So for the last four months or so I’ve been biting bits of sand in the food. At first I thought that maybe I hadn’t washed the rice or vegetables properly. I started paying extra attention when washing things but nothing changed. So frustrating. To be chewing into something that tastes so good and then a piece of sand or soil gets in the way.
When it first started happening I was horrified. I said to God, “please don’t let my husband get these pieces of sand in his food. If they’re there let them end up on my plate.”
A few weeks ago when I was salting the food, I saw a piece of something in the salt that didn’t look right. I pulled it out and it was a tiny piece of rock. For the next few days I cooked with the coarse sea salt instead to see if it made a difference. It did. There was no sand in the food. It had to be the salt (the regular, iodized one).
Do you know God is faithful? Well know it today, He is faithful. When I told my husband I found the source of the sand that’s been in the food he said “What sand?”
When I was wondering what to do, because I didn’t want to throw away the salt, I had a flash back. Not to the science lab in school but to Mama’s kitchen at home. Dad decided we were going to have some fun in the kitchen one day. I think it was just after dinner. Anyway, he took a glass with some water in it and dumped a lot of salt into it. He said something like “We are going to make the salt disappear, and then we’ll bring it back!” We were young, I thought it was going to be a magic trick.
He then had us stir it till all the salt had disappeared (Mama had no sand in her salt). He asked if we knew how to bring it back. One guess was a sieve with a very tight mesh to catch the salt which we thought was just invisible or really tiny. I can’t remember what our other guesses were. After we gave up he said we’re going to boil the water. It made no sense to us. At least not to me. Boil the water? What does that have to do with the salt that’s in it? He placed a small pot on Mama’s stove, poured in the salty water and turned on the heat. Then he said for us to go play and he’d call us when the salt was back.
I can’t tell you how long it was but when he called us back the salt was there. It was back and the water was gone! That day I learned what steam was, understood the concept of evaporation what it meant for something to be soluble. I learned about crystals and crystallisation. In the kitchen with my Dad. He taught us many things when we were young that have stuck better than what I learned in the classroom. I thank God for my Father.
On that note,… I proceeded to recreate that experiment.
