"The Little Black Dress in Your Kitchen"

It's a wonderful thing to stop into a friend's kitchen and see a cast iron skillet on the stove. You know right then that you are going to have something good to eat, that you are in the home of a true cook. A cast iron skillet has an heirloom quality about it. Every pan has its own stories to tell, memories of sharing good food with friends and loved ones. No other pan has this kind or history. Passed from generation to generation, old cast iron skillets remind our sense of smells that flavors that makes us want to heat them up and hear them sizzle with good food again.

The cast iron skillet is one of the most important pans in your kitchen. It is the key to good cooking. Cast iron's unique charateristic of producing dry, even heat makes it ideal for browning, searing, roasting, caramelizing, and even baking!

For four generations the cast iron skillet has played an important role in our family. Sunday mornings always meant peeking into the oven to watch the Dutch Baby rise, or the sauteed apples and powdered sugar waiting on the table. Our well-seasoned cast iron skillets connect our family history with loge, one generation to the next.

I love that my Mom, Sharon Kramis, who co-authored my cookbooks, calls the cast iron skillet her "little black dress in the kitchen." This so perfectly sums up the elegant, timeless quality of this wonderful kitchen tool. Since writing our cast iron cookbook we've heard so many unique cast iron skillet stories from readers - everything from a cast iron skillet getting caught up in a divorce settlement to being inherited through a grandmother's final Will. As my Mom says, “If only these pans could talk, the stories they would tell!”