Friends come to visit

When I went to my first Gay Center Student Meeting at UCI, the first person I met was Joel G. Over the next couple of years we were roommates and partners in gender crime, sex crime, chemical crime, and managed to finish school and do a lot of sailing. He went to USCF and then to Yale at a time when I was in New Haven so I found him his first apartment and we did a lot of windsurfing in the (oft-polluted) LI Sound. Then he moved down to Baltimore and I moved all over and we periodically keep in touch.

He and his partner Joel were in town yesterday so we had them as well as Dan and Lawrence over for dinner. It's amazing how much food you can get people to eat when you do multiple courses:

Softshell crabs with lemon and hot bean paste.
Lamb with five spice and chile sauce.
Arugula salad.
Szechuan eggplant.
Kung Pao chicken.
Bananas Foster.

All of it yummy.

Joel and Joel (with me reflected).





More ( behind the cut )

Salt

During my year in London in 1998 I was on full expenses and I lived and ate pretty well (it was still the most horrible job I've ever had.) One of the things I discovered was there are different kinds of salt - but this sort of stayed in the periphery of my consciousness until 2001 when I went on a bicycling trip in the South of France. I spent a couple of days by myself in Paris at the end and shopped for wonderful treats to bring home to my friends and I found a box of fleur de sel de camargue. I loved the idea of people gazing out over the vast pools of drying salt water in the steady winds that blow off the Mediterranian Sea, scooping up the frothy bits of dried salt like little flowers of deliciousness. And then putting them in a jar. For me.

I was hooked. I love the flavor. It took us a while to go through what I brought back even after much of it had been gifted away. When I went online to order more I saw that others had caught up with me and that salts had become fashionable. Sites such as www.saltworks.us or www.salttraders.com provide a wide array of sources and flavors. I really am not much on mixing salt with another flavor and then selling it for more than the price of either ingredient so I steer clear of much of what's out there (like flavored vinegars or oils) but some of the are really great.

My favorite is this fleur de sel from M. Gilles Hervy:



It's still moist. What more can I say. It's incredible on fresh picked tomatoes still warm from the sun. It tastes like the wind smells coming off the ocean on a grey damp day. It's marvelous.

The same site has fleur de sel de Camargue:



This is our day-to-day salt. It's sort of crunchy and adds flavor as well as saltiness. And it lasts forever.

Then there's Danish Viking-smoked salt:



It's much more expensive and my tiny jar was mostly used by Lawrence (JB) who would snort some up every time he came over. It's made by evaporating salt water over a smoky fire of juniper, cherry, elm, beech and oak. A little goes a long way but when it's right it adds the essence of an outdoor fire.

Then there are the pink salts. One from the Andes comes from buried, dried seas encased in the mountains that are slowly being dissolved rainy season by rainy season. The salty water seeps out into terraced ponds where it dries and is harvested. I love the idea of prehistoric contents - could there be essence of dessicated dinosaur in there? - but the flavor isn't exceptional. Other pink salt is mined in the Himalayas, and hawaiian red salt is sea salt with clay added. It's got an earthy, wide flavor to it. There's an australian pink salt that JB got us that is tasty as well.

Varietal salts. Duck fat instead of oil. These are the things that make an ordinary kitchen into a palace of gay culinary showmanship.

I need something new, though.