Such was our experience when Jennifer Turner Bitterman, co-founder of The Meadow, organized Farm Awareness Day, bringing together Corey Schreiber, James Beard Award winning chef and Farm-to-School food coordinator with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, Nikole Williams, Program Manager of Nutritious Services for Portland Public Schools, and Paul Folkestad, an instructor and chef with the Western Culinary Institute.  The event was held in conjuction with PPS’s Local Lunch and Harvest of the Month program, tasting and playing with asparagus with the students of Laurelhurst Elementary School.

And amazingly, the kids, insofar as is possible within the rather bewilderingly frenetic 20 to 30 minutes that they were allotted for lunch, really did eat asparagus.

Jennifer, Corey, and Paul pursued a three stranded strategy in their campaign to a) feed children, b) wake them up to the unexpected pleasures lurking within a stalk of astringent green vegetable, and c) make the entire thing thought provoking and memorable enough to hopefully percolate down to conversation with the parents over dinner table back home.

Strand 1 of the strategy: grill some asparagus and serve it from a platter.  400 kids, lunching in three seatings, can motor through a substantial amount of asparagus, even if there only a minority cared to partake. Minority status notwithstanding, there were a surprising number who were more than willing to wolf down a stalk or two. In fact, in addition to what was served them, I spied dozens of kids skulking away from their seats to grab a stalk, shoving it down their gullets as they returned to their tables, often realizing just as they were about to retake their seats that they had, alas, finished their asparagus, and so would have to skulk away again to get more, and so repeated the circle of seeking, eating, returning, realizing, and re-seeking again and again, transformed by hunger into a sort of asparagus-inhaling perpetual motion machines. (Skulking’s sort of a figurative term, as they really just bounded up from their tables and ran across the cafeteria to Chef Folkestad, who was dispensing piles of thick, remarkably nicely-cooked stalks of asparagus as fast as he could.)

Strand 2 of the strategy: give them the opportunity to personalize their vegetables with salt.  Jennifer thought it would help stimulate things if we played off the natural interest in things that are salty, cool, colorful, unique, and salty.  In other words, we allowed the kids to partake of the joys of finishing salt, which they did with gusto.  We brought three suitably dramatic artisan salts from The Meadow: warm and meaty Kauai Guava smoked sea salt, a rich red Alaea Volcanic sea salt, and a snappy charcoal gray Turkish Black Pyramid sea salt from Cyprus.  Hard to know what was the most popular, as the cafeteria was more or less engulfed in a white cloud of aerosolized Himalayan Pink rock salt that I was grating onto kids asparagus, hands, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and upturned smiling faces.

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We are on a safari, intent on face-time with the Big Game, the people who first inspired us in our love of salt.  Salt is produced in virtually every region of every country in the world, but some places strike home, transport us back to the stillness that comes only in the early years of culinary discovery: leaning against the dew-beaded fuel tank of my motorcycle in the pale morning, eating cold sardines as I watch the oyster boats return from the shoals.

We fly from Portland to Nice, drive across the south of France and the north of Spain to Portugal, down that coast and into Portugal, a loop to Casa Blanca, and then back up through the Spanish mainland and up the west coast of France toward Normandy, and then to Paris for some R&R.  There is a lot of country in that drive.  Existential fear caused us to abandon Italy, Germany, Poland, and Slovenia to the summer.

We welcome suggestions for places to stay, people to meet, things to eat, beaches to swim, and rocks to climb.  Here is our itinerary:

April 6: Fly

April 7: Arrive in Nice, drive toward the Camargue, stay in Arles

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The only thing better, or at least more interesting, than a chocolate chip cookie  is an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.  The only thing better than that is the same cookie with a spectacular and intriguing finishing salt on top.  Topping your cookies with a beautiful artisan salt brings out the cow in the butter, hills in the oats, and the jungle in the chocolate.  Also, by topping your cookies with the salt rather than just mixing a small amount up inside the batter, you set the salt free to do it’s own thing, work its mojo with each of the ingredients as they combine in your mouth while you chew.

I used Bali Rama sea salt, which has really cool hollow pyramidal crystals and a great, snappy saltiness for the cookies pictured here.  The advantage of using a flake salt is that it remains delicate even after baking.  This salt is not yet on our website (it will be by the end of the week), but you could order it over the phone by calling The Meadow.  It did a spectacular job bringing just barely enough drama to the cookies to make them sparkle, but keeping everything mellow enough to assure they remain the ultimate comfort food.  The oven will dry out a fleur de sel, or sel gris, leaving you with a hard crunch and a slightly more ostentatious saltiness.

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Andes Mountain Rose is a rock salt hand quarried from the Andes Mountains in southern Bolivia.  The salt shifts shapes as it walks through time: once a chalk-colored crust of a salt pan formed from an ocean that evaporated millennia earlier it was then buried under 10 thousand feet of shifting continental plates, only to emerge hundreds of million years later as a orange-pink stone.  The salt shifts colors in the changing light of the day in amazing, and sometimes unsettling ways.

I’ve covered this dish before here and elsewhere, including at the Himalayan salt block cooking classes at The Meadow, but I don’t think it has ever actually been hammered into a simple recipe.

There are two simple tricks to this dish (if you can call steak seared on a giant block of salt a dish): cutting the meat against the grain, and cooking it at a high temperature.  Oh, and cooking it NOT on steel, but on a block of ancient, super dense, mineral rich Himalayan rock salt.

Ingredients:
1 2lb piece of flank steak
1 8×8x2 inch Himalayan Salt Block or Plate

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Taken yesterday, under cloudy, neutral light while I was brushing my teeth (I forgot to do it earlier).

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Nadir never spoke French half way as well as I did, to be honest, but he always knew about the crazy little dishes eaten by the farmers and laborers inhabiting the rugged, forested terrain surrounding the chateau, stretching from Les Montagnes Noires (The Black Mountains, which amble from the Pyrannees to the Massive Central) up through Perigord.  When “we” were together as a “we,” and making food, it was usually because we had been abandoned, told to fend for ourselves for the night, when the family that resided at the chateaux had plans.  So as evening was creeping in long lazy purple shadows across the sheep pastures, I would be somewhere sanding oak planks out in the outlying farm buildings, or at some distant and unheated reach of the house fitting tongue into groove of the ancient oak slats covering the ground floor (everything there was made out of ancient coeur de chêne (heart of oak), the incomparably hard timber harvested from the mountains when the land was first settled some hundreds of years ago).

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Among the ten or so Fleur de Sel’s we carry, the French versions are predictably more popular than their Portuguese brethren.  Times’ writer Elaine Sciolino points out “…Mr. Navalho confesses that his team learned many of its techniques from Guérande, the Brittany-based cooperative that restored traditional salt-making to France in the 1970s and whose brand dominates the hand-harvested salt business. France produces about 80 percent of Europe’s hand-harvested salt and fleur de sel.”

The quality of any artisan salt ranges from producer to producer.  I have found that João Navalho’s Necton salt company indeed produces a good flor de sal.  (We sell a hand-harvested artisan sea salt from neighboring salt producer as Flor de Sal do Algarve.)  The Times story points out the challenges any buyer faces when deliberating artisan salts: it is not always easy to know when a salt is in fact made by an artisan: “Nico Boer, the German co-manager of the Marisol salt works in nearby Tavira, said one Portuguese salt producer sold more than a dozen tons of industrial salt to the French several years ago, passing it off as hand-harvested.”

The New York Times story, “From a Portuguese Marsh, Salt, the Traditional Way,” written by Elaine Sciolino, is classic New York Times journalism, packed with great insights into the people and place, but keeping a pole’s distance between the writer and any observations of the heart of the matter: in this case, the culinary and other benefits driving the growing global use of artisan salts.

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“It has been a challenging year for investors, homeowners and Republican candidates, but 2008 was very lucky for sweet caramel seasoned with fancy salt.  The combination has long enchanted French and American chefs, but this year it became one of those rare flavors that works its way from an elite culinary obsession to the American mass market.”

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The set includes a guaranteed 50 artisan salts selected from a master list of the salt that best exemplify the cultural, culinary, creative, artisanal, geographic, oceanographic, and economic character of their origins.  If you look hard enough you can literally explore the world through each crystal of salt.

Alaea Volcanic (coarse) Hawaiian sea salt; Aguni Koshin Odo Japanese sea salt; Amabito No Moshio Japanaese seaweed salt; Andes Mountain Rose (coarse) Bolivian rock salt; Atlantic Mesquite Smoked Maine sea salt; Bali Reef Fleur de Sel Balinese sea salt; Bali Kechil Pyramid Balinese sea salt; Bali Taksu Pyramid Balinese sea salt; Bamboo Leaf Hawaiian sea salt; Barrique Chardonnay French sea salt; Bengal Blue Bangladesh sea salt; Black Truffle infused sea salt; and Cyprus Silver Mediterranean sea salt.

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