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!
Christy,
I’d love to come to see you this weekend at the cornbread festival, but I’m currently bedridden with divertictus.
Am IMissing you daily recipes or are you too busy to send them daily anymore.
We Unaers are so proud of your success!
shirley
My skillets all came from Mom, and Grandmother. I have one that Grannie’s broke and is welled back together. It was one of the first skillets she got as a newly wed in 1900.
Everyone that is afraid of “Seasoning” Don’t be. You can not hurt cast iron; if it gets sticky wash really well grease with crisco and put in 250 oven for 2-3 hours on a cookie sheet. Comes out brand new.
Cornbread, fried anything and the best pineapple upside down cake you can make comes from this one pan.
Born and raised in Alabama and could not live without my skillets!!
WOW, 1900! I bet that is one of your most prized possessions. I would love to see it sometime. If you happen to follow me on Facebook I would love it if you could post a picture of it sometime. I am so impressed. Of course I love antiques and heritage.
I have my grandma’s cast iron skillet that is only used to make cornbread (and sometimes fried eggs). I have a friend who unknowingly used her husband’s grandma’s skillet to cook something else in and he told her in no uncertain terms that it was only for corn bread!!! We still laugh about it. I love mine!!
Hi! I too am a dummy when it comes to cast iron. I remember my mother having one when I was a kid but I dont know what happened to it. I did not grow up in the south but I live in FL now and my husband was born and raised in FL. I felt brave when I read this post and I went out and bought an iron skillet and and an iron dutch oven.I feel like I am missing out on so much without cooking in iron.
I am so sad I cannot find Taste of the South magazine here. I really wanted that issue with all the cast iron recipes and such. Anyone know where I can get a copy of that? Thanks.
My mother always fixed dessert for my daddy who had an insatiable sweet tooth. Homemade pies (she had a pie recepie that would turn into chocolate, lemon or coconut meringue depending on what she had), cobblers, fried pies, pound cake both vanilla and chocolate and banana pudding. But my favorite was the pineapple upside down cake she made in an iron skillet. The skillet she used for this was very deep. I can still see her mixing up that batter (I always got to lick the bowl) and the smell of that cake as she flipped onto a plate from that old iron skillet was just heavenly. I haven’t had one in a long time but I can almost smell and taste it now just thinking about it……..
I can smell it too Lisa!! I love Pineapple upside down cake as well.
My mother has my dad’s mother’s BIG ol’ iron skillet ~ and a few others. The one I’m talking about is about 4 inches deep and probably 12 inches across. Well, there are a LOT of us at Thanksgiving dinner. She had always made her delicious gravy in that skillet. One year, she went to pour the hot, just made gravy from the skillet to a couple of cute little pitchers (gravy boats do not work on our table ~ take up too much space!)…just as she went to pour it out, her wrist gave out under the really heavy weight of it all and HOT gravy went right down her legs. Right there in the kitchen, she shucked off her pants! Right in front of my boyfriend who I had only been dating a few months! Luckily, she was smart enough to do that and she avoided being scalded! But, to this day ~ 12 years later, he asks me if my mom has done any encores to the panty dance!
Just this weekend I picked up a cast iron 10 1/4 inch skillet.
I’m still a little “scared” about the cast iron cooking bit but I thought I should really give it a “whirl”, I mean there are so many people that seem to LOVE cooking with cast iron (for years and years, generation to generation) so I put my big girl panties on and found a Lodge brand that said it was “pre-seasoned”. I figured the first part of the seasoning thing was already done for me …… now I just have to keep it that way.
Now I will be looking forward to trying some of these recipes and then maybe making some of my own (in my dreams) using this pan.