Yesterday was a peaceful day. I made French Toast from my homemade sourdough bread for breakfast. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so divine as that. There is something wonderful about the texture of this bread that is only magnified when it’s coated with a slightly sweetened custard and fried to crispy perfection in one of my magical iron skillets. 

I think I’m finally getting the feel for cooking in an iron skillet. I’ve always been a little heavy handed with the heat when I cook. Cast iron demands a gentler approach. There is a delicate balance between hot enough to fry crispy but not so hot as to burn food to the pan. That way, cleanup is much easier and you don’t need water and soap…two things that are deleterious to a well seasoned iron skillet. 

When it comes time to clean my cast iron, I wait till it’s cooled down enough to handle without burning myself. I sprinkle in a scant tablespoon of coarse grained salt and a teaspoon or so of olive oil. Then I wad up a paper towel and scrub the inside of the skillet with the oily salt. You can feel when any bits of food have been removed because the surface will feel silky smooth under the salt. I take the skillet to the trash can and wipe all the dirty salt and food bits into the trash then wipe the inside of the pan with a clean paper towel and little bit more oil. Once the inside of the pan is done, I wipe down the outside and the handle with what’s left of the oil in the paper, then leave the skillet on the stove top. I have a gas stove. I have heard of people who have used cast iron on a glass cooking surface, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s too easy to scratch or break the cook top.

Once the kitchen was clean, I set to work in the office again, copying the posts from 2015 and 2016 over to the blog. I’m at the point now where my aunt invited me to leave the farm and I struck out on my next adventure. A sweet friend left for Wyoming to take care of her grandchildren while her daughter was doing her student teaching and allowed me to stay in her loft apartment in exchange for watering her plants and bringing in the mail. 

It’s really interesting to go back and read my earlier posts. It reminds me how hard grief was those first couple of years. And it shows my how much my life has changed…how much I have changed in the time since I arrived in West Virginia. I really want to get all the work from Facebook transferred over to my blog so it’s safely in one place. I invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in my writing these last seven plus years…I would certainly hate to lose any of it. It’s irreplaceable, actually.

It has finally rained like crazy here off and on all day. Our garden will be so happy. I went out yesterday and found a few tomatoes that aren’t quite ripe, but something has been eating the low hanging ones. I imagine it’s the relentless bunnies I chase off only to find them right back a few hours later. I was trying to get a picture of how tall the tomato plants are but the only way to really do that by myself was a selfie with my hand raised up. As you can see, the plant is a good six inches beyond my reach…and I’m 5’6” tall! It’s crazy how much they’ve grown. 

Here it is…the last day of July! How can that be possible? I promised Mr. FixIt we would go for a drive today. It’s time for an adventure. I’ll keep you posted!

❤️

“Try your best to live quietly, to mind your own business, and to work hard, just as we taught you to do. Then you will be respected by people who are not followers of the Lord, and you won’t have to depend on anyone.”

1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 CEV