Thrifting: Putting the Sunny in Sunny Side Up

While I was visiting my kids a couple weeks ago, I watched as they cooked with their stainless steel Cuisinart pans and flew away with a desire to have my own stainless steel pans. Since we moved to this house in Arizona, I have not been happy with the pans that were left behind for using on the glass top stove. First, I don’t love the stove but there is nothing wrong with it and I cannot justify changing it. When it does finally bite the dust, DUDE, I’M GOING WITH A GAS STOVE. It’s not that I cook all that much anymore but when I do, I prefer natural gas. Secondly, I have never trusted non-stick coated pans as far as what that teflon is doing to our brains. I'm not here to argue that point, you can Google it. Plus, you have to be so careful to use certain utensils so you don’t scratch them. Once they are scratched, I trust them even less. Who knows what is leaching from the material they use to make them. Full disclosure: I have been using them because they are here but I think about these things every time I put them out on the stove to cook. The non-stick pan will be going into the donation box today. 

 

I brought my cast iron skillets with me even though I can’t use them on the glass top. Someone recently told me they use their cast iron on glass top but I can’t stand the thought of scratching it up and having to live with that. I can, however, use cast iron in the oven. I often bake cornbread and oven-fried potatoes. Cast iron skillets are great for baking cakes and brownies. Pretty much anything you can bake in a pan can be baked in a skillet. I’ll never give them up, and who knows, I may end up with a gas stove someday

 

Yesterday, I found a beautiful American-made stainless steel frying pan with a glass lid at the thrift store I visit often. I paid $10.99 for it and felt like I was stealing! It is 3-ply, which means it is heavy and the heat is distributed evenly. The real test came this morning when I made pancakes and sunny-side up eggs for the hubs. I think I heard angels sing when I placed my spatula in to pick up the eggs. They didn’t stick a bit and he felt like he was getting an $8 breakfast (minus the bacon). This was not happening with the non-stick pans I have been using. After doing some research, I learned that the pan was priced fairly but the real tipping point for buying it was that it came with a glass lid. Nothing I’ve found online shows this particular brand sold with a glass lid, so I suppose it is possible the lid belonged to another brand. Don’t care. I wanna see those sunny side up eggs turning opaque so I know the exact moment to pull them up and get them married to a stack of cakes, ya know what I mean? Not everyone can cook perfect eggs but I'm working towards that end goal.

 

I get excited about the silliest things. How about you? 

love, susan