While cooking, I noticed an open tray of small white crystals. They're fans of Alton Brown's excellent show, Good Eats, and he advocates having Kosher Salt around in an open container because it's so easy to grab a pinch and toss it in your dish. "Ahh, just like true Alton Brown fans" thinks I, as I drop a pinch into the spaghetti sauce. Everyone has some, and enjoys it.
Two days later, I'm explaining something to my littler brother, and use the kosher salt as an example. "Oh, that's not salt, those are bath salts." "Bath salts in the kitchen in an open dish? Yeah right, little bro" thinks I.
Still, he's pretty sharp, and thinking back, I remember the consistency of the crystals being just slightly off from what I expected. I had attributed it to the salt being a different brand, but I realized that I never taste-tested any of it.
When my Mother in law got up, I asked her if the tray was kosher salt, "Oh no, those are bath salts. We put them there to keep the ants away, but they're old. I guess I should throw them out."
"Ok.
So.
First of all, we're not dead..."
I explained the situation and after the initial shock, everyone realized that were were, in fact, still alive, so we had a bit of a laugh about it.
There are a variety of household items that are unnecessarily non-toxic "just in case," but I really didn't know how something as obtuse as bath salts would hold against that "just in case" presumption.
I immediately started looking up the toxicity of bath salts, which was near impossible, since every search result was about zombies and face eating. Luckily I was able to find some common bath salt ingredients, but that only scared me more. After some searching, my Mother in law was able to find the brand of the salts, and a quick visit to their website showed all the ingredients were natural and quite edible (particularly in the small amount I used).
So that was fun.
