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For recipe sodium counts, better do your own math

Posted on April 30, 2010 by DebbieN

Another Martha Rose Shulman recipe for a peanut sauce to go with soba and other noodles appears in today’s NY Times “Recipes for Health” column. Which would be fine but the nutrition counts below it don’t add up–at least for sodium. She’s specified unsalted peanut butter–but has 1 or 2 tablespoons of regular, not low-sodium, soy sauce at 1200-2400 mg sodium, and not low-sodium but regular or unspecified vegetable or chicken broth, both of which are pretty loaded, so anything from 150-750 mg per cup. If you look down to the nutrition counts, though, each of 4-6 servings is supposed to be 150 mg of sodium. How? In my daughter’s 4th grade math text, ~3000 mg for the total recipe at the higher options (650-750 mg broth, 2400 for 2 T soy sauce)  would give you 500 mg for 6 servings. For 4 servings, it would be 750. The best you could do would be the lower-sodium options for 1350ish in the total recipe, so about 350 mg. per serving.

On her own web site, Shulman claims not to care about sodium counts when she creates new recipes or adapts old ones (not clear how she can claim that makes them recipes for health), so perhaps this is one column to take with(out) a grain of salt.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, nutrition, Pasta, sauces and condiments | Tagged: , , | Comments Off on For recipe sodium counts, better do your own math

Cheese sauce, better than instant

Posted on April 16, 2010 by DebbieN

Cheddar cheese sauce, easier than instant

This cheddar cheese sauce for pasta or vegetables goes together beautifully in about 5 minutes from start to finish, and tastes like cheddar with savory accents, not processed cheez-flavored glue. None of the ingredients come from a box.

And on the other hand, you don’t have to make a roux of butter and flour first, you don’t have to stir out the lumps when you add the milk, and you don’t have to worry about grating your knuckles in with the cheese. Give this one a try.

Home made 5-minute cheddar cheese sauce

  • 2-3 oz sharp or extra-sharp cheddar
  • 1 oz low-fat mozzarella (optional)
  • 1/8 to 1/4 med yellow onion
  • small clove garlic, minced/grated/mashed
  • 2 T (heaping soupspoonful) flour
  • 1 c. skim milk
  • grating or pinch of nutmeg

Grind the cheese, onion, garlic and flour in a blender or food processor until the cheese and onion are finely grated. Blend in the milk. Pour the mixture into a saucepan or frying pan and heat on a medium flame while stirring with a spatula or wooden spoon. The cheese will melt and the flour and milk will thicken within a minute or so. Grate on the nutmeg, stir in, serve over pasta or broccoli-type vegetables. If you have to wait for the pasta or vegetables to finish cooking, take the sauce off the heat as soon as it comes together, and reheat a moment or two while stirring to revive it once you’re ready to serve.

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Rethinking everything

Posted on February 21, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve been away from my desk, my notebooks, this blog for two weeks now. I never expected to be–it’s become a weekly adventure to seek out new topics in food, food politics, nutrition, and alternate methods for cooking real food faster. And then last week my daughter was diagnosed with Type I diabetes.

Diabetes is one hell of a verdict when you think your kid is just growing, and then just has a simple stomach virus, and it turns out to be neither of those things. It was also one of those strange fairytale paradoxes by which a cursed or poisoned feather turns out to save the princess in rags. She’d come home from school three weeks ago with what seemed like a routine stomach bug, but it wasn’t. Instead of a bit of fever, antsy impatience at having to rest and then bouncing back, she was cool, sleeping around the clock, drinking a lot even when she couldn’t stand to eat, and losing weight fast. Taking her back to the doctor the second week, we were thinking anemia, mono–afraid to think anything worse. Thank god our doctor threw in a glucose test along with the usual suspects. By afternoon he’d called and told us to get her down to the ER.

A night in the hospital is no picnic, even if all they’re doing to your kid is putting her on an i.v. and pricking her fingers with a lancet for testing once in a while. The second night is no fun either–everything the doctors have been telling you goes in one ear and slides right out the other as you wonder what your kid will ever be able to do normally again, and how much you’ll have to worry for her the rest of her life, and how you’re going to keep from laying those worries on her. And yet–at some point in the middle of the second night, unable to sleep much between nurse interruptions–I started to realize my daughter’s legs and arms and face were already filling back out, and in fact she had spent a good part of the second day sitting up reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for all she was worth, reading me her favorite bits in a silly voice  and cackling every once  in a while. More energy than I’d seen in three weeks. Whatever they’d done to lower her sugars and balance her electrolytes again was really working. She was reappearing before my eyes. I had no idea how to feel anymore except shocked, grateful and slightly absurd.

Furthermore, every time the orderly came by to pick up a menu or leave a meal, my daughter tucked into the food as though it had been catered by Daniel Boulud. (Of course, most of the meals featured meat, which she loves but I don’t make very often.) It is fairly humiliating to have your kid announce that the hospital meals are better than those at home…

Then she started talking about which kinds of potatoes she likes or doesn’t, whether and how soon she can have pizza, how will she ever be able to go to a birthday party and stand not having cake or candy or ice cream without having to figure out the carbs and the insulin beforehand, what about Valentine’s Day and on and on.  Somehow oatmeal raisin cookies became the benchmark of whether she was going to be able to eat like a person or not–and she hasn’t even had a taste for them in at least six months.

The shrinkage, the re-blossoming, and the total fixation on treats and sweets, all within a few days in a hospital bed–suddenly Charlie Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, Grains, kid food, nutrition, Odd food, Pasta, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rethinking everything

Real Soba

Posted on January 2, 2010 by DebbieN

Happy New Year! The LA Times just published a feature on New Year celebrations in Japan. The  December 30th article on making your own soba or buckwheat noodles has instructions and demo pictures from a professional soba chef–and the traditional recipe contains…no salt. At all. Contrast that with any of the store-bought brands here in the U.S. It also has a lot more buckwheat than the store-bought types, using a ni-hachi (2:8) proportion of wheat to buckwheat, so it probably has a lot more buckwheat flavor. Worth a try, and if you’re not sure you know how to knead to the right texture by hand, you might be able to knead the dough in a food processor to get it very smooth and elastic before rolling it out.  Traditional Soba from the LA Times

The dipping sauce recipes that accompany the soba article are no bargain sodium-wise, and they contain a lot of sugar as well as a lot of soy sauce mixed in with the dashi stock, but at least the noodles themselves aren’t adding to the problem. You could use low-sodium soy sauce and less of it; you could also decide not to follow tradition and use a different dipping sauce with more substance and less reliance on salt and sugar for flavor. Here are two possibilities (quantities are loosely something like half a cup to a cup). Neither is Japanese but they both taste good with soba.

Dipping Sauce for Jao Tze (why not, it’s good with soba too)

  • 1/4 c. low-sodium soy sauce
  • 1/4 c. vinegar–red wine, apple cider, or rice vinegar
  • dollop (~1-2 T.) dark molasses–this takes some stirring to mix with the thinner liquids
  • ~1/2 t. grated ginger
  • 1 scallion fairly finely chopped
  • few drops toasted sesame oil
  • 1/4 t. dab of z’khug or a bit of minced garlic, some hot pepper flakes to taste, and a bit of chopped cilantro if you have it

Peanut Curry Sauce

Serve this sauce cold or at room temperature to avoid the yogurt breaking down. If you add some lightly nuked or steamed fresh brussels sprouts (they look nice cut in halves) or other cruciferous vegetables and some hard-boiled eggs or tofu on the side, you have a pretty substantial lunch or a light supper.

  • 1-2 T. chunky unsalted natural peanut butter (peanuts only)
  • 1/2-1 c. plain nonfat yogurt (milk and cultures only)
  • 1 t. curry powder (unsalted)
  • 1 clove garlic, mashed/grated/minced
  • 1/2 t. mashed or grated ginger
  • 1-2 T. low-sodium soy sauce
  • juice of half a lime (best), lemon (ok), or 1-2 T. vinegar to taste
  • hot pepper flakes to taste
  • optional additions: scallion, finely chopped; few drops toasted sesame oil; pinch or so of sugar

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Grains, nutrition, Pasta, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Real Soba

Microwave tricks: Pasta You Don’t Have to Babysit

Posted on December 4, 2009 by DebbieN

Mark Bittman’s post-Thanksgiving look into the brave new world of absorption pasta and Pete Wells’s “Cooking with Dexter” piece in the New York Times yesterday on the virtues of a pot of boiling water have me thinking hard about why neither of them has even tried the microwaves that must be sitting on their counters. Especially Wells, who has not one but two very young and active children to watch out for.

You can cook standard dried or frozen pasta very well in a microwave, with only a few minutes of actual cooking time and almost no need to stay close by. You can cook rice too–and we’re not talking Minute Rice, either. Basmati rice, the queen of difficult rices, cooks perfectly in a microwave.

The setup for microwaving tortelloni

The setup for microwaving tortelloni and other filled pasta

I started cooking pasta in a microwave when my daughter was a toddler. She was pretty active and I couldn’t leave a pot boiling away on the stove to go and chase her–either the pasta or I would have boiled over. By the same token, I had nightmares of her getting over the baby gate and into the kitchen as she got bigger and more impatient. My mother-in-law still has extensive scars from having a boiling pot tip over on her when she was a child, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to try microwaving pasta instead. Even though my daughter is now kitchen-savvy, it worked so well I’ve never been tempted to go back. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Food Blogs, Grains, kid food, Microwave tricks, Pasta | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Microwave tricks: Pasta You Don’t Have to Babysit

Taking on “Recipes for Health”

Posted on May 2, 2009 by DebbieN

Martha Rose Shulman’s “Recipes for Health” column in the New York Times typically offers quick stir-fry vegetarian fare that anyone can do at home. Shulman is a good and popular cookbook author, and I give her credit for her intentions. But the column reveals some serious flaws in her understanding when it comes to the actual healthiness of the recipes.

First, the recipes never include standard nutritional breakdowns. I wouldn’t expect that for glamor food magazines, but any major newspaper or magazine claiming “healthy” recipes should declare the nutrition stats per serving so people can gauge calories, fats, carbs, fiber, and especially, because we’re not used to thinking consciously about it these days, salt.

And salt is where Shulman’s recipes go seriously wrong. Time after time, they contain surprisingly and unnecessarily high salt per serving. Where does it come from? Take this week’s recipe, “Stir-Fried Snow Peas with Soba”. It’s basically Japanese whole-wheat noodles (soba) with snow peas and tofu in a peanut sauce, and serves four. Seems simple enough, but the ingredients Shulman chooses are hiding an awful lot of extra salt:

* You expect the soy sauce to contain salt. OK. It’s only a tablespoon. But it isn’t the reduced-sodium version–and why isn’t it?–so figure  1200 mg.
* Half a cup of vegetable or other broth–also not specified low-sodium. Figure 250-500 mg sodium; maybe even more.
* Salt “to taste”–TV chefs tend to sprinkle in a pinch or more. Figure 1/8-1/4 teaspoon, 300-600 mg, if you imitate them.
* Peanut butter. Not specified unsalted. Figure 1 tablespoon is 100 mg.
* And then there’s the soba itself. Ordinary Italian-style whole wheat spaghetti or fettucine has almost no sodium in it, just flour and water, but authentic Japanese soba dough contains quite a bit, 250 mg or so per serving. Times four is about 1000 mg.

Grand total for 4 servings: 2300-2800 mg, or 600-700 mg sodium per serving.

If that’s your whole dinner, ok, but most of that sodium could easily be cut without sacrificing taste. Plus, two ounces of snow peas per person isn’t enough to call it vegetabalia and get away with it in my book. You’ll notice that the glossy photo in Shulman’s article shows a generous two snow pea pods, a few slices of radish, and none of the promised cubes of tofu–her version’s a side dish, not a proper meal. Let’s revise this one.

Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Pasta, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Taking on “Recipes for Health”

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