Extra Tid-Bit Wednesday

I'll add another post for today because I was so excited to start using our hand-crank grain mill. We got it today and I tried it immediately after rushing from the mailbox to open it. It's a Victorio grain mill, and I'll put up some pictures tomorrow. Today, however, I'm going to show you what I milled first. We don't have any grains right now or even dent corn to mill, so I decided to mill some of my Himalayan crystal salt. I've been using a mortar and pestle to crush the crystal salt, but this mill takes most of the hard work out of creating freshly ground salt.

Here's what I got. The knob on the grain mill is adjustable so I can get fine or coarse milling (or any texture in between). I used too fine an adjustment for the first batch, and powdery salt isn't any good for cooking, at least in my opinion. After adjusting the knob so it would make the grinding stone looser from the rest of the grinding mechanism, I got the right texture - slightly coarse so that the salt wasn't powdery. 

Himalayan crystal salt is pink and has many of the minerals intact. Because it doesn't supply all of the iodine that the body needs, I needed to purchase some seaweed "salt" from my local natural foods store. It's basically ground up seaweed from the coasts of the Northeast. It makes things taste like the sea, so I like to use it with other spices to kind of mask the sea flavor a little.

I do not really use iodized salt anymore. I sometimes will use it when I am boiling pasta, but since I purchased a kilo of the Himalayan crystal salt, I have so much of it that I use it for almost anything I make now, even in boiling water (such as making chicken broth).

This is our extra tid-bit for this Wednesday. It's just an extra blog post about a "small" something that, to me, makes a big difference in our lifestyle.