Salty

So I was looking at some food stuff, on line, today...

I have time for that, these days.

You know checking out recipes and shit.

I usually just sort of get a vague idea for dinner options and make something up...

But it is easy to get into a small rut.

I try to keep things fresh.

These days that seems to involve a lot of work.

And that is fine...

Good food usually takes a little work.

I enjoy a trip to the farmers market, an actual butcher or to the out of the way specialty spice joint.

Anyway, I notice a bunch of recipes are calling for specific salts...

Sure, yeah, I am down with the kosher or the plain old iodized options.

I will admit to having some salt that claims to be sea salt in the cupboard.

Which, you know, tastes like salt...

Any hint of deep briny undertones exists only in my head, as best as I can tell.

But the one that got me?

Stopped me in my tracks?

A recipe calling for Himalayan rock salt...

You know what?

No.

I will not do it.

It may be the most awesome, saltiest, fucking salt ever...

It could be cultivated from the sweat of virgin, tantric nuns, who feed only on wild goddamned gooseberries...for all I care.

I am not going to buy Himalayan rock salt to improve my guacamole.

Screw that and the associated fussy dissection and deconstruction of food into absurd gourmet components...

Food, is about the combination of a few ingredients, positive energy, some conversation and maybe a bottle of wine...

Some rock salt, from some far off mountain range, is ultimately not going to change the rest of that dynamic much.

Unless you invite me over for dinner, and I discover you have some K2 brine bag hidden in a cabinet.

I hope you are good with laughing with me, as I laugh at your salt shopping obsessions, because I will laugh.

A lot.

I am all for buying really great ingredients, when I am making some food.

I want my food to to be good, and starting with good stuff makes that super easy.

But there are limits.

And salt shipped from the other side of the planet might be just past my limit...

That is just gratuitous name dropping, label whoring shit.

Alright, I did some research and there are no nuns involved.

Just poor, stooped Pakistani guys and one of the world's biggest salt mines.

That sort of spoils the idea of some kind of pristine, glacial super salt doesn't it?

Nope, just a big ass hole in the ground, outside of Islamabad.

A bunch of giant diesel machines scraping up salt...

I am sure they gouge salt out of the ground with the utmost of care and delicacy.

Like Martha Stewart operating an excavator...

Knowing that some fanciful foodie in a fake suburban villa will be dashing just a bit of their salt across some avocados.