Salt Assault

Have you ever tried bacon sausage? Did you even know there was such a thing as bacon sausage? If not, don't worry, neither did I. Now I do. I'll get to it shortly. I must preface this posting with my history of cooking. When Mitch and I first got married, I was a pretty mediocre/borderline lousy cook. I quickly learned that if I fed Mitch dinner, he was a happy person for the rest of the night. Dinner is a big deal to him... so, I always cook dinner. In the past 6+ years of cooking dinner pretty much every night (well, that and what I learned from Chef Eric and Charlotte Brennan in my culinary classes) I've learned a thing or two. I'm still not an amazing cook, but I do love to cook and I try new things all the time. It helps that my husband enjoys food so dang much. We both do, but he will offer helpful advice such as, "Cara, wouldn't this taste awesome with a little more lime?" Sometimes this advice is taken gracefully, sometimes not so much. But I digress... when I have cooking fiascoes they always involve salt... like WAY TOO MUCH salt. I have many more stories, but the following salt fiascoes all happened in the past few months:

Salt Fiasco #1: I bought a sloppy joe mix and added tomato sauce instead of tomato paste. Tomato sauce has added salt, tomato paste does not (I checked), plus the mix had way too much salt anyway... therefore Mitch and I couldn't even swallow our first bite. It was that salty.

Salt Fiasco #2: Mitch enjoys pheasant hunting. Every so often he brings one home all cleaned and ready to cook. Normally he cooks it himself, but I decided to try my hand at it. His co-worker told him if you brine the pheasant in saltwater it has a great flavor. I tried this, but I forgot about it for 2 days. I decided it couldn't make that much of a difference so I made it into a Chinese sweet and sour dish. It would have been great, except it was so salty we about choked on the first bite!

Salt Fiasco #3: I was in a hurry and decided I would hurry and just cook some chicken in a pan with olive oil, garlic salt seasoning, red pepper flakes, and basil. We like to put this over pasta. I forgot and garlic-salted the chicken twice. It was quite salty. Edible, but just barely.

Salt Fiasco #4: (this happened tonight, thus prompting this posting) Two words: Sausage Bacon. Now sausage is salty, and bacon is incredibly salty... so who would put these two together? Well I guess Jimmy Dean knows. I sure don't. I was making biscuits and gravy for dinner since it's Mitch's favorite meal ever and I just have a hard time eating it for breakfast. So I'm cooking the sausage and I tell Mitch, "This sausage looks pink." He comes and looks at it and he agrees. I say, "I'm sure it's pork, I checked." So we look at the package it came in, sure enough-- pork sausage bacon. Well you can imagine how salty biscuits and gravy made with sausage bacon was. Again, edible, but just barely. Mitch told me I had better take off my rings, because I was going to swell up from all the salt and they wouldn't fit! He's probably right!

So there you have it. If you're ever around my house for dinner beware. You just might be salt assaulted.