Salt:

When I was younger, I never gave much thought to salt. It was just one of those things that you had in the kitchen. Though it's an ingredient in most recipes you see, I often cooked without it, preferring to experiment with other flavors instead. A few years ago, though, Mina came home with a little box of Guerande Sea Salt from France (http://www.eco-natural.com/greysalt/fleurdesel.html) and we tried scattering a few crystals on some charcoal grilled beef. The flavor was one of those true revelations and started us down a path of collecting "finishing salts" from around the world. Now, we have 7 or 8 types of salt in our kitchen, the vast majority of which are used sparingly right at the table as a way of giving a piece of meat that extra little pop. Currently our list of finishing salts looks like this:

1) Le Paludier Fleur de Sel de Guerande (link above)

2) Noto Peninsula Natural Sea Salt (from Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan - http://www.atthemeadow.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_88&products_id=360&zenid=d9ee5261119b03c10ce36425fc0ebf05)

3) Kumejima Natural Sea Salt (from Okinawa Prefecture, Japan　-
http://www.sekaino-osio.com/shop/searchdetail.jsp?mode=itemid&val=000111&x=43&y=9)

4) Maine Sea Salt (http://www.maineseasalt.com/)

5) Himalayan Pink Salt

Anyway, this past weekend we found some flanken style short ribs (cut across the bone rather than perpendicualr to it) of the sort you might find grilled in a Korean BBQ and decided to grill them up and serve with some different salts. I also put out some grated daikon radish and Yuzu Ponzu to use as a dipping sauce for a change of pace. The meat was pre-seasoned with "sansho", a Japanese version of szechuan pepper (http://www.asiafood.org/glossary_1.cfm?alpha=S&startno=27&endno=51), mashed garlic, and olive oil and was then grilled (unfortunately, it was pouring rain, so I did this on the grill pan indoors rather than on the charcoal grill). I served a salad of mixed greens with some nectarine and slivered almonds and some roasted potatoes along side. The French sea salt was as good as you expect it to be, but we were surprised with how nice the Noto salt was with this flavor combination.

The other dish I feature here today was last night's dinner. We had some chicken sausage in the freezer and I decided to try a frittata with it. I fried some thinly sliced potatoes until they were crisp to form the base and then sauteed the sausage with some red onion and a little sliced jalapeno pepper (one of my missions is to secretly teach Mina to like spicy foods). I laid the potatoes on the bottom of a cast iron pan, covered these with the sausage mixture, and then poured over 6 beaten eggs. This went into a 325 degree oven until the eggs had set, and then was topped with grated cheddar cheese and cilantro. The basic idea for this came from a Guy Fieri recipe that I found on foodnetwork.com, but the potato base was my addition to the party. A quick and hearty dinner that would obviously be a good breakfast as well.