I’ve mentioned I do a good deal of the cooking these days. For me, it’s a form of artistic expression. I love coming up with my own recipes and tweaking them endlessly. I also enjoy learning new ways to prepare food. 

About 18 months ago I started seeing blog posts about how great cast iron is for cooking. I talked to a friend who uses cast iron and she said it was easy to clean and gave food a better flavour. So after far too much research, I bought my first cast iron skillet. 

Now that I have the skillet well seasoned it usually cleans with nothing more than a paper towel. If that’s not enough, boiling some water in it takes care of it. Food does taste better, and being able to move it from stove top to the oven is very nice. (It makes amazing tortilla pizza!) 

I feel duped! Why on earth did I ever have anything else? And how did “modern” non-stick cookware ever become the choice over cast iron? Why was I using a poor second choice all these years? I was using it because it’s what I was taught to use, and it’s what “everyone” else was using. I let my family of origin and my culture tell me what kind of pan to use.

Fortunately, a poor choice in cookware isn’t a big deal in the larger scope of life. But we do the same thing with more important choices, including how we live our marriage. We let our family of origin, our friends, and our culture tell us how marriage should be. We accept these norms as right and good without taking the time to think about them or examine other possibilities. If most marriages in our culture were wildly successful and happy, doing what everyone else does would seem like a good idea. In a world where many marriages fail and most have significant problems, doing what everyone else is doing seems like a really bad plan.

My advice? Look for a better way to live out your marriage. And buy a nice cast iron pan!

~ Paul – I’m XY, and my talented wife is the real artist in the marriage!

By The Way: Lori and I could use more monthly supporters. We’ve not mentioned this often enough the last eighteen months and natural attrition has caught up with us. We receive monthly donations ranging from $3.33 to $200.00, and each one is greatly appreciated. If you value what we do, please consider a monthly or one-off show of support.

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