Salt....that's all I can say.

I must be out of the culinary sundries loop. Did you guys know about smoked salt? Not me! How utterly embarrassing! Maybe I did know...you know how old I'm getting (see previous post)...and I just forgot. I'm mortified. How could I have possibly missed this? Am I spending too much time with the butters? The chocolate? The bloody berries????

I saw my first jar and just about went ballistic. SMOKED SALT. Brilliant! I immediately dropped my bag of wasabi potato chips and rushed to check out with my bottle of alder smoked salt.

First off, I opened her up right in the car and took a taste. Criminy! Campfire in fall, first snow, my favorite elk hunting gun by my side. Another taste (the woman parking by me is just staring at me licking salt), and I taste flat iron steak on the grill, Argentina Shiraz, chewing tobacco, my college sweatshirt, stained with God knows what, and a leather bridle on a Grand Canyon mule (don’t ask, I like to lick stuff...cow salt licks too, although those are terrible).

Twitter, twitter, my mind is in a whirl.

I figure I better come up with some food to put this on, otherwise, I’ll OD on smoked salt and won’t that be a story for the emergency room! The best my refrigerator could do last night was to offer up some pork chops. Alrighty then, that will work just dandy. I mixed the salt (which has it’s own special shelf now)


The Patron Saint of Salt, St. Joseph (ok, I just made that up...)


with some rubbed sage, and black pepper…rubbed those suckers down with the mix, and seared them, about 4 minutes each side. Then I had some beautiful beef stock on hand, so poured about 1 cup over, covered the skillet and let the chops simmer for about 12 minutes. In another pan, I pan roasted some sliced button mushrooms in some butter and olive oil and added to the simmering chops after they browned. Served this with a nice arugula salad with tomatoes, pine nuts, Parmesan, and a very light slip of olive oil, rice vinegar, lemon juice, pepper and SALT. Oh, how I love this salt.