New Food Data Widget

Just a quick post here to point you to the right where you will find a new (on this site) widget which will retrieve nutrition data on most foods. For some time I have been using this site but just now found and installed the widget.

Scrambling for taste.

Over the last couple of years I've worked hard at staying within this 2000mg/day salt restriction, sometimes with more success than others. At home it is hard enough, but traveling can be really tough. All the stuff that I love in the convenience stores, is bad for me: chips, pop corn, hot dogs, crackers, I even like those salted prunes you find in Mexican neighborhoods. Some times I just waffle and go for the chips, five sometimes, eight hundred mg of sodium at a shot. Sometimes I buy the chips, the smallest bag I can find and dump about half the bag in the trash before I even start, because there is no way that I am going to stop once I start. A stupid hot dog is about 900 mg. of sodium. I really haven't solved the convenience store problem. I just try to stay away or get in and get out as fast as I can. I do better when we are traveling and can find a big supermarket with more choices.

But at home I am winning the battle. I've found several ways to spice things up that really help. I've always liked hot sauces, every thing from the fairly mild Tabasco to salsas in Mexican restaurants that raise blisters on your tongue and bring tears to your eyes. My favorite hot sauce currently is something called Sriracha Hot Chile Sauce. Lots of flavor, 100 mg of sodium /teaspoon, but you don't use it by the teaspoon, you use it by the drop. Working in El Paso I watched the Mexican kids dousing their popcorn with hot sauce. So I now use this one on my popcorn. Very tasty, so much taste in fact that you forget you aren't salting that popcorn. This hot sauce looks like something you would find in the oriental food shops but I get mine at Safeway. Bottle has a rooster on the front and lots of writing in oriental languages.

Another resource for our neglected taste buds are a series of bottled sauces made by Fischer & Wieser. These are very nice tasty sauces that come in lots of different flavors. Most of them are low to no sodium. My favorite is Chipolte Raspberry. I stocked up on these at supermarkets when I was in Houston and Amarillo, Texas. You can buy them online but you will find them a bit pricey. The supermarket prices were cheaper than on line. If you can find these try 'em. And let us know where you find them.

Soda Bread Link

Check out the comment on the No-Knead Low Sodium Bread post. Our commenter really liked the bread and immediately went to work to come up with a way to accelerate the process. And on that same author's blog, Carpe Diem, you can find a soda bread recipe. (A bit more sodium in this one, probably about 170mg per slice.) I was in Ireland last march and decided that soda bread is a staple there, second only to Guiness.

Is it OK to Eat Green Potatoes?

Is it OK to eat green potatoes?

Why should you keep watermelons out of the refrigerator?

Which are more nutritious, raw carrots or cooked carrots?

Harold McGee knows the answers and writes about the science of food and cooking: where our foods come from, what they are and what they’re made of, and how cooking transforms them. He has a huge book, On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen, and Bill Buford, author of Heat, will tell you why you should own and read this book. Bills pitch for the book on NPR’s All Things Considered is fun to read and to hear.

I’m not going to buy this book. Too big, to much, can’t afford it, lots of excuses, but I am going to follow what’s going on at CURIOUS COOK exploring the science of food and its transformations with Harold McGee