it up with two hands, so you can imagine how heavy the skillet is! I can tell you that this cast iron skillet makes the absolute perfect fried chicken….far better than any deep fat fryer ever did! I am 70 years old, so you can just imagine how old it is! I have been known to fry fish in it along the river bank while camping….of course, I was younger then!
I know, I know…never EVER wash your seasoned cast iron skillet with anything but water. OK Mom – I get it. But I really didn’t until I was on my own and trying to make the 2 best things in the world – fried chicken and cornbread. Neither taste as good in anything but cast iron and neither stick as bad when cooked in a cast iron skillet you just scrubbed. Holy smokes. Mom really IS smarter than me afterall and I know she’s looking down at me from heaven and laughing her behinny off!
I have my grandmother’s iron corn bread stick pan. Also, 4 iron skillets, a saucepan and a Dutch oven. Pineapple upside down cake in the iron skillet-made many of these. I made the Pecan Pie in the iron skillet just recently. ( It was in Southern Living).
I bought the “Taste of the South”
We have a skillet, and a dutch oven that belonged to my grandmother, which I displayed with other pots and pans from the past, but my husband loves to cook and try new idea’s, and was reading about cast iron cooking, so I let him take my grandma’s dutch oven, clean it up and season it, today he is cooking beef and noodles in it…….. I forgot how yummy things tasted, coming from cast-iron.