How to clean a cast iron pan

One of the things I learned from my father--your grandfather--is the beauty of a cast iron pan. They're relatively inexpensive, hold heat really well, and develop a non-stick surface when you season them well.

Seasoning is another way of saying that they don't get washed. At least not with soap. The oils from whatever you're cooking coat the pan, creating a layer between the pan and whatever you cook next. Sounds gross, but the heat kills anything nasty. Plus, you get a bunch of flavors--seasoning--that get imparted to anything you cook with it.

There are a lot of ways that people care for their cast iron pans. My father--your grandfather--takes a pretty hard line. No cleaning. You can rinse it out, and maybe wipe some of the bigger chunks off, but that's it.

My approach is a little less dogmatic. You're still not allowed to use soap, but I figure food doesn't taste any better just because it's cooking on chunks of burned stuff.

What I do is run the pan under hot water, then pour salt into it. Using a paper towel, I scour the pan. Then I rinse it off and put it on a burner to warm it up and wipe it with another paper towel.

Sometimes, if I've cooked something really smelly or greasy, I'll scrub with the salt a few times to get all the nastiness out.

And don't tell your mom, but if things get really nasty I'll even take some soap to it. Okay, I did once. But that was because your mom cooked teriyaki in the pan and the sugar burned onto it. I couldn't get it off with just salt, so I had to scrub it with detergent.

Once I did, though, I dried the pan thoroughly and then wiped it with a layer of oil. You have to. If you don't, your pan will rust.

You're from Portland.

By the time you read this, you'll have heard all the stories. About how I was born in Japan, but grew up mostly in Florida. How your mother was born and raised in Nova Scotia. And how my mother grew up in Houston and my father grew up in New York.

I think of myself as being from Florida. Which is strange for a couple of reasons. I wasn't born there. And I've spent more than twice as much time not living there as I ever did living there.

Still, it's where I grew up, and that's what makes it where I'm from.

The realization I had about you is that you're from Oregon. I'm sure that seems normal to you, but I didn't move to Oregon until I was well into my 40s. Before that, I'd only been here maybe five times. And yet, this is where you're from.

Your mother's not from Oregon. And my parents weren't from the place that I'm from.

And that's the neat thing. How you can be from a place that your own parents think of as new to them.

In some ways I envy you. You get to grow up in a place we chose for all the things that we hope will make it a good place to be a kid--good neighbors, a conscientious populace, seasons, a reasonably cosmopolitan city without the congestion, traffic, and stress of a big city. The down side is that you won't have any idea how good you have it. In fact, I think it's probably inevitable that you'll want to move away, to experience life in the big city.

I can't tell you not to. I did. I moved to New York when I was 22 and LA when I was 24. Your mother left Nova Scotia for Hollywood when she was 26. And your grandmother left Texas for New York. All I can say is that I hope you get New York or LA or wherever you decide to go out of your system and eventually find your way to whatever becomes your home. Selfishly, I hope that's Portland, but that's only because I'd love to have you close.

There's a saying I heard once: "Everyone should live in New York, but leave before they get hard. And everyone should live in LA, but leave before they get soft."

It's not true for everyone, but it works for me.

My parents weren't from Florida, either.

The difference between "love" and "in love".

I did my share of dating before I met your mother. More than my share, actually, given that I had long hair, a runner's body, a very good job, a promising career, and a gift for turning a clever phrase.

At one point, I had a girlfriend I really wanted to be The One. (To be fair, I wanted every single one of them to be The One, which probably explains why I got to date so much and so well. It also explains why I couldn't just enjoy dating, but I'll get to that in another episode.)

One day, I told this girl that I loved her. Naturally, I expected that she'd say she loved me back, but she didn't. Instead, she asked how I defined love.

In addition to being taken aback, I was stumped. I hadn't actually defined love for myself. I just figured that like porn, as the famous quote goes, I would know it when I saw it.

She helped me out, though. She told me that to her, love meant "appreciating in someone else the qualities you like most in yourself." And at the time, I thought that that was a pretty workable definition.

If I'd thought about it more deeply, I would have realized that by her definition, what I felt for her wasn't love. One of the things I admired most about her was the purity of her beliefs--something I didn't possess myself.

Since then, I've come to change my definition of love. And while it's still a little fuzzy, I have a better sense of what it means. Here goes.

Love is valuing someone for what he or she is. Not because of what he or she is, and not in spite of what he or she is. And it's not valuing certain aspects of a person. It's valuing an entire person for all the things he or she is.

By that definition, I love your mother. And I love you.

In love is completely different. In love is not about what is, it's about what you wish it to be. In love is about hope, while love is about knowledge.

This is why I don't believe in love at first sight.

I believe you can have incredible chemistry at first sight. But you can't know someone at first sight. You can imagine what they might be like, and if you're lucky, they'll turn out to be who you imagine they are. But the odds are very much against that happening.

Hope is a powerful thing. Which is why being in love is usually so painful. You're hoping he or she will call or say the right thing or touch you in just the right way because you're hoping he or she will turn out to be the kind of person you want him or her to be.

It takes time to realize that what you have may not be what you imagine you want. And it's only then that you can honestly evaluate what you have and decide whether to keep going at it.

For me, it always took four months to fall out of love. For your mother, it took two weeks.

For both of us, once the initial infatuation went away, we came to realize that we loved each other. Not because we're perfect, but because even with our annoying habits and faults and weaknesses and baggage from other relationships, we value each other completely. We know each other well enough to anticipate--and compensate for--the things we're not crazy about in each other.

I think the search for love is somehow inevitable. It's programmed into our biology and there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

It pains me to know that someday, you're probably going to fall passionately in love with the wrong person. Over and over. You'll lose sleep, sacrifice friends, compromise your career, and make some pretty dumb decisions, all in the name of hope.

But I also know that those are the experiences that will ultimately make you who you are meant to be, and that person will find real, lasting, true love. I hope I'm around long enough to see it. I''m excited to meet the person you're going to end up with.

Always use a comma before an "and" in a series.

The purpose of grammar is to avoid ambiguity. Most of the time, using a comma before an "and" in a series doesn’t make anything clearer.

But it’s consistency that makes grammar work. You can’t just apply a rule when you think it’s going to help. So always use the comma.

What time is it at the North Pole?

I don't know the answer to this, but it's a pretty neat question. Because at the North Pole, all the time zones come together.

So take a couple of steps in any direction and then turn left and with every step it'll get an hour later.

The part that's neat to me is that the hours may vary, but the minutes don't. If it's 1:19 when you're in Pacific Standard time, it'll be 4:;19 when you step into Eastern Standard time.

By the way, if I had to guess, I'd say that the time at the North and South Poles is officially the same as Greenwich Mean Time.

At some point, the temperature in Celsius is the same in Farenheit.

It's kind of obvious when you think about it, but most people don't. There's a point at which the temperature is the same for both scales.

That point is -40 degrees. So now you know.

How to make a decent omelet.

When you were little, I used to make you breakfast, just about every morning. Usually it was an omelet.

I started off trying to make fluffy omelets, and I figured the fluffier, the better. So I'd separate the whites from the yolks, whip the whites (by hand) until they formed soft peaks, then fold in the yolks. I'd cook the mixture over a really low heat, covered, for a long time.

They were good. But they took a lot of work and a long time.

Then I stumbled onto a video segment by Julia Child. In case you're not familiar with your television history, Julia Child was an American woman with an annoying voice--kind of a combination upper-crust accent and falsetto--who had a cooking show on television back in the 1960s and 70s. She was trained as a French chef, and pretty much revolutionized American cooking by opening people's eyes to the way ingredients and kitchen equipment worked.

Anyway, I wish you could hear me imitate her voice because it adds a certain something, but here's what she said:

"To make an omelet, you need a hot fire, butter, salt, pepper, and eggs." You also need a little water, which I've found makes the omelet lighter.

You mix all the ingredients together except the butter. The butter goes in the pan, but only after the pan is hot. And only one or two eggs. I'd sometimes use three egg whites and one yolk, but that was usually too much to fit in the pan.

The tricky part for me is the heat. You want the fire to be as hot as possible without making the butter go brown.

I also don't use a non-stick pan. I don't have one.

I use a lot of butter--enough so that tilting the pan back and forth will get the entire bottom covered with melted butter. If I put too much in the pan, once the bottom is covered I'll pour some out into the sink.

Julia Child says an omelet should take 20 seconds to cook. For me it works out closer to a minute. Either way, it's not long.

I shake the pan immediately so that the egg doesn't stick to the bottom. And sometimes I'll tilt it so that the egg liquid will flow beyond the edge of the puddle that it formed at first, making the omelet bigger.

When it's about halfway done, I'll sometimes sprinkle dill in. Or thyme. Then I use a spatula to fold the omelet in half. That way half of the bottom is cooking at a time, which means the insides can spend more time total being cooked.

When it's 3/4 of the way done, I flip it over.

And that's it. Simple. But delicious. You seemed to agree.