Asparagus, Salt and Sweet Brings the Farm Home to School Children

Asparagus and salt tasting EventNothing pleases children like asparagus. They just can’t get enough of it. So when you bring a few dozen pounds of asparagus to a school cafeteria, you expect to be inundated with boisterous, hungry faces, jockeying for position, beseeching you for more of the stuff.  Kids, there’s nothing like ‘em to remind you of the simple pleasures of the farm.

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.

Salted Asparagus Ice Cream EventStrand 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.)

Mark Bitterman Serving Himalayan SaltStrand 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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Travel Advice? A 25 Day Salt Tour of Europe

Plan for Salt Tour of Western EuropeOur flight leaves just one day after I return from my first IACP conference, so the bags must be packed in advance.  Cigarette lighter power adapters for cell phones, my laptop, and various and sundry electronic accouterments, a new camera bag for my incredibly sexy new Nikon D90 (I usually carry it in a grocery bag), battery chargers and SD memory readers, 8 hulking travel books (so far): why are we so My handy leatherman, a Shrade actuallyladen with equipment, when I used to travel with a pocket knife, a spare pair of socks and a rain jacket?  Reasons.

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.

italy, water, lollipopsWe 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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Bali Rama Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Salt-topped chocolate chip oatmeal cookies

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 the Centerfold

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.

Bolivian Andes Rose Rock Salt

Quick & Easy Himalayan Salt Block Seared Flank Steak

Flank steak cooked on Himalayan Salt BlocksFlank steak has to be pretty much the best thing short of a foot rub while drinking a root beer float.  But it’s tough.  It’s ornery.  There is a common strategy to making the flank steak supple enough to eat without popping your jaw out of joint: marinating.  I’ve made coffee and ginger marinades, lime and tequila marinades, smoked salt and chili pepper marinades, vinegar and sugar marinades… you name it.  Every time, great steak.  But think of the poor steak.  A wonderful, flavor-packed piece of meat forced to suffer quietly the insult of subjugation to intense acids and sugars and salts.  When we see a flank steak, we see a quandary.  How do we get that elemental flavor out of a meat that resists the teeth?  There is a solution, a way honor the humble yet noble flank steak in its naked beauty, a way that takes virtually no preparation ahead of time, a way results in a fun, incredibly juicy and savory dish.

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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