I cook with Kosher salt and high-mineral Celtic sea salt. I've used sea salt for over 30 years - I didn't like the taste of iodized table salt. I also add kelp to my garden and toss it into things I bake/cook. I use other kinds of seaweed, like Nori, for the added minerals. I learned this stuff when I tried Macrobiotics years ago. As far as Campbells Soup goes, it's all about perception...and marketing. It's just like all the so-called "organic" stuff that is everywhere now - not just the health food store anymore. The food industry thought they should get in on that market share - not just the three of us "health nuts" already buying from the food coops and health food stores. -Grainlady

katrina: I like your idea about using more solid pillows or pillows that read like solid. I pulled a creamy patterned pillow from my bedroom and tried it on its solid reverse side. Looks pretty good! patricia and raven: Neither of you would whitewash the trunk - what do you think about whitewashing the chunky stand? isabel: If I got the larger pillows, would you use them in place of the matching ones on there now - or in addition to them? nosoccer: That is one gorgeous rug but I do like the one raven pointed me to and it fit my budget. I think with the sea salt I just need to decide which color to nudge it toward. I think I'm going blue. Thank you everyone for your help so far. One more quick question? I found a glass cylinder lamp on sale (the kind you can leave empty or fill with stuff). The price on it is great. It looks a lot like the photo I've attached. Do you think it would look ok in my room? Filled with shells, empty, or filled with something else?

Chi83, I've looked at beautifully roasted, best crop brussels sprouts and thought they looked delicious, but could barely choke half of one down, and nearly brought it back up. I can deal with cauliflower and cabbage if they're raw or cooked right so they don't stink so bad. I have the same reaction to the sulphur in vitamin capsules. The best vitamins I ever had used to mask the smell of the sulphury B's with vanillin, but they wanted to be all natural so stopped that and didn't put in a different mask. Even after I aired out the smell and could swallow them, they came back up. I can eat all kinds of cheeses that stink worse! I just can't tolerate sulphur! Yes, the Canadian law (which I looked up yesterday) mandates iodine for table salt. The salt in canned goods probably doesn't have it. There's such a thing as too much iodine, and the amount of it people got from canned goods would be too variable, I'd think. Every kind of salt crystal has a different finished (serving) shape and, I think, density. You can get grinders that reduce sea salt to the size of regular table salt, but they're generally expensive. Regular salt grinders tend to make small flakes, which taste good, but are actually as big as several grains of regular table salt. That's probably why sea salt tastes saltier. The iodine in salt is bitter, however, and it could be that sensing the bitterness along with the saltiness lessens the perception of saltiness. BTW, The Canadian Salt Company, according to Wikipedia, has been a division of Morton since the 1950's and is the maker of Windsor, Fino and Safe-T-Salt. By their own website, Compass Minerals, the makers of Sifto, are the largest salt producers in North America. It sounds like table salt is a very small part of what they produce. I also learned that the discovery of the original Sifto salt bed started a "salt rush". That sounded interesting, but a quick search on Amazon/Amazon.ca didn't turn up any books on the subject. I have a copy of Salt (the history of salt, not the spy novel) that my father passed along to me awhile back. I suppose I should read that...

This has been an interesting thread to follow, and I would have to say cooking is both an art and a science. In fact, I would say food at its best is a blend of art and science, after being a foods judge at fairs for many years. Leave the salt out of a bread recipe and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt twice, an easy mistake, and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt early and the gluten is harder to develop. Add the salt late in the gluten-development and it's easier to develop and won't require as much kneading. All science! The same goes for adding too much water, flour, sugar (or other sweetener); or flavoring ingredients which can affect the gluten-development in bread when you add too much - like cinnamon and nutmeg when added directly to the dough (this is why we sprinkle cinnamon/sugar on the dough surface for cinnamon rolls, rather than adding large amounts of cinnamon TO the dough. Add too much dairy and you'll end up with loaf with characteristics like - low-volume, poor symmetry, poor cellular structure and texture..... That's pure science. When people have a failed recipe, it's generally not from bad intentions or bad artistic interpretation, it's from bad science. Most modern baked goods are based on a ratio of ingredients. Stick to the common ratio whether you use a scale to weigh each ingredient, cups, pint canning jar, tea/coffee cup or mug... for your measuring tool-of-choice.... So take a moment to marvel at the science. "A standard plain cake has, by measure, 1/3 as much fat as sugar, 2/3 as much milk as sugar; and about 3 times as much flour as liquid." This ratio works whether you are making one small cake, one large cake, or enough batter for 100 cakes. Alter the ratio, such as trying to make a low-fat or low-sugar cake, or changing the type of flour used, and you will need to alter the known science with different ingredients and/or mixing methods. This science is most important when you develop recipes because you need to keep in mind ingredients that are tenderizers (fat and sugar) and those that are structure builders (flour and eggs), along with the other ingredients. Back to measuring flour for bread. This is one area that is completely without a standard for a scale or a dry measure, as all measurements for flour in a bread recipe are just a "good (or bad) guess". Add to that the way each person fills a cup with flour which will get you completely different amounts of flour if you were to weigh the amount on a scale, and the measuring cups themselves have NO standard in manufacturing. This is one area of baking where experience (art) along with science will help improve your bread. Due to the differences in the amount of gluten and moisture in flour, and those differences vary from brand-to-brand, season to season (moisture high during the rainy season and low during a dry winter) as well as from bag-to-bag of the same brand, you need to develop the "feel" (art) for bread dough. Your hands will "know" more about the dough than an exact measure. This is why you need to hold back 1/2-3/4 cup of flour during kneading. You may not need to add all the flour once it has the correct "feel" - and you may use all of the flour and require even more than the recipe called for..... It is also better to err on the side of a loose/wet dough than a hard/stiff dry dough. But I would also encourage EVERYONE to get a scale. There are lots more uses, along with measuring ingredients (especially if you find a recipe that is all weight measurements). It's the best tool in your kitchen when you MUST weigh something. It's far more accurate to measure 4-ounces of shredded cheese on a scale than it is to try to measure an equivalent in a cup - do you pack it tight/loose???? You can scale (weigh) the amount of batter in two cake pans to make sure you have an equal amount of batter in each of them so you have cake layers that are the same size. I even scale dough for burger and hot dog buns so I can adjust the size wanted/needed and make them consistently that same size, as well as the amount of bread per serving (a serving of bread is considered 1-oz.). When buns/rolls/loaves are the same size, they will bake more evenly. A reason to weigh the amount of salt is because of the size of the grains of different salt products. The finer the grind, the more salt grains there will be in a teaspoon (or whatever measure) because they will pack very closely together, while there will be less total salt when you put coarse-grinds of salt in the teaspoon because there are more voids of air between the larger chunks of salt. But the difference will probably not make a really huge difference in this bread recipe, but it IS a science factor you may want to keep in mind. And plenty of bread has successfully been made with plain old iodized table salt - even though I personally stopped using it many decades ago. So many things are choices, and neither totally right or totally wrong. -Grainlady