Salt Pt. 4: On the Road Again, Please


A fine pinch of Kosher salt over the skin of a whole chicken; added to highlight the flavors of oils, honey and mustard in a black pepper vinaigrette sauce; or its stockpiling in a walking taco, all show salt in its small portion usages.  Back to the salt trade in 5th c. B.C., though, and we find that salt was one of the most critical large-scale commodities on earth, to the point that the Venetians and Genoase would, no surprise, go to war over the control of Mediterranean salt.  One such player was Wilfredo the Hairy (how impressive the name must have been to the young damsels) who rebuilt an abandoned eighth century castle on a mountain fifty miles from Barcelona

where he "could peer from the thick stone ramparts at his prize possession, the source of his wealth, the next mountain

striped in pattern and colors so lively, it was almost dizzying to look at it – salmon pink rock with white taupe, and bloodred stripes." It was the now famous salt mountain Cardona, Spain.  "Inside the mine the pink-striped shafts were ornamented by snow-white crystal stalactites, long dangling tentacles where the salt had sealed over dripping rainwater from fissures above."

Fast forward 1,127 years – last sunday morning – to a winding stretch of Minnesota highway (52 south from Mpls. to Rochester) through the danger red alert zone of Ice Storm Luna, Troydo the Wary trying to haul his family over glass thin patches of sleet ice in four wheel drive at 30 mph, ducking and weaving in around fish-tailing black sedans and jack-knifed wagons, his wife's fingers firmly molded in the dash, and we find another good use for mountains of salt: the state highway snowplow.  It took us over 5 hours to make the usual 2 1/2 hour route home.  We might have seen 20 cop cars with lights twirling, an uncountable number of cars along the road, in the ditch, contorted, or at least spun, and all we were hoping for as we went along was that the plows had been on the road again, please, laying down its pebbles of melting salt somewhere ahead so those danger red highways might turn green again.    

Salt Pt. 3: A Good Drummie

Carly could play Monster High Dolls (the newest and hottest 1st grade doll!!)

with Addie Lee for six hours straight if given the chance.  She did have the chance this past sunday.  I went to pick her up at 5:30 at the Lee's and as Carly and Addie showed me the elaborate blanket fort they created in the basement, they wanted to ask to make sure a future 'doll trade' was ok: Carly would take one Monster High Doll from Addie now, but Addie would get two dolls from Carly when they saw each other next time. Ok, no problem.  For the trouble of taking Carly for the day, I wanted to bring Theresa a little something from what I had been cooking the last few hours – a whole smoked chicken with black pepper vinegar sauce and Chi Chi's cornbread.  I chose the recipe out of Bobby Flay's Bar Americain, a restaurant name that I'm fairly sure gives a nod to Humphrey Bogart's place in the movie Casablanca

The recipe is so simple that it reminds you of the power of well applied salt, for both the chicken and the sauce: the chicken, nothing more than buying a whole chicken, lathering it up in Canola Oil, and shaking Kosher salt and pepper on the entire outside, bake at 450 for 20 minutes, creating the browning effect, then continuing for another hour lower, at 350

Once out – the chicken is small but much more tender in comparison to chicken bought in pieces – I decided to drizzle the black pepper vinegar sauce in circles around a white platter, then adding the cut white and two legs over that.  If the chicken is simple, perfectly textured, the sauce is a complimenting highlight, nothing more than dijon mustard, honey, vinegar, pepper, 1 1/2 tsps. Kosher salt, canola oil and extra virgin oil. I yanked off one of the little drummies, spooned over some of the sauce and gave it to Theresa in a little tupperware box.  A couple of hours later I got a text back, "that chicken was awesome, thanks." I owe it to the salt.

Salt Pt. 2: Concessions of a Walking Taco

The end result of the Ona B-ball Tournament this past saturday was the 6th grade Suns 4-0, holding blue ribbon champion medallions...the beginning result was four pounds of taco meat cooked and sealed up in a slow cooker ready for delivery by 8:30 in the morning.  Julia's team – if my memory serves me – is 19-1 now on the season, have finished 1st place in three tournaments and third in Eau Claire.  This will be a group of girls to watch in the years to come.  They have size, strength, athletic ability and guard play that is well beyond its young years (the point guard is the coach's daughter, and our off-guard is a great defender, dribbler, and good shooter).  Julia, in her first year on a team that has been together two years is finding her place as a forward wing player.  She is gaining confidence and now looks for a shot not only when she's open but has learned to create some space for herself on offense so she can shoot that nice jump shot of hers.

Doing my own tournament duty, I was randomly stationed behind a cash box taking orders from a continuous line of 120 snack-hungry people through the noon hour dishing up salt and sugar  . The most popular snack by far had to have been the new cafeteria phenomenon, the walking taco –

an opened bag of Fritos, a scoop of Taco meat, a clump of shredded lettuce, then a dollop of sour cream on top if you choose.  Definitely a clever idea.  You have a fork, and everything is self-contained in the bag and you can pretty much walk anywhere you want with it. But I also wondered if eating one of these might be a bit like eating a bag of salt?  I could just about picture a series of those salt brine pipes mentioned in the previous blog, Salt Pt. 1, coming down out of the ceiling with little open / shut valves on them.  "Bag of salt, two dollars. Bottle of salt, one-fifty."

Salt Pt. 1


When you cook, salt is always on your mind – too little, too much... Forget it and some folks won't eat the food it's laying on; put one pinch too many down and the salty faced frown comes out.  Even at the highest levels, on the cooking shows, how the chef applies salt might very well make the difference between the contender going home with ten grand or a fist full of nothing.  It is a seasoning that is generally taken for granted, always present, on tables, in recipes, on cooks' minds.  But it turns out that salt is exclusively the only rock humans eat. Ancient empires have flourished or declined depending on its advantages in salt resources and trading.  From the intro. material in Salt, A World History

we find out that scientists estimate that the human body needs anywhere from 2/3 of a pound to 16 pounds of salt annually to survive.  In our ancient human past, we probably didn't sit around newly conceived cooking fires to estimate this, but Kurlansky goes on to point out the obvious, that hunting cultures which got their salt from animals didn't unknowingly need it, but for other more agricultural cultures, they had to go out and seek salt sources.  "Salt deficiency causes headaches and weakness, then light-headedness, then nausea.  If deprived long enough, the victim will die.  But at no time in this process is a craving for salt experienced.  However, most people choose to eat far more salt than they need, and perhaps this urge – the simple fact that we like the taste of salt – is a natural defense." When we think of this last part and modern society, we can easily see that abundance doesn't stop us necessarily from over doing it.  Hypertension and cultural obesity being a couple of the health problems associated with salt we now face.

Going back in time, to at least A.D. 100, the Chinese figured out that you could dig wells for brine which could be reduced down to usable salt.  They would dig so deep for brine as to encounter what they thought was an invisible substance – 'evil spirits' – which, when lit, could be used to cook by, and eventually piped in long and elaborate networks of bamboo, using gravity and water for pressure,

pushed along to boiling houses where the brine cooked until the water evaporated and left salt crystals.  Interestingly, it was from this salt mining network concept the Chinese learned to build irrigation and plumbing systems.  As Kurlansky says in summary, "By the Middle Ages, the time of the Norman conquest of England, Su Dongpo, a bureaucrat born in Sichuan, was building sophisticated bamboo urban plumbing."  From ancient rollercoaster-like brine pumps, to making double chocolate chip cookies and a smoked whole chicken, we've come a long way in how we see and use salt.

Our Mini-Me's or How to Make Lo Mein?


When I taught writing, I used to tell my students that often times writers don't really know what they want to write about until they actually just start writing and eventually find themselves in the middle of something worthwhile...but what happens when you find yourself in the middle of two ideas and aren't sure they go together...

Jan and I were taking Carly to a south-side La Crosse YMCA gymnastics class at 5:30 on mondays this past fall but it dawned on us that it was possible that the cross town commute at dinnertime so one or both of us could walk into the 'people zoo' wasn't going to happen again any time soon.  Carly is talented at gymnastics. We don't want to pull her away from a sport because our hair is graying and our knuckles are starting to grow into the shape of a steering wheel, so we tried karate for a couple of months and waited until we found a gymnastics option that was held in the cafeteria at Holmen Middle School.  The resources there are not the same – a couple of pads, a beam, a floor, maybe a vault? – but there were six or seven kids, two instructors, and four or five parents sitting at their round tables quietly tapping at their ipads.  I was taking a few pictures; Jan had just arrived and sat down on an orange cafeteria chair.  It dawned on me after a few easy minutes that we were watching her, when she was Carly's age, and she, Jan, was like her mom watching her!  "Oh yeah, Mom lived at the Y."  Carly had fun.  We sat quietly and watched.  Our blood pressure maintained.  We don't know if Carly is on a fast track to the Olympics by training in an empty school cafeteria, but...

If you cook Pork Lo Mein don't follow the recipe for the pork loin or the house will fill with smoke because the initial 450 oven setting – dropped down to 400 for the rest of the bake – will cause the house to fill with smoke as the pork juice drips onto the sizzling pan below that is just too hot.  The same woman who just made the revelation about the mini-me will ask why the house should be evacuated on a night that would be nice to stay inside, where it is warm, true, but not on fire.  The chef though will readjust the temperature to 350 and get the pork to the proper internal pork temperature of 160 (beyond in this case by a bit), shred that, and eventually add it into lo mein noodles, a sauce of minced garlic, Asian Sesame sauce, Oyster Sauce, Soy sauce, carrots, a bit of broccoli, a hand full of mini corn cobs, and chopped green onions.  The final product

will come to impress the wife, and she will stash away a little tupperware container of it for tomorrow. The writing instructor didn't really know what he was talking about anyway...

How Not to Cook Your Hare

The 1954 debut of 'Taz' (the Tazmanian Devil) in "The Devil May Hare," we find a new Looney Tune character who eats anything and everything, including, he hopes anyway, this boney rabbit.  At this point in the cartoon Bugs tries to cooly persuade the crazed and hungry Taz that he wouldn't find much to eat on his bunny body by lifting up the fur on his leg revealing no meat.  I got a little taste of this trying to cook farm raised rabbit on saturday.  We received a gift certificate from a specialty meat store in Hudson and chose pheasant pot pies, wild boar, and some rabbit.  When ordering, I asked out loud if anybody might like to sample the rattle snake selection, but no takers. No Yak either, kangaroo, or llama.  I wanted to find the simplest possible recipe, so decided on a slow cooker option, which asked for the rabbit, onions, one smashed garlic clove, bay leaves, a variety (pick your own) of herbs, beef broth, tomato paste, carrots and potatoes, all to be simmered for 6-8 hours in the slow cooker.  From what I've read, wild rabbit is tough and needs long cooking to soften, but this was a farm raised rabbit and by the time those hours were over Bugs was soft, tender, and had obviously absorbed the liquids very well

There was one problem: the meat was so fall-off-the-bone tender that the bones themselves from the carcass had begun to break down also and became part of the meat, so that when you bit down on what looked like a long slab of dark meat, you might just as likely find a chip of bone crunching in your teeth.  They say that rabbit is the most nutritious meat available to eat – low calorie, low fat – but that it's a tricky little animal to get the proper cooking time and texture figured out.  The next time I try rabbit I might shorten the cooking time and simply braise in a pan with a carrot.  Taz probably thought the same thing.

Suckers for Appetizers


Carly and I are around three quarters of the way through reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, and still no octopus – or giant squid as Carly curiously hopes – despite the fact that every book cover and old movie poster shows those big old tentacles in some kind of menacing pose or another.

So far, the book almost feels like false advertising...but I know it's coming at some point because I remember the old technicolor movie.  For those who might have forgotten the story, Captain Nemo has constructed a sleek metal submarine in which he and his crew explore the depths of the oceans in search of lost treasure.  The question becomes, what is the purpose of this reclusive undersea explorer – is he motivated by greed, cynicism, adventure, lost love...what?  Later on, after some development, we find out that Nemo, once he finds these treasures, spreads this wealth back to the poor and less fortunate of the world above.  Jan and I decided to go out and find our own octopus in Madison last saturday night, not at the bottom of any tank but on our plates for appetizers at a great little corner restaurant called Nostrano's up near the capital.

Don't let the ingredients below fool you, as long as you can get past the sight and texture of eating these perfectly circular little suckers on the octopus arms, the overall taste is very well seasoned, sort of smoky and crisp, but simple, the meat similarly textured to maybe shrimp.  I had never heard of Tarbais Beans (not shown) before, but they were plump and soaked the flavor of the harissa, a mild green chile sauce. Jan, not a fan of certain kinds of  textures, but also a food adventurer, did have to close her eyes to eat these coils but was glad we took the dive.

GRILLED OCTOPUS

HARISSA AIOLI | TARBAIS BEANS | CELERY | TANGERINE AGRUMATO 

Gust and the Trout

Jan, Abby and Julia (red helmet) at the top of Eagle Mountain, Lutsen, somewhere around 1600 feet high and the air temp well below zero helped by the lake effect wind.  Out on the horizon is the North Shore of Lake Superior, not yet frozen.  Around halfway down Eagle Mt. a convenient ski in / ski out trail just before the Lutsen Bridge carrying skiers on into the grounds of Carribou Highlands, our resort, past a bonfire burning unattended and ending eventually at a bar made out of ice. The first night we arrived we postponed dinner reservations until seven and then sat down for a nice meal at Mogul's Restaurant

where Jan had a thick slab of prime rib, Julia a filet mignon, Abby some wild rice concoction (once you reach Duluth every third sign along the road advertises wild rice. Julia still wonders what 'tame' rice might look like?) Carly chicken fingers, and I ordered the trout special, something close to the almondine white sauce pictured below but without the almonds and a smoky 'tame' rice mixed with cranberries as a side.

The vast north shore and this fantastic little plate of local trout got me thinking later about A History of Lutsen, in the chapter "The North Shore Fisherman" where the author describes some of the hardships early settler fishermen endured, especially in the cold months.  The Nelson (Lutsen) brothers themselves often made trips in large oaring skiffs – which could carry up to 1,000 lbs. –

to drop their pay catch off at market in Duluth, a trip that would normally take 24 hours of oaring and rest.  One particular trip C.A.A, Alfred, and Gust Nelson made it back home as far as Two Harbors without incident, but the remaining 64 miles took over eleven days.  Marooned on an ice floe, the weather brutal and food scarce, the brothers might have tried to reach shore and walk, but the youngest brother, Gust, was lame, so they stayed on the ice and hoped for an opening.  At one point, suddenly the ice cracked.  The brothers heard a strange small rippling sound in the water, and saw, as the story is told anyway, that a single injured trout had flopped onto the ice near them.  The brothers knew that the ice could break apart at any moment, but also had to reach the fish if at all possible, so they placed branches from the shore across their chests in case they dropped through an ice hole, and Gust, the lightest of the three, reached out and managed to scoop the trout. "The whoops of joy from his brothers may have been heard in Duluth.  The men devour the trout but afterwards, again go several days without food."  They finally found enough open water to oar back home to family members who would not have known whether they were dead or alive.  My order at Moguls Restaurant was good, but I imagine the taste of that one raw trout the brothers had was just fine without the almondine sauce.

Behind us in the picture below is a series of family chronologies describing the origin of Lutsen Resort, where we did not have to oar or float on ice to get to the famous New Year's Eve buffet