I am proud to be from Albuquerque when I click over to Duke City Fix and see the new tagline “More Dick, Less Knipfing.” See, DK is a newscaster and, uh…I guess you had to grow up there.

Anyway, I went to the equally obscure (sort of) city of Pittsburgh this weekend, partially to see Loretta Lynn sing and partially to visit Peter’s friend from grad school, who’s just moved there and illustrates the shocking truth of NYC real estate by living in a house a million times nicer than hours and paying about a tenth as much. Or something like that.

Anyway, really, the point of this post is to say I’m glad I got my creative desperation-cooking juices flowing in the kitchen last week before we went (I did finally go grocery shopping on Wednesday, but I still cooked a pantry-style meal: sloppy joes, succotash, and some radishes rattling around the bottom drawer).

Because as Peter and I are puttering around the kitchen, getting out pans, turning on the burners to make dinner, Gaby says, “Oh, I should’ve mentioned at the store–we don’t have any salt.”

Grrrrrrrrrkkkkreeeeeeekkk. Or however you spell the sound of the record being quickly ground down to a stop.

Wha?

Gasp.

Several more dramatic pauses for emphasis.

…

…

OK. Have I made myself clear? Cooking without salt is a little hard to imagine. It’s every cook’s not-so-secret trick. I mean–you can’t boil pasta without salting the water, right? The Constitution would probably spontaneously combust in its little secret vault. The Starship Enterprise would fall into a black hole and never recover. The earth would flatten out, and I’d probably fall off the edge, to where the dragons are.

Peter offered to run out and get salt. I, typically, dug in my heels. NO. We’d manage. We’re creative people. We had one packet of Chinese-takeout soy sauce, half a bottle of reduced-sodium soy sauce, a jar of anchovies and half a pint of olives. And some parmesan. We’d wring the umami out of those babies and whip up a damn fine dinner–no extra grocery shopping required.

Luckily, my dinner plan consisted of making some grocery-made lamb sausages into a pasta sauce. Those sausages were probably already loaded with salt. I’d been planning to add olives anyway–I added more. I hacked the rind off the parmesan and threw it in the sauce with the canned tomatoes, that probably had salt in them too.

Peter made a Caesar salad dressing heavy on the anchovies. He grated extra-coarse parmesan cheese.

I smothered the butternut squash with feta cheese.

I glugged so much soy sauce in the pasta water that it looked like it had come out of lead pipes that had been rusting for three hundred years.

At the last second, I panicked and added an anchovy to the pasta sauce too.

It all turned out totally freakin’ fine. And for once in my life, I actually had a meal involving feta cheese and olives where I didn’t think, Gah, this stuff is good, but it’s soooo salty.

Lesson learned. New Year’s resolution: Less salt, maybe. Definitely less Knipfing.