Travails with Rock Salt

It all started with our packet of iodized salt getting over. As it happens all the time, we forgot to replenish our stock of salt. So my intelligent and ever resourceful Mom decided to use Rock Salt (Kal Uppu in Tamil) to cook our daily meal.

The food turned out to be a lot better than normal with just that extra bit of salt. The aloo karamadhu(curry) turned out excellent last week :). So far so good. Then Amma decided to do most, if not all her cooking using rock salt..

Now rock salt is very unlike the normal free flowing powdered salt that we use. I am told 1 1/2 teaspoons of normal salt is equivalent to about 1/2 teaspoon of rock salt. Anything extra might just make your food inedible ;).

My Dad, a competent cook himself decided to experiment and added rock salt to the Idli batter. There started the problem - the batter turned out salty and the idlis saltier! Now to salvage the batter, we added onions and chillis and made dosas.. they were no better! Dad ate them with a straight face ;). No comments :)

We then added water to the existing batter, my mom's logic - the water will absorb the salt and then we can spill the excess water and use batter to make more idli's :). After all this natak.. what remained was a watery white liquid that can be only thrown away :D. I believe I glimpsed happiness in my Dad's face when he did that :D

And when Dad started making upma, he added all the ingredients.. took the salt, thought about it and called out to my Mom..."Please come and add salt for this upma!". Mom and I couldn't help ourselves and we started laughing out loudly :))