Did a bit of research recently on how to cook steaks like the restaurants. One of the steps really requires a good cast iron skillet. I was always leary of these very heavy cooking pans because of difficult clean-up and food sticking so badly to them. For searing steaks you need high temperatures and cast iron really has no equal in this regard. In my research I discovered that a well seasoned cast iron pan can be very non-stick even for eggs and pancakes. I bought a couple pans yesterday and put them through a 2 hour seasoning ritual in the oven and then cooked some steaks we had marinating for a couple days. Wow, they were very very good. I had to use lower heat for the marinated steaks as apparently restaurants only use light dry seasoning and a little oil when they cook theirs and finish it off in the broiler. The black char in the pans was indeed very hard to clean out though. I will try salt next time as I hear it works good in helping the clean-up. This morning I cooked some eggs to see if I could do it with no sticking as I saw a YouTube video where someone had done it. I put some ghee (indian clarified butter) in the pan and let it heat up. I put a single egg into the pan and let it cook a bit. After about a minute I started to work the spatula under the egg and indeed it was not sticking at all. In fact it was doing better or just as good as my non-stick pans do. I was excited so I did another egg and then eventually a whole scrambled egg breakfast. The pan stayed so clean I didn’t even need to wash it out at the sink. I am now in love with cast iron cooking.