Herbs and Spices. I suppose it's fairly predictable that I would start this way. Quite simply, your favourite dish should start with the best Herbs and Spices. Not your artificially flavoured, salt laden and preservative added mixtures on supermarket shelves but plain, pure and natural Herbs and Spices that have been delivering flavour to us for over 3000 years.

All good but before you think I'm getting a bit carried away with this Spice flavour thing, I accept the obvious that the dish must first start with the ingredients.

Not just any ingredients but pure, salt free ingredients from sustainable farm produce and free range, naturally grass fed meat and poultry from open space compounds.

The difficulty with this is the low cost, antibiotic filled meats and poultry from cruelly restrictured animals. Sure the proper produce costs a little more and is not always easy to find but being a bit canny, you can buy, say, a little less meat weight ($'s saved and anyway, less meat is healthier) and then work your recipe balance with vegetables - and beans too if you like, to meet the budget.

Staying with vegetables,there is no better example than from the many Farmers Markets across Australia. You only have to buy your favourite vegetable or fruit to see and taste the difference between a Farmers Market product and one that has been endlessly transported and sometimes ripened in warehouses before arriving on supermarkets shelves.

But I digress.The point is natural Herbs and Spices are given to us to enhance the natural (there's that word again) flavours of vegetables, meats and poultry. Nothing more and nothing more complicated. Just a matter of understanding how the array of Spice flavours relate and appeal to you the Home Chef and your cooking.

And better still, for up and coming Foodies and those beginning a Salt Free diet, the learning can be fun as you work through how each Herb and Spice partners to develop and enhance the chosen flavours in your dish.

I often mention our skilled Spice Road Spices Foodie subscribers ( better described by Adam Florance as "Spice Roaders") and I imagine that a great many of this talented Home Chef Brigade understand very well how Herbs and Spices work for them and their recipe.

I also imagine that this same group always learn a little something new each time they cook. Maybe that levels things out a bit between the Foodie starters and the Foodie masters amongst our subscribers. I know both have a great love of food and excellence in their home kitchen world and of creating their own Umami - that wonderful Japanese word for the fifth sense - Deliciousness !

Which, of course, brings us us back to the importance of placing the natural salt free flavour of Herbs and Spices at the start of your dish. But I would say that !

For the full selection of Spices and Spice Blends click: SPICES and for unique Salt Free recipes click: RECIPES

Enjoy the flavours everyone Arthur Huxley