Low Sodium - Almost Instant - Chili Soup

This soup is a relative of my Almost Instant, Low Sodium Potato Soup. The recipe was concocted a day or so ago when I couldn't find anything for lunch to suit my fancy. It has all of five ingredients and all you do is mix them in a pot, heat, stir, and enjoy.

You will need:

• 1 - 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes, no salt added
• 1 - 15.5 ounce can of Cuban Style Black Beans
• 2 t. of chili powder
• 1/2 of one Chipotle Pepper
• 1/2 cup red wine

Mix the ingredients in a pan, simmer for 5 or 10 minutes and enjoy.

Makes 4 servings.

You can, of course, adjust the heat with more or less chili powder, more or less chipotle pepper. Be careful with the chipotles. Lots of heat there

The Cuban Style Black Beans came from Trader Joes. You could substitute no salt black beans and add a bit of spice. (coriander, cumin, dried onion, etc) That would substantially decrease the sodium.

The counts for a one cup serving of this version of Almost Instant Chili Soup

• Calories 120
• Fat 0.5 mg
• Sodium 400 mg
• Fiber 6

Weight Watcher Points for a one cup serving 2

Blueberries and Sour Cream

This is a classy, easy dish. A great dessert to calm down the palate after a spicy meal. For me it's a more than acceptable substitute for the big bowl of ice cream that was, and maybe still might be, my favorite.

The Recipe

• 1 Handful of fresh blueberries
• 4 (More or Less) T no-fat sour cream

That's it. And it's not too hard, as you can see, to create a very attractive presentation. There are only about 50 mg of sodium per serving. Total calories estimated between 80 and 100. No fat.

Maybe, if you are just not too wild about sour cream, you would like a sweeter version. Replace the sour cream with a low, or no-fat aerosol, whipped topping. Lite Cool Whip might be an another alternative.

But hurry, while you can still find fresh blueberries in the market.

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Don't tell anyone, but the blueberries in the picture were actually this morning's breakfast.

Black Bean & Sweet Corn Salad - Low Sodium

How about an easy, attractive summer salad, that tastes as good as it looks.

You will need:

• 1 15 ounce can of low sodium black beans
• about one cup of frozen sweet corn
• 1/4 cup chopped red onion
• 1/4 cup diced red bell pepper
• 1 small can diced green chilies
• 1 T (more or less) olive oil
• a splash of red wine vinegar

Rinse and drain the black beans. Then gently mix all of the ingredients together. The dressings are optional. In this version I sprinkled the mix with a bit of olive oil, then the red wine vinegar. Sprinkle easy then taste. Need to brightened it up a bit, sprinkle a bit more vinegar.

You might just try the salad (minus the oil and vinegar) with a bit of a medium salsa for a dressing. That works well. If you search you can find salsas with little or no sodium. Mine comes from a farmer's market type store called Sprouts.

Or you might like to experiment with other low sodium, fat free dressings.

If you get six servings, the sodium for the salad (without any dressings) would be about 70 to 80 mg per serving.

Desperation Soup - An Almost-Instant, Low Sodium Potato Soup

I'm trying to adjust my life style, and that means not eating stuff with fat or sugar. Actually I'm pushing it a bit these days. I'm really tired of this fat belly I've acquired in the last couple of years. And today it was noon and the refrigerator was bare and the pantry wasn't much better. There was an envelope of a creamy potato soup mix that was a strong lunch possibility, but it had 500 mg of sodium. Too much.

And then what to my wandering eye did appear, potato buds and non-fat dry milk. Desperation breeds creativity. I could make my own potato soup, almost instantly. Sounds a little weird but it turned out to pretty darn good.

Try it. For a one cup serving you will need.

• 1/3 C Potato Buds
• 1/3 C Non-fat dry milk
• 2 t All Purpose Chef's Shake (Spice Hunter)
• 1 t Butter Buds
• Boiling water
• Ground black pepper
  

Just mix all of the dry ingredients together in a bowl and add enough boiling water to get the consistency you like. Let it sit just a minute or so to cool and to rehydrate the dried spices in the Chef's Shake.

This is a no fat recipe with a total of 160 calories, 145 mg of sodium, and a bonus of 10 mg of protein per serving

You could easily substitute other no-salt seasonings that contain garlic, onion, black pepper and usually an assortment of other spices.

Want more servings? Just multiply the ingredients.

I was surprised. Hope you like it too.

Zucchini and More - Colors Galore

Yes, that's a skillet, but we are not going to fry this colorful batch of low calorie, low sodium veggies. We are going to steam them. No need for any special steamers. All you need is a decent sized pan with a lid and low heat. Because the zucchini and yellow squash have a high moisture content you can actually steam them without adding any liquid. But for this batch we are going to add a half cup (more or less) (actually a healthy splash) of white wine, today a Cabernet.

The combination and amount of vegetables is up to you. To clone this batch,

You will need:

• 2 medium to small zucchinis - sliced
  
• 1 yellow squash - sliced
  
• 1/2 large sweet onion - sliced and broken into rings
  
• 1 medium sized tomato - cut into small pieces
  
• 1/4 sweet red pepper - cut into small strips
  
• l large carrot - sliced diagonally as thin as possible
  
• 2 cloves garlic - finely chopped
  
• 1/2 C white wine or apple cider

That's it. Put all of the ingredients into a large pan with a lid. Non stick is a good idea but not absolute. Lid is absolute. I start with high heat, just until the pan is hot, and then turn the heat down very low. Put the lid on and cook until veggies just barely retain a bit of their crunch. For these to turn out just right you will need to check periodically. Overall time for this batch was about 6 to 8 minutes. When they are almost perfect, take the pan off the heat. You can leave the lid on a few minutes until you are ready to serve. Very low calories. Not enough sodium to count.

A batch of steamed veggies like this is great served over brown rice or noodles. For a real treat top with a bit of the spicy peanut sauce also found in this blog.

BBQ Shrimp with a Corn Relish- Low Sodium

My oh my, you are gonna like this one, a low sodium recipe fancy and tasty enough for company. (580 mg sodium per serving - 2 generous servings)

You'll have to do a little preparation, but it's easy and fun. You'll feel like you are getting ready for your own TV cooking show. It combines a corn relish we are going to mix up with some awesome "barbecued" shrimp. Here we go. Three basic steps.

Mix up the corn relish
For the corn relish you need.

• 2 C of frozen corn
• 1/4 C chopped red bell pepper
• 1 T olive oil
• 1/8 C chopped cilantro
• 1/2 small white onion chopped
• 1 t chili flakes
• 1/4 C low sodium chicken stock (less than 500 mg sodium per cup)
• 1 T Worcester sauce
  
• 2 T cider vinegar
• 1/2 t sugar
• Cajun Spice (Spice Hunter Cajun Creole Seasoning - salt free)
  

Heat a large non-stick skillet. Add the frozen corn and the pepper to the dry skillet and roast them until the corn just barely begins to brown. When the corn and pepper are barely roasted dump then into a bowl, add the rest of the relish ingredients, sprinkle with the Cajun spice to taste, and mix. Set aside to marinate while we prepare a roux and saute our shrimp.

Prepare a roux
Easy now, a roux is simple, and we need it for a thickening when we put this very cool dish together.

• Melt 1 T unsalted butter over medium heat in a small sauté pan
• When the butter is melted gradually stir in 1 T white flour, continuing stirring and heat slowly until the mixture turns a nice golden color.
• Take the pan off the heat and set it aside.

Sauté the shrimp
I use raw, frozen, tail on shrimp that I buy at Costco. These are medium sized. (31-40 count per pound) Watch the sodium content on shrimp as it can be high. The ones I use have 280 mg of sodium per serving (about 9 shrimp).

You will need

• About 18 shrimp, thawed and patted dry
• 1 T butter
• 1 T oil
• 1 T (or more) minced garlic (you can buy it already minced in a jar)
  
• 1/4 C chicken stock (low sodium)
• 1 T Worcester sauce
• Cajun Spice

Melt the butter, oil, and garlic together. When the skillet is hot and you can smell the garlic, add the shrimp and sauté quickly, less than a minute per side. Add a little oil if necessary. Sprinkle generously with the Cajun spice, add the Worcester sauce and chicken sauce and sauté until everything is hot.

Combine and Serve
Add the corn relish to the skillet and heat. Scrape the roux into the relish and shrimp mixture and stir until it is mixed in. Heat just long enough to thicken and your are ready to serve up an awesome dish.

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This is recipe adapted from a TV cooking show where the chef magically sprinkles the ingredients without obviously measuring and puts the whole thing together in about 5 TV minutes. I could not find an actual recipe so the measurements here are my approximations. Feel free to wing it and adjust according to your own tastes. The original dish is a creation of Chef Brett Maddock at Arnold Palmer’s restaurant in La Quinta, California.

How To Be A Great Cook

Want to be a great cook? You need three magic ingredients:

1. Olive Oil
2. Garlic
3. Onions

That's it! You're on your way.

Heat up that skillet. (Make it non-stick skillet and save your some grief) Pour in a little olive oil, add some chopped or smashed garlic (several cloves not the whole bulb, unless of course there are vampires hovering) and throw in a fistful of chopped onion. Sauté just long enough to fill the house with that wonderful bouquet of garlic and olive oil and you’re on your way to a great quick entrée and a great reputation as a cook.

Now add chicken breast, cubed, strips, or whole pieces. Brown both sides then lower the heat and cook gently for a few minutes. Get the skillet off the heat just a soon as chicken is barely cooked through while it is still tender and juicy. Season with pepper a tiny bit of salt if you can afford it. Serve with a dash of a good barbecue sauce.

Or when that great bouquet fills the kitchen, add sliced and diced vegetables, zucchini, yellow squash, carrots, broccoli, tomatoes, whatever, you can find in the fridge. Put the stuff that takes longer, like carrots, in first or add them as very small pieces or slivers that will cook quickly. Quit cooking while there is still a bit of crunch in some of the veggies. Serve your sautéed veggies over rice, brown of course, unless like me you sometimes still yearn for that plain and quick white stuff. For a real treat dribble a bit of Thai Peanut Sauce on top.

Make a spaghetti sauce starting with the three magic ingredients. Add tomatoes, mushrooms, something to spice things up (red pepper flakes or chili oil or jalapeños or green chilies) and you’ve done it again.

So their you have it, culinary magic. Use your imagination. Experiment. Have a good time. Let me know how it turns out.

Basic Bread Recipe - Low Sodium

Here is a very basic bread recipe. It has very little salt, and you can make it with white flour or wheat flour or any combination. I usually use about half white and half wheat. Some times I sweeten it with a healthy dose of molasses.

The recipe starts by making a sponge. You mix about half of the flour for the recipe with all of water and the yeast and the sweetening and let that mixture rise for a while before adding the salt and kneading in the rest of the flour. This first step lets the yeast get to work in the absence of salt, which inhibits the yeast’s functioning.

Ingredients

• 3 C lukewarm water (85°-105°F - not hot or cold on your fingertips)
• 1 1⁄2 T dry yeast (2 packages)
• 1⁄4 C sweetening (honey, molasses, or brown sugar)
• 6 C approx. flour (whatever kind you like or have on hand)
• 1/4 C veg. oil
  
• 1 t salt

Measure the water into a big bowl. Sprinkle in the yeast and stir to dissolve. Add the sweetening. Then gradually stir in about 3 cups of the flour. Beat about a 100 times until the batter is very smooth. Cover and let it rise in a warm place for 45 minutes (more or less). Warm is better, but our place right now is about 65° and the bread is rising nicely. Altitude probably helps. Not being in a hurry helps most of all.

When the sponge has increased in size and shows some small bubbles, stir in the salt and the oil.

Now add about three more cups of flour. Gradually stir as much of the flour as you can into the sponge. When the batter is too stiff to continue stirring, turn the bread out onto a floured surface and knead the mixture until it is smooth and elastic. If the mixture sticks to your hands work in more flour.

Cover the dough and let it rise until doubled. Knead again, let it rise again. When it has doubled again or is close to double, knead one more time and then split the dough into two equal portions. Shape the dough into loaves and place in 5x9 loaf pans that have been oiled lightly. With a sharp knife make 3 diagonal slashes in the top of each loaf. Let the dough rise in the pans until it is above the top edges of the pans.

Bake in a preheated 350° F oven for 50-60 minutes. Bread is done when it is golden brown. Remove from pans immediately, cool on wire racks.

Yield is 2 loaves. 12 slices per loaf, 100 mg sodium per slice.

Chipotle Corn Soup

Aieeee! This is a good one. This soup was my supper tonight, along with the last of a loaf of the No-Knead Bread. Again an adaptation. I started with a recipe that looked really good, but it called for canned creamed corn. I didn't have any canned creamed corn and didn't want to drive 30 miles down the mountain, in the dark, dodging elk, to my not-so-nearby Safeway, so I improvised. I had plenty of frozen corn, and integrated my own white sauce. Try this one.

As always you may want to make your own adjustments. I like it hot so I use a whole chipotle chile (canned), but recommend starting with a half if you prefer something a bit milder. Shouldn't be hard to multiply the recipe if you've many mouths to feed, but don't get carried away with the chipotles until you know what you are doing. For two generous servings you need:

• 1 T flour
• 1 T unsalted butter
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 2 T olive oil
  
• 1/2 chipolte chile, minced
• 1 C milk
  
• 2 C frozen corn
• 2 C low sodium vegetable broth
• 1 bay leaf
• Pepper to taste

I start by making a white sauce for thickening the soup. Melt the butter in a small saute pan and then whisk in the flour. Heat the mixture gently for a few minutes until it just barely begins to darken. Watch it carefully, when it starts to brown it can go quickly. Next gradually whisk in the milk until you have a nice smooth sauce. Set this aside and keep it warm.

In a 2 quart sauce pan saute the onions in the oil and butter for about 10 minutes, until transluscent. Add the chile, and heat for a couple more minutes. Next stir in your white sauce. Add the vegetable broth, the corn, and the bay leaf. Season with Pepper. Simmer for about 15 minutes, rescue the bay leaf and serve. Two generous servings. About 350 mg sodium per serving.

Spicy Peanut Sauce

I really do stick to my daily sodium limit (2000 mg), well, most days. And, that often leaves me hankering for something with some real taste. One of the places I’ve found real taste is in Thai Peanut Sauce. Great stuff on steamed vegetables, like a combination of zucchini, yellow squash, and onions. But as might be expected, the off the shelf Peanut Sauce I found had a lot of sodium, 250 mg/T.

So here we go with another of Ms. Duncan’s recipes, a homemade low sodium Peanut Sauce.

You will need:
• 3 T peanut butter, unsweetened, unsalted
• 2 T rice wine vinegar
• 1 T chopped cilantro (optional)
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2 t soy sauce, reduced salt
• 1 t light brown sugar
• 1/2 t chile oil
• 2-4 T warm water
Combine all of the ingredients (except the water) and whisk together, adding enough water to make it the consistency you want.

Makes a half cup, which would be 8 Tablespoons. About 37 mg of sodium/T compared to my off the shelf bottle which weighs in at 250 mg / Tablespoon.

That’s the basic recipe, which I always consider a starting point. I’ve lived a big chunk of my life in the southwest and my taste buds have a pretty high heat tolerance, so I up the chile oil to a full teaspoon. This one is quick and easy so it’s no big deal to start experimenting. I really like this stuff and will be tweaking the recipe to suit my own tastes. Let me know how you like it and what adjustments, if any, you make.

No-Knead Low Sodium Bread

Don’t eat much store bought bread any more. Have become accustomed to the taste and texture, and aroma of home baked bread, and can’t really match that off the shelf at the supermart. So for a long time I’ve been baking bread, and find that the whole bake-your-own bread process is much easier and much more forgiving than I had imagined.

For starters here is a really great no-knead bread with an amazingly simple recipe. You need flour, yeast, salt and water, that’s it. Now this has to be a really old and basic recipe, going back to the days shortly after somebody learned how to mash wheat into flour, but the current version comes from Jim Lahey, at the Sullivan Street Bakery, and is blogged all over the internet. Here is the Murphy low sodium version.

Mix together the dry ingredients
• 3 C flour (I’ve tried white and wheat, liked the white better)
• 1/4 teaspoon yeast
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (1200 mg sodium)
Add
• 1 5/8 C water
Stir until all the all of the flour is wet and sticky

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise 18 hours in a warm room. The original recipe says a warm room is about 70°F but our place is 60° over night and mid 60’s, sometimes 70° during that day, and this dough rises OK.

Dough is ready when the surface is dotted with bubbles. Dump it out onto a floured surface, dust the top of the dough with flour, cover it with plastic wrap and let it rise about 2 hours.

Put an oven proof bowl, casserole, or dutch oven, with a lid in your oven and heat to 450°F (Original recipe calls for 6 to 8 qt capacity, I get along just fine with an old oven proof 4 qt mixing bowl and lid I bought at the library thrift shop)

When the dough is ready, carefully (450° is hot, real hot. I use my fire place gloves.) remove your pot or bowl from the oven and dump in the dough. Might not look great at this point but have faith.

Cover with a lid and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until the loaf is browned and looks good to you. Cool on a rack.

If you could cut 12 equal slices (which I can’t, because I end up with this really gorgeous crusty round loaf) each slice would contain 100 mg of sodium. No fat, no cholesterol, and about 3g of protein per slice.

Quick Easy Low Sodium Tomato Sauce

Here is a basic, tomato sauce for pasta and pizza. It will make about 3 2-person servings, which can be frozen in separate containers. Sodium per serving in this one, very low.

• 1 28-oz can diced or crushed tomatoes, no salt added
• 1/4 c finely diced onion
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2-4 T olive oil
• fresh pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients except pepper in wide skillet. Simmer for 20-30 min, stirring occasionally. Season with pepper to taste. And . . . if you are yearning for a more spicy version, add another clove or two of garlic, or up the heat with a bit of chili oil, your favorite hot sauce, or a sprinkling of ground red chili.

Total sodium 270 mg. Six servings. 45 mg of sodium per serving

Thanks to Maria Duncan for this one.

Murphy's Pico de Gallo

When I first started trying to eat and cook without salt I was dying for something that tasted like something. Here is one of my first solutions, a an easy Pico de Gallo, that you can use on a baked potato or as a dip for a few low salt chips or wherever you need a little bright spot for your taste buds.

You need
• One big or two small tomatoes
• A medium to small onion
• About a half bunch of cilantro
• One fresh jalepeno pepper
• One garlic clove
• The juice of one lime

Chop everything in a food chopper and mix together. Adjust the ingredients as your tastes dictate. Let this sit a couple of hours and the garlic will give it a nice kick. Use more or less jalepeno depending on your love for heat.

Now just for fun go to the Nutrition Facts and Calorie Counter and find the individual amounts of sodium for each ingredient. And if that doesn't seem terribly entertaining, I'll tell you that if you eat the whole batch at one sitting, you've only consumed 16 mg of sodium. Essentially this is a no sodium food.