I've checked out a few Pinterest searches and found a couple low sodium cook books at the thrift store and have been conducting my first week of low sodium meals. I have learned that cooking at home is a HUGE factor to cutting sodium. Oh, and also only drinking water, as much as possible, and lots of it.
Eating low sodium meals begins at the grocery store. You have to change the way you buy food. Not all canned/boxed food is created equally. Not all healthy foods or even things that say reduced sodium are foods to be recommended. You have to check the label. I heard a good rule of thumb is to find foods that offer 140mg or less of sodium per serving. Anything that contains over 300mg of sodium per serving is considered high. And oh boy! Do stores sure carry a lot of things that are high in sodium. Of course, your best bet is to shop along the perimeter of the store, but it is hard to make a complete meal out of a bag of avocados and peaches.
This brings me to the star of our blog today, 'NO SALT ADDED' tomato sauce. I snagged an 8 ounce can with a total of 52.5mg of sodium for the entire can. Compare that to a whopping 470mg of sodium for only 4 ounces of traditional marinara sauce. There's no way I can ever look at regular spaghetti sauce the same way after this!
Now you may be thinking what I was thinking, which was, what does tomato sauce taste like? I'm not the biggest fan of tomato soup, so I wasn't sure what to expect. But let me tell you how I believe I made magic happen. It tasted great!
Here's what I threw together tonight on a whim:
1 tablespoon of olive oil in a pan, add
3 cloves of mushed/minced garlic, and
1/3 white or yellow chopped onion.
let simmer. Next add:
3 chopped grape tomatoes, and
1/8 green bell pepper chopped, and
2-3 mushrooms chopped.
You can season the veggies with basil, pepper. lemon pepper, onion powder and oregano like I did, or whatever you like/ have on hand. Same thing with the veggies, throw in whatever you like.
Now, add the tomato sauce. I let my sauce heat up until it was forming big splattering bubbles and then reduced the heat and let it simmer for around ten minutes. This seemed to help thicken the sauce! Make sure to taste along the way to adjust your seasoning. I used half of this mix over a cup of whole wheat pasta. Which is great because my whole wheat pasta had 0mg of sodium and the half portion of the sauce only had roughly 30mg of sodium. The best part is this meal is very satiating and you do not feel like you are missing anything from a traditional jar of marinara.
And there you go! So much less sodium and so much more taste than I had ever expected! My next adventure is to put this on a pizza. But first, I'll have to figure out the low sodium option for the crust and cheese!
