Salt box chronicles

Our salt box cracked. It was a Click Clack brand rectangular plastic box with a blue lid, and it served us well for many years. But you can’t get sentimental about your salt boxes or grease jars or utensil crocks. Actually, you can–I’m so sentimental about my grease jar, which was a present from Laurie and is shaped like an ear of corn, that I don’t keep grease in it.

Corn jar

In a cosmic coincidence (not that cosmic, since we made do with the cracked box for weeks), the same issue of Fine Cooking that gave us paprika potatoes and Asian-glazed short ribs also spotlighted a charming little salt box from Crate and Barrel. It looks like this:

Saltbox

The little dot embedded in the rim of the bowl is a magnet. There’s a matching magnet in the lid, so when you swing it mostly shut, it pops into place. Time will tell whether this salt box is as durable as a Click Clack, but we’re enjoying it so far. I showed it to Iris, and she wanted to taste the salt. Then she wanted to taste it again. I’m really curious how much salt she would have eaten if we’d just let her go to town. I’ve started calling her Salty Sam, which along with her mastery of the word “arrrr” should transition her smoothly into her nautical career.

Do you have a salt box? The single most important thing I’ve ever done to improve my cooking is to switch from table salt to kosher and keep the salt box close at hand. Kosher salt doesn’t taste any different from table salt (people who think it does are the same kind of people who buy $500 audio cables, and if you have a list these people’s names and addresses, please send it to me), but it’s much easier to pick up with your fingers and therefore more likely to be used throughout the preparation of the meal rather than added in a lump. Plus, if you get into the habit of sprinkling salt by hand, you’ll look like a Food Network personality without having to pick up any annoying signature exclamations.

I like Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt best, but Morton is fine too. And you don’t have to spend $15 on an admittedly smoove-looking salt box; a Gladware container would work fine, too, as long as you’re careful not to melt it.

Don’t lie to me

I’m at the Columbia City Bakery, which has only been open for a couple of months but is already rightly considered one of the best in town. They’d been selling at the farmers market before that. The bakery itself is a bright space on Columbia City’s main drag, across from Geraldine’s Counter, which has one of Seattle’s best burgers.

I intended to stop in for a little free wi-fi and a cookie, and I’m availing myself of both those amenities, but I couldn’t leave without a loaf of bread. Today it’s the crusty *pain de campagne*. They’re making baguettes in the back, flouring up the couches just like I used to do before Iris, when I spent some time baking bread. We recently made an order from [King Arthur](http://www.bakerscatalogue.com/), which sells the best parchment paper you can buy, and I threw in a bag of their high-gluten flour. Iris and I will make bagels and pizza with it.

When I first walked into the Columbia City Bakery, I took a look at the bread display and knew immediately that they made great bread. This is not because I’m a bread expert. It’s because there’s something unique about bread: good bread always looks good, and bad bread always looks bad.

It’s easy to burn some grill marks into a so-so steak and make it look prime, but somehow bread doesn’t work that way. Unlike any other food I can think of, you can size up a loaf of bread the same way you size up a mate: a good loaf just looks special, and it’s not due to one particular feature that can be taken in isolation. Being able to see good gluten formation in the slash is important, as is color (darker is better, up to a point), but those qualities alone don’t tell the whole story.

Probably there’s an exception to the rule somewhere, a loaf that looks like Poilâne and tastes like poop, but I don’t want to hear about it.

Corn of plenty

I can report a major pressure cooker success, thanks to smoked paprika. But let me back up.

On Monday night we had a rice noodle stir-fry from that same issue of Fine Cooking. I soaked some rice sticks and cooked them with fish sauce, garlic, chiles, chicken, tofu, and mushrooms. Iris did not approve, or as she likes to say, “Iris *don’t* like it.” (Sometimes Iris will fling a book aside and say, “Iris *don’t* like that book,” and then I will find her reading the same book five minutes later.) This despite the fact that she usually loves spicy tofu (aka “tofood”). She requested stew instead.

Iris has been making a lot of pretend stew in her new kitchen. She’ll put some chiles and toy vegetables into a little wooden pot and put it in the oven. Then she’ll turn one of the knobs on the stovetop, point to the other one, and say, “That one’s Dada’s.” I give it a turn, and she says, “Ding! It’s ready!” and opens the oven. The other day Laurie asked what she was making, and Iris said, “Chipotle-mushroom stew,” which sounds excellent.

So it didn’t take much to convince me that we should make some stew on Tuesday. Iris was happy about the prospect of stew, but even more excited because I said I’d be serving it with polenta. She loves polenta like a pellagra-ravaged Italian peasant. We went down to Pike Place Market and stopped in at Delaurenti for some pancetta. They sell pancetta at the QFC on Broadway, but we want to stop off at the Crumpet Shop for a crumpet with butter and honey. Anyway, while the woman at Delaurenti was slicing the pancetta, she asked what I was making. “It’s going to be something like a Northern Italian goulash,” I replied, “with pancetta and beef, red wine and tomatoes, and lots of onions. And I’m going to use smoked paprika, because we have some kicking around.”

“What are you going to serve with it? Potatoes?” she asked.

At this point Iris piped up, “Polenta! Polentapolentapolenta!”

The stew was inspired by a recipe in _Italian Slow and Savory_. I sauteed the onions, garlic, pancetta, and paprika but didn’t bother to brown the meat. Everything went into the pressure cooker with canned tomatoes and red wine (not too much of either, because I’ve learned my lesson about putting too much liquid in the PC). It cooked a total of 28 minutes at high pressure, although I had to open and check it a couple of times, which made it take longer. While the stew cooked, I had the polenta in the oven.

When the stew was done, I strained out the solids and defatted the very red broth in the gravy separator. I’m always reading recipes that advise you to spoon fat off the top of a sauce, either with a “wide, flat spoon,” whatever that is, or by putting the pan halfway off the burner, or tilting it, or something. I’ve never had the slightest success with any of these techniques, so I’m really glad someone invented the gravy separator. The best way to defat your stew is to leave it overnight in the fridge and remove the solid fat the next day, but that involves a degree of postponed gratification that I can’t countenance.

Iris was predictably impatient for the polenta to cool, and as soon as it was less than tongue-charringly hot, she started spooning it off her plate and saying, “Polenta! Not hot, just tasty.” We were all very pleased with the spicy stew. Apparently, and probably everyone knew this but me, smoked paprika is one of those ingredients, like fish sauce or parmesan cheese, that makes anything taste better. It made the stew beautifully red and smoky, and not in a fake-tasting liquid smoke sort of way, more like I had browned the meat over a glowing pile of hickory embers, which is doubly impressive since I didn’t brown the meat at all.

The strong flavor of smoked paprika makes it especially suited for the PC, which can crush strong flavors like play-doh. I threw in a couple of whole rosemary sprigs, and you couldn’t taste that at all.

The moral of the story is: Don’t buy a half-cup jar of smoked paprika. A half-gallon is more like it.

I used up all our pancetta, but after Iris’s bedtime, my dad came by with a late Christmas present: a whole slab of Salumi’s guanciale (cured pork jowl). When it comes to Italian pork products, I am Even Steven.

The OJ trial

I may have created a monster.

We had a couple of leftover oranges from making the glazed short ribs and some cranberry-orange muffins, so after nap I made Iris some fresh squeezed OJ. As I juiced the oranges, Iris kept saying, “Fresh…squeezed…OJ,” sound pretty much exactly like Ren Hoek saying “Forty-seven MILLION dollars?”

Iris has had OJ from concentrate plenty of times, so there’s something very reassuring about her having an intuitive sense that fresh OJ is better, even if it means there will be a lot of juicing in my future. Or maybe she just enjoys watching me work.

Today when I went back to the store for more oranges, I noticed that my local QFC sells Seville oranges, which I’m always reading about but have never actually seen before. So I bought a few, and we’ll see what I can come up with.