The Griddle Pan That Ended Our Sunday Kitchen Fights

For about six years, our kitchen ran a small war every Sunday morning starting around eight fifteen. My mother-in-law Delfina comes over after the early Mass at her parish across town, and the first thing she does is set up her comal on the front burner to make flour tortillas from scratch, the way she has since before I met Teresa. That burner is hers for a good thirty five minutes, no negotiating. Meanwhile our two kids, Marisol and Lucas, want different breakfasts, and I am usually standing there with a carton of eggs and a pack of bacon and exactly two burners left to work with. This is the story of the Sunday morning that finally sent me looking for the Lodge griddle sitting unused in my cabinet.

It came to a head on November 9th of last year, the Sunday after the time change, when everybody was cranky and running late anyway. Delfina had her dough resting and the comal already hot. Teresa needed a pot for oatmeal because Lucas won't eat eggs before nine years old on a Sunday for reasons nobody has explained to me. I had bacon going on one burner and tried to squeeze a skillet of eggs onto a back burner that runs about 200 degrees cooler than the front two, so the eggs took forever and came out rubbery, and by the time we sat down the tortillas were cold and the bacon was over.

Teresa said, not for the first time, that our kitchen only has four burners and five people who all want the stove at once. I said something back that I won't repeat here. Marisol asked if we could just eat cereal, which is the kind of thing a nine year old says when the adults around her are being ridiculous, and she was right. Delfina, to her credit, just kept rolling dough through all of it like she'd seen worse Sundays, which she probably had, raising five kids of her own in a kitchen with the same four burners.

I'd had a Lodge reversible griddle sitting in a cabinet for almost a year at that point, one I'd bought on a whim to do smash burgers on the kettle and mostly used maybe five times. It's the same reversible one a lot of readers here already know, flat on one side, ridged on the other, and heavy enough that it holds a steady temperature across the whole surface instead of running hot in the middle like a thin skillet does. That Tuesday I pulled it out, wiped it down, and set it on the kitchen counter where Teresa would see it, with a note that said try Sunday outside.

The next Sunday I lit the kettle around seven forty five, let the coals get gray, and set the Lodge griddle across the open grates. Bacon went on one side, eggs on the other, and Delfina had the entire stovetop to herself for her tortillas, comal and all, no rushing, no sharing. Teresa had a burner free for oatmeal without stepping around me. Nobody was cold by the time we sat down.

Delfina got her whole stove back, I got a bigger cooking surface than I ever had inside, and for the first time in years nobody's breakfast went cold waiting on somebody else's burner.

That first outdoor Sunday wasn't perfect. The griddle takes longer to come up to temperature at 5,000 feet than I expected the first time, closer to nine minutes than the six or seven I'm used to at sea level, because the coals burn hotter here but the thinner air pulls heat off cast iron faster too. I moved the eggs around too much waiting on it and scrambled them harder than Marisol likes. She told me so, without any diplomacy at all.

By the third Sunday I had a rhythm. Bacon goes on first, on the smooth side, off to one edge where the coals run a little cooler. Once the grease renders out I push it aside and crack the eggs into that same fat, which is a trick Delfina taught me and one I'd never have learned if I'd kept fighting for stove space instead of asking her for help.

Delfina noticed the change before Teresa did, honestly. She said the kitchen felt calmer, which from a woman who has run her own kitchen for fifty years and doesn't hand out compliments about mine very often, meant something. She still brings her own comal, she is not about to trust a Lodge griddle with tortilla dough, and I don't push it. Some things stay indoors.

The griddle itself has held up fine through a full year of this, one Sunday after another plus the odd weekday smash burger. I re-season it every month or so with a thin coat of oil after it cools, and the reversible ridged side gets pulled out maybe once a month when I want grill marks on chorizo or thin-cut skirt steak instead of a flat sear. It's heavy, close to nine pounds, and Teresa still asks me to carry it out to the kettle for her, which I don't mind one bit. The one real downside is that it takes both hands and a folded towel to move once it's hot, so I've learned not to try it one-handed while also holding a coffee mug, a mistake I made exactly once.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If your Sunday mornings look anything like ours used to, four burners and too many people who all want breakfast at the same time, I wouldn't buy a bigger stove. I'd buy a Lodge griddle, set it on whatever grill you already own, and take half the meal outside. It won't fix an argument about who gets the front burner if you don't have somewhere else to cook. It will fix it if you do. That's the whole trick, and it cost us less than an actual kitchen renovation would have, which is really the only case I'm making here.