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Before I took this job, I cooked almost everything I ate in the same Lodge 10.25 inch cast iron skillet that I had purchased at the University District Goodwill in Seattle, WA back in 2011. I had been a young, rambunctious lad at the time, and thought there was no finer thing in life than a home-cooked pile of steak and eggs, slid lovingly from the black iron directly onto my plate. I was right, but I also greatly underestimated how much better skillets could get.
Back in November, I reviewed the Stargazer 10.5 inch skillet, a piece of cookware that replaced my Lodge and hasn’t left my stove-top since (except for on the occasions when I use it to cook something in the oven, or... like if I wash it). Since writing that piece, the pan has lost its gold color and shifted almost entirely into the matte-black you find on pre-seasoned Lodge skillets, but the interior surface hasn’t lost its ice-sheet smoothness. I thought it’d be my pan for life, or at least until the end of the year, and in these perilous times, I clung to that kernel of certainty as Leonardo DiCaprio clung to that floating door in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But then the Lodge Blacklock 10.25 skillet showed up, and it's pretty neat, so now I’m back to living in abject terror all the time.