Crafty Meals – easy recipes for healthy meals

Seasoning is the key to bringing out the natural flavours in any food that you cook. Salt and pepper are perhaps the only ingredient you could travel to any house on the planet and find in every pantry or cooking supplies cupboard.

As we are reminded constantly, salt is not good for us, yet the flavour enhancing it adds to food makes its inclusion mandatory. Still, some time ago I developed a seasoning mix that uses far less salt, and blends 2 other simple flavours with black pepper to create a mix that just works.

We use this to season beef, lamb, chicken, pork, fish and vegetarian dishes. Whenever you would break out the salt and pepper we use this mix, even for adding a little pizzaz to a tomato sandwich.

Magic Seasoning Mix
This mix is made with equal parts of the ingredients below.
You will need a spice grinder or mortar and pestle to make this mix. For ideas on these items, see our article here.

Ingredients
Rock Salt (this form of salt helps to blitz the remaining ingredients in the spice grinder).
Sechuan Pepper Corns.
Black Pepper Corns.
Brown Mustard Seeds.

Method
Measure and combine equal amounts of the above ingredients.
In a typical spice grinder 1 tablespoon of each will be about the maximum for efficient grinding.
Blitz with the grinder until you start to get fine grindings sticking to the top of the grinder.
Tap the grinder on your bench top and repeat twice.
Using a tea strainer, sift the ground ingredients to remove the stalks from the sechuan pepper corns.
Seal in dry containers and store in a cool dry place.

Hints
I like to make large amounts of this to make the effort of getting the spice grinder out worth it.
I combine a cup of each ingredient into a large bowl and mix, taking half a cup at a time and grinding it.
I grind, then sift the ingredients into another bowl, and once all the batches are done I carefully fold all the batches together to ensure even distribution of the ingredients.
I store it in empty spice jars, and when I need to use it transfer it to a pepper shaker to easily spread it over whatever I need to season.

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