Granted, the Salton Sea isn’t the beach, and it’s pretty dried up, but the California desert is where I find myself, and I think it would be fun to show Theo and Cousin Jenny how to make salt from the water. In the same way my parents thought it would be fun to take us to the Arboretum to show us the effect of weather on native plant species. (Which 40 years later I appreciate.)

If Gordon Ramsay can slaughter his children’s pet pig in the name of slow food, I can help desiccate a body of water to the same end. Here’s how you do it:

Collect some salt water from as clean a beach as you can find, or from an endangered body of desert saltwater. Strain it through a paper coffee filter or a pillowcase into an enamel or stainless-steel pan.

Boil until the water is almost gone and begins to get cloudy. Then watch it closely, because soon it’ll get splodgy like wet sand and the salt crystals will emerge.

When this happens, turn off the heat and scrape the wet salt onto a wooden board, and either dry it out in the oven overnight or in the strong sun for a day. A quart of water will make about a tablespoon of salt.

(If my camera hadn't been lost somewhere between L.A. and N.Y., here's where you would have seen the picture of Theo and Jenny being bribed with a date shake at Shield’s Date Farm in Indio—making salt was apparently not the fun afternoon they had in mind.)