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!
This recipe looks yummy and can’t wait to try It. Now I just need to invest In a really good cast Iron skillet. Don’t have one of my own and have always wanted one. Just never got around to getting one, but that will change soon enough! I remember Mom had a couple of them and used them alot. It seemed like everything she made with them tasted so much better then what she made using other pan types.
Some of my earliest memories are of watching my mom fry bacon and eggs in her cast iron skillet. I now have her cast iron skillet – or it could be my great-grandmother’s on my dad’s side. Either way it still cooks great! And for some reason my husband still isn’t convinced that cornbread from a cast iron skillet is the best cornbread on earth. (But it goes back to the fact that his mom didn’t use cast iron, I think.) Anyway, I love my cast iron and the memories it holds!
My mom made the best fried chicken ever, always in her cast iron skillet. She would also make a skillet full of cream gravy to eat over warm toast. imiss her and her good cooking so much.
I have my mother-in-law’s cast iron skillet. I never met her, she passed away before I met my husband, but he handed her skillet over to me when we got married. I use it for everything, bacon, corn bread, frying chicken, Christy’s Lima Bean Casserole, anything that I can think of. My husband uses it for frying fish. I guess eventually I will have to pass it down to one of my step-daughters but I love it too much to give it up yet. And I think I just found my recipe for dinner tonight. Thanks Christy.
When my husband and I got married, he brought with him 3 VERY well loved cast iron skillets. My family had never used a cast iron skillet so I wasn’t familiar with how it got better with age. The thought of cooking in them – with all of that burnt on food and bubble edges – made me sick so I threw all 3 away. Weeks later he asked about one so that he could cook some cornbread and without hesitation I told him I had thrown them all away. And 15 years later, I am still paying for my mistake.
When my grandmother’s house was being cleared my mother asked me if there was anything special I wanted as a keepsake. I immediately replied, “Her cast iron skillets!” I received two. One was used only for bread and the other for frying. They both had interiors like satin from over 75 years of use. Everytime I use either of those pans I recalled the wonderfully warm times spent with my Grandparents and the biscuits, cornbread, fried chicken, fried corn, okra, well, you all must have memories like that if you inherited cast iron. My mother in law passed away and both of my sons only request was for her cast iron skillets. I know they hold the same type of family memories for them too. Funny isn’t it, how we can tie memories of happy times with family to skillets?
Christy, Thanks for Southern Plate and all you do.. My cast iron memory is when at 15 my surrogate “mom”, Lena, fried 2 Large chickens in 1 Lodge Cast Iron pan. That day was a learning experience of what it takes to go from feathered bird to Southern Fried Chicken.