Whatever Floats Your Boat

While I was looking for cupboard quotes to accompany the “From My Cupboard” post (something other than old Mother Hubbard, whose cupboard was bare), I came across a gourmet site called In the Cupboard.  My senses were delighted to find it not bare at all, but full of such imagined riches as assorted bitters—for cocktails or for cakes, poultry seasoning or gravy, even vegetable soup—

• orange & juniper
• grapefruit & hops
• lem-Marrakech (invoking the spice markets of Morocco) 
• plum & rootbeer (enhanced by purple beet juices)

and then these salts—

• Guatemalan fleur de sel from salt pans that supplied the Mayan Empire
• Andes Mountain Rose, to spinkle on brook trout (hand quarried in Bolivia from an ancient dried ocean bed)
• mesquite smoked sea salt
• healthy bamboo leaf salt from Molokai
• chocolate fleur de sel to add to mole
• lemon flake sea salt harvested from the Mediterranean (good on asparagus, or on the rims of margarita glasses)
• Cyprus hardwood smoked sea salt, for potatoes or goat cheese
• salt from a warm mountain spring 10,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes (for pre-Inca tamales, or a scallop ceviche)
• briny French gray salt
• cherry plum salt
• pinot noir salt
• rosemary or saffron flavored salts 

And if that weren’t enough, chocolates as well!

I’m going to juxtapose these sensual delights with this delightful picture I just found.  At the beginning of the holidays (the long holiday month), the floating blessings of an old salt or lover of salts, a not-quite-ancient mariner, a seafarer on sometimes inland seas.

image:  Porch Sitting Union of America