Tonight I made a delicious dinner in my our new skillet, to celebrate…my our new skillet arriving! Also spring arriving, but mostly the new pan.

The saga of the demise of my nonstick pots has been somewhat protracted, with one of them going a couple of years ago and the others starting to get a little worn but remaining functional (i.e. no bits of nonstick coating coming off in the food). Since the new year, though, I’ve lost two (the wok-style frying pan and the inky dinky frying pan), which meant that we definitely needed to get something new (because the one that went first was the regular-sized frying pan), not to mention my backup enamel soup pot that used to belong to my grandparents (it got its last utility scorched out of it during an inattentive reheating just last week). Now that we’re getting the farm share each week, we’re cooking nearly every meal at home. This has meant that in addition to the pots and pans getting more wear, we’re branching out and cooking more seriously. We’d gotten in the habit of just boiling water and having pasta, or making sandwiches, but with the fresh produce something else is called for.

What all this has meant is that we’ve spent the past month or so talking about what kinds of pots we’d like to get, what kinds of cooking we do, what kinds of pans are both of good quality and easy to maintain, et cetera. The collective answer to these questions is: a hodge podge. We replaced the littlest frying pan with another small nonstick pan, just to have one around. Our plan is not to replace the nonstick pots generally, though, but instead to swap in higher end pieces that will require more attention from us but will also allow us to cook things more the way they were meant to be cooked.

To that end, our first replacement purchase was a 10″ skillet. After going back and forth and around, we picked the All-Clad MC2 line for our stainless steel pans (ultimately, over the next, say, ten years or so, to be this skillet, a sauté pan, and a tall stockpot). I have heard only good things about the evenness of cooking with them, and I personally liked the more matte-finished exterior than the shiny version. When our nonstick soup pot finally succumbs, I’ll replace it with a round French oven of the same size, in the cheery orange color.

So that’s the skillet that came today, and I took it as an opportunity to use up some kale and farm eggs in a frittata using a recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (thus maxing out the possible things I could do with the pan on its first day, since it ended up under the broiler for the last 4 minutes). Accompanied by some farm salad greens and a bottle of California merlot, a housewarming gift from one of our neighbors, it was quite a tasty little meal.

And, the pan was nice and easy to clean. Welcome, spring!