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!
One of my favorite Cast Iron Memories is of when I would go to visit my grandmother(Mammy) in Kentucky for the summer. She used her cast iron skillet everyday and just about every meal! One of my absolute favorite things she would make was Chocolate Gravy! Yes, you heard me CHOCOLATE!!!!! It was a special treat she would just whisk up for us! It was sooooo good served over her homemade biscuits and a glass of cold milk to wash it down! It is the simple things in life that are truly the best!
My mama grew up in hard times. Where they lived, in the mountains of NC, the terrain was rough, and the weather could get bad.
Back in the 1940’s there wasn’t much but love to keep a family going.
Mama used to tell me stories of her childhood…and one that sticks in my mind the best involves a cast iron cooking pans:
Food being scarce, they ate what they had. Grandma would get up way before dawn and start the wood stove to warm the icicles off the nail heads inside of the house before everyone else got woke up.
She’d make a modest breakfast for them, with homemade biscuits, and cooking whatever precious little meat they had in a cast iron skillet.
Then at “dinner time” (or lunch, as some folks say,) she’d feed everyone the “big” meal of the day, which usually consisted of dried beans that she’d cooked all day in a cast iron dutch oven, some sort of greens, and corn bread that had been baked in her cast iron skillet.
Almost every night, they had that leftover corn bread…they would crumble it up into a cup of the “likker” from the greens or in some buttermilk, which was a “treat” for them.
That was supper, and they were grateful for it!
My mother passed away in 2008. I inherited her cast iron cookware. She had skillets of all sizes, pots. Dutch ovens. I added these to my small collection. I use a skillet almost everyday. Each time I pick up one of these items I think about her. I have so many memories of her using these and I enjoy remembering the memories of her cooking and of her. I hope to pass these along to my daughter and grandchildren.
My late mother-in-law and her sister both gave me cast iron skillets that they had used so of course they were seasoned. What a blessing ! I also have a couple I received in a set as a wedding gift. I keep mine seasoned by spraying them with oil before putting them away in the bottom drawer of my stove. They get more seasoned everytime the oven is on.. Thats the way my Momma did hers, too. I use them a lot, love to make cornbread and of course biscuits in them. One of my beloved sons put one of my skillets in the dishwasher once and it did not hurt it at all, still seasoned and non-stick ! I like to say I am blessed among Southern cooks to have several seasoned cast iron skillets !!
I inherited my great-grandmother’s small and large iron skillets. My Maw Maw was a fabulous cook. I watched her cook fried chicken in the large skillet and corn bread in the small one. Those skillets hold a life-time of memories and good cookin’. Every time I use them I think of Maw Maw, how she taught me to cook, and how much she loved me–her first great-grandchild. Soon I will be teaching my little granddaughter to cook in those precious skillets so she will have cherished memories too–of cooking with her MiMi.
My family is originally from Eastern Kentucky – cast iron skillets – what else!! Daddy (87 years young)has been living in Florida for the past twenty years and I am in Arizona. When I go visit, one highlight is going to get (if he has run out, and to get some for myself to bring home) Martha White’s self-rising buttermilk corn meal mix, and buttermilk by the gallon – what a dream! He, of course, has to give me a ‘how to take care of his skillets’ lesson every time! Needless to say, that is how I season mine, but that is not important! We have fun making enough cornbread and hoe cakes for an army – and not one measure does he do! The stuff life is made of….
Side note – about 7 years ago, I found a cast iron wok at a flea market – what a dream! I can make fried potatoes like no other!!
Your post about your dad made me smile! =)
My mom cooks in hers on a daily basis. She make the best liver and onion gravy in them, besides her cornbread, pineapple upside down cakes, biscuits. Oh my the list just goes on and on. I personally don’t have one, but I am thinking of getting ,myself some. My sister has them and loves them just about as much as my mom : ) Thanks : )