So pans are an interesting beast.

Take cakes, for example: you look at an 8 inch cake and think that’s far far too much cake and think maybe half of that would be more than enough, so you buy a 4 inch cake pan…

A 4 inch chiffon cake pan, at that.

And that 4 inch cake pan will give you maybe 4 bites of cake.

I know, I know. I’m showing my critical lack of math skills here. Because volume for circular things works very differently from volume for squares.

All I can say in my own defense is that it’s so non-intuitive!

Anyway.

The 8 inch skillet is getting a bit too hefty these days, so I thought — oh hey, a 5 incher. That would probably be perfect!

(This was before the Iwachu pan, by the way.)

The 5 inch Lodge mini “skillet” shows up and …bwahahahahaha.

I can fit one large egg in it. One.

So I set it aside, thinking it was likely never going to get used for actual egg making, because usually I do two at a time.

Well.

Today I was using it as a baking pan to heat up some cheesy bread. And after two rounds of cheesy bread, it was distinctly giving off the smell of “this pan is too hot”, so I decided to crack an egg into it to cool things down.

Dear friend, that egg was perfect.

I hadn’t done much with that brand new pan up until now. No bacon, no nothing except washing it, drying, then lightly oiling it with a paper towel and then using it for toast a few times.

But that egg didn’t stick in the slightest. At all.

And you’d think it would be hard to flip an egg in such a small space? But nope!

Perfection.

And it cooked fast enough that I don’t think it would be a huge hardship to take the time to cook two eggs.

I actually think I might use it slightly more often than I thought I would, because the thing about such a small pan and all of it being used is that there is sliiiightly less cooking smell than cooking an egg, or even two eggs, on a “normal” sized skillet.

Maybe it’s the humidity; maybe it’s just something terribly unholy about Taiwan, but I find that cooking smells linger around for much longer, and are much more annoying than they ever were back in Boston.

Curry? If you invite curry in, by cooking it of course, it will stay and stay and stay until you scrub the entire kitchen down.

Let’s not talk about what happens if you fry fish.

So it’s really a huge plus if using up the entire surface of the pan means less “heated oil” smell. Meaning much less of a shrieking urge, by myself or by family members, to open the window when it’s 36 Celsius outside and they just hiked electricity prices by 50%.

We’ll see!

I might decide it’s still a pain and it’s slightly too small for the gas range. With an induction stovetop though…