Asian Persuasion

Since my husband if Filipino he is used to eating fried rice.  Well all fried rice has soy sauce on it and soy is DANG high in sodium (2 tablespoons=900mg), even the low sodium soy (2 tablespoons=560-600mg) is ridiculously high.  So tonight I made our own soy sauce for fried rice.  Well it didn’t exactly taste like soy, but it was close (I guess).  The whole batch of “soy” sauce had a total of 176mg of sodium, which was a total of ½ cup (8 servings=8tablespoons at 22mg per serving).  I used 2 eggs, which have a total of 65mg per egg, and the rice, of course, is 0mg.  I also added some chopped green onions, which Clay later said he didn’t like.  It tasted fine enough to eat, but nothing like good fried rice that we’re used to.

I think my husband and his sister may be going to our local farmer’s market tomorrow to see what’s available for dinner or lunches this week.  So we’ll see what he finds tomorrow.  

B.Y.O.S.S

So tonight we actually had the stuffed pasta shells for dinner.  We bought a different brand of spaghetti sauce this time as well.  It tasted much better straight from the jar when compared to the first one.  This one has 25mg of sodium per serving where as the other had 10mg.  I did however throw it all in a pot and add more spices.  The stuffed shells turned out pretty good and tasted pretty good as well.

Thursday night we got invited over to my sister-in-law’s house for dinner where we had spaghetti.  So of course we had to BYOSS (bring your own spaghetti sauce).  This is something that we’ll probably have to do a lot.  We’ll probably be making a lot of our stuff before we head over the parties/family get-togethers or eating before we go. 

So we went on another food shopping adventure this weekend to find the no sodium beef bouillon and baking soda and powder.  I was only able to find the beef bouillon at Fresh Market.  This is one ingredient that I need to make our own soy sauce.  I cooked rice today in our rice cooker so that it’ll be ready for fried rice tomorrow night.  I’ve read that day old rice is the best for fried rice.  I also have to get some red wine vinegar to make the sauce.

Oh and Clay and his brother-in-law were picking some things up at our local Kroger for dinner on Thursday night and he found some 0mg corn tortillas by Tia Rosa in the international food isle.  We’ll have to get those and see if they hold up better than the ones we currently have.  We also picked up the Xochitl brand tortilla chips (0mg) because Clay wanted some salsa.  They taste just like the chips at most Mexican restaurants (which my husband usually puts salt on).  He made his own salsa, which I didn’t like because it had too much jalapeno.  He liked it and now the chips are pretty much gone.

We also made pancakes for the first time with our new mix.  It’s going to take some getting used to.  It’s an oat bran mix so it’s very grainy and gritty tasting, which we are not used to.  The recipe also suggests that you can add berries, chopped nuts, vanilla or cinnamon.  We’ll probably try the vanilla or cinnamon and possibly the nuts.  I’m not big on berries or cooked fruit. 

I still need to check Whole Foods for the baking soda and powder, otherwise I’ll be ordering them from this website: http://healthyheartmarket.com/.  This is the brand that the author of our cookbook, Dick Logue, recommended, Hain Pure Foods.

We also had another great find this weekend.  Clay has always liked Frosted Mini Wheats and we bought a three sister’s brand at Whole Foods that only had 10mg of sodium per serving (1 cup).  Well it turns out that the Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats only has 5mg per serving (24 biscuits)!  Which is totally great because I always have coupons for Kellogg’s cereal or Mini Wheats.  The next best was corn pops, which was 120mg per serving (which was 1 cup).

This finding low to no sodium foods seems to be getting easier, but at the same time a big challenge.  The one meal that is still hard for us is lunch.  Mostly because you want something quick and easy and sandwiches get old quick.  Plus Clay is really staring to get tired of PB&J’s.  I still need to look into the sodium count for Pita’s and see if that could be an option for lunches.  At least we could fill that with fresh veggies or sautéed ones, so I guess the sodium count for a pita wouldn’t really matter when what’s going in it is practically zero.  We can’t just pick up Lean Pockets or Lean Cuisines because the sodium count is outrageous!  Seriously, next time you head to the store pick one up and check out the sodium count, I think you’ll be shocked.

And one last thing, this container store find has totally come in handy for me and I use it ALL the time.

Homemade Enchilada Sauce

So tonight we finally used our low sodium cookbook for dinner (and we even picked out dinner for tomorrow night).  Tonight we decided to do enchiladas.  I used the recipe for enchilada sauce from the cookbook and used our 0mg sodium tortillas.  The sauce has to simmer for an hour and is very simple to make.  I think it’s a total of 8-10 ingredients, and I doubled up on the spices (something I’ve been learning).  Here’s the sauce:

I decided to puree the sauce when it was finished because I don’t like chunky sauces.  The one thing I don’t like about the tortillas, besides the taste, is that they are hard and break and crack very easily.  I had to warm them up in the microwave with dame paper towels so that I could work with them.  I filled mine with cheese and Clay’s with cheese and diced chicken.  I poured the sauce on them and cooked them for 15 minutes at 375°.  Here’s how they turned out:

So when we started scooping them up from the dish they quickly fell apart and this is what our enchiladas looked like on our plate:

They completely disintegrated.  I guess salt is a glue of some sort, who knows?  But they were really good.  Next time we’ll be doing a casserole type of layering with the cheese and tortillas.  But I’m pretty sure that if I had friends over and cooked with this enchilada sauce they would have no idea that it was low sodium (sauce=5mg of sodium and yields 16 servings).  I think we only used about half of the sauce for a total of 40mg of sodium for the sauce.  Of course the cheese was about 510 (for 3 enchiladas) and the total amount of sodium was roughly 530mg.  Not too bad.

We stopped by our local Kroger today (not the super one) and they have all the low sodium items that we need.  While we were there I also looked to see if they had the no sodium beef bouillon, which they only had chicken.  I need the no sodium beef to try to make soy sauce.  I also looked for the no sodium baking soda and powder and they didn’t have it either.  I’m probably going to look at Whole Foods and Fresh Market and if they don’t have it then I’ll have to order it online.  I really want to make these mocha muffins for breakfast soon.  Each muffin only has 23mg of sodium.

So tomorrow I’m going to be making some stuffed pasta shells and will be using our spiced up spaghetti sauce.  Hopefully it turns out well.  We’ll see tomorrow. 

Ode to the Smartphone (and internet)

I am somewhat glad to be living in an era where we can have internet access at a moment’s notice.  Personally my cell phone is not my baby, nor do I feel like I need it all the time, and if I do forget it, it’s not a big deal for me.  I feel like I’m pretty techy and well informed with new gadgets and technology, but I don’t care when it comes to cell phones.  And when my sweet little Olive chewed up my trust brick phone an month ago I gave my husband VERY specific instructions for picking out my new cell phone (I had to work the next day so he had to go get me a new one.  The only instructions he was give were: 1. Simple, 2) it had to be a brick phone with the regular number pad, and 3) no camera or other flashy things.  So I now have a Go phone, which is just what I needed and wanted.

Now having said all of this about how anit-smartphone I am, since Clay was diagnosed with Acute IgAN, and since we’ve have to completely change our diet, the smartphone has actually been very handy.  I really think that our phone and our Galaxy Tab (similar to the iPad) will come in VERY handy for our new diet, especially on vacations.  It’s also very helpful that most restaurants and foods have their nutritional info on the web making it very easy to access from Clay’s smartphone.  I can’t even image trying to live with this diet change 10-15 years ago (hello, remember dial up? Yikes!). 

So even though I may never get a smartphone, (although I’ve considered it, but only if I can get the R2-D2 droid phone or if someone will make a Harry Potter smartphone.  I’d definitely be getting that phone and probably wait in line for days to get that phone), it has made life a little easier for us.  For instance we all have those days where we’re out shopping or running errands and get so busy you don’t realize how hungry you are and that you’re too tired to go home and cook so you just stop at a restaurant.  The easy access to the internet form the phone will definitely come in handy in those moments because we’ll be able to pull up almost any restaurants nutritional info in an instance. 

So to the creator of the internet (Al Gore) and smartphone (Steve Jobs) I thank you.  

I got nothin' (for a title at least)

Today we’ve been kind of lazy.  We decided to have salad and baked potatoes for dinner.  Clay found these tortilla strips for salads and they only have 15mg of sodium per serving, and they taste pretty good and look really pretty (they are tri-colored, red, blue and yellow).  Another item that I have read that gives a nice little crunch to your salad are unsalted sunflower seeds (0mg).  I’ll have to pick some up the next time we’re out.  I think they’ll taste good on a baked potato.  Clay also bought some olive oil and vinegar Newmann’s Own dressing (yuck, I hate vinegar) that is pretty low in sodium.  I think he said he was going to try it on his baked potato tonight.  Who knows?

So starting tomorrow we’ll have a house full of dogs, five of them to be exact.  It’s going to be pretty crazy around here for about a week.  This Saturday we plan on taking Marcus, our foster, to Petsmart to try and get him adopted.  I’m going to be furminatng him everyday this week to get his coat super shiny and soft and he got a nice bath yesterday.  I’ll be going to Hobby Lobby on Wednesday to pick out some fabric for his new bandana.  I love making our girls special bandanas; they look so cute in them.  Hopefully we can teach Marcus more tricks, he learned to sit today, before Saturday.  That will definitely make him more marketable. 

I need to look through the cookbook and find a recipe to make for dinner tomorrow.  It’s much easier to have things planned out, especially when we can’t just go to the cabinet and eat whatever.

Team Amber=One lone soldier

So we had a busy day with my sister-in-law’s wedding yesterday.  We left our house at 10:30 and finally got home around 9.  I got to meet Grandma Mosley, Aunt Wilma (really Clay’s great Aunt) his Aunt Becky and her son Chase.  It was nice getting to meet everyone.

My job at the wedding was the guestbook attendant.  I had some little helpers passing out the programs with me; they are Clay’s cousin’s kids, Grace and Elizabeth.  These girls are so sweet and pretty well behaved.  At one point Elizabeth said to me, “Sigh.  Why did I have to get such a hard job passing out the programs?  Next time I’m not going to pick such a hard job.”  It was too funny.  Here's a great pic of my fabulous helpers:

Now on to the food issue, we had breakfast before we left the house.  The wedding was at 2 so we weren’t going to be eating till 3ish, and we had to be there at 11:30 for pictures.  So of course Clay was hungry right when we go there. 

Before I continue I have to give a little back-story here.  So both of Clay’s sisters husbands and his cousins husband all get crazy when it comes to food.  For future reference I’m going to call them The Boys.  They are always talking about going to Sonic and grabbing a super sonic double cheeseburger (for which they have named the SSDC), getting a pizza, getting an Angry Whopper, or a KFC famous bowl all for lunch and then hitting up the Kripsy Kreme for dessert.  So these boys don’t make this whole lifestyle change easy for me.

So once we got to the church Clay was hungry and some of the his Aunts were already making Lumpia.  So The Boys convinced Clay (which I know didn’t really take a lot of work doing) that he should have at least 5 free days a year to just eat normal food.  I don’t necessarily agree with this because this isn’t a diet this is a lifestyle change.  Plus I know how Clay gets and the 5 free days will just keep adding up.  So Clay decided that he was taking a free day and that he was just going to eat what he wanted.  I couldn’t really argue since I would look like the nagging bad cop wife and Clay had already made up his mind and once that happens there’s no changing it.  So there’s no telling how many mg of sodium he had yesterday.

So today it’s back to the diet.  Neither of us had breakfast this morning.  I slept in and Clay got up and mowed.  We had Subway for lunch and are planning on making our pizza and salad for dinner.

Also staring Tuesday night we’ll be adding two more dogs to the mix.  We are dogsitting for my sister-in-law while they take a little vacay.  So we’ll have a house of 5 dogs for 6 days.  It’s going to be crazy, but fun.

"Some people live to eat, but we eat to live.”

So today has been a busy day.  We got up at 6 this morning and took our dogs on a walk.  Marcus, our foster, did really well on the walk.  We used our pinch collar, which makes controlling the dog much easier.  We also use a pinch collar with Olive and Riley is so obedient that she can walk without a leash.  Our foster Marcus is so sweet.  He’s always wagging his tail and he seems to catch on quickly (like walking on the leash and using the doggy door) and he’s house trained.  He did, however, poop right in the middle of the trail on our walk this morning.  I hope this sweet guy finds a home quickly.

I don’t have many stats from our meals today as didn’t write them down and I don’t remember any of them.  This morning once we got back we decided to have breakfast burritos using our 0mg sodium soft corn tortillas.  We scrambled some eggs, cheese and black beans.  Clay added jalapenos to his and I sprinkled some red pepper flakes on mine.  I will have to say that the tortillas tasted like thin cardboard…..no flavor and hard, even after being warmed up in a skillet.  Oh well, I suppose we’ll get used to the taste.

We saw the final Harry Potter movie this morning and it was great.  I even got a pair of cool Harry Potter style 3D glasses.

We also had Clay’s sisters wedding rehearsal tonight and the food thing was not that big of a situation.  Clay had a piece of roast (which had a sauce or stock on it) and a salad.  Since we didn’t cook the meat we don’t really know what the stock was and how much sodium was in it.  This whole lifestyle change in pretty challenging and Clay says that he’s hungry all the time since our portions are smaller.  Our new favorite quote is, “Some people live to eat, but we eat to live.”