An Arsenal of Bold Flavours

“Salt sells.” That is a common slogan in the restaurant business. It makes perfect sense, since salt is a powerful flavour enhancer. The goal of any chef is to create a meal that wows your mouth and leaves you wanting more. Fast food chains get the kids shouting out for a trip through the drive-thru every time the car comes anywhere near one.  Manufacturers of frozen entrees want their products to stand out as gourmet.

How can you make your own food, without using high sodium ingredients or shaking in lots of salt, get that “wow?”

Remember that the tongue recognizes four tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salt. There are also chemical receptors that sense spicy heat. There is debate in trying to define another taste called umami, which can be described as “meaty.” Those are six sensations, and only one requires salting your food.  If you take away the high dose of salt that we have been conditioned to, five options remain to excite the palate.

Our kitchen is never without:

Sesame oil

Chopped garlic in a jar

Garlic powder

Parmesan cheese*

Ginger

Lemon juice

Olive oil

Cumin

Horseradish

Black Molasses

Real Butter*

* has salt in it, but not as much as you’d think.

A note about “lite” salt... It contains a mixture of sodium chloride (common table salt) and potassium chloride. Used sparingly, it can add a touch of that taste with half the sodium. But half of a lot is still a lot so it is not presented in a shaker at the table. We use “lite” soy sauce only occasionally and sparingly as well, because half of a lot is still a lot. 

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Get A Crock Pot

A cup of Campbell's 100% natural, New England-Style Braised Beef Pot Roast soup has 650mg of sodium. A cup of Healthy Request Beef and Vegetables contains 410mg.  Regular Chunky soup contains 890mg of sodium per cup, including a heaping helping of monosodium glutamate.

Hearty and packed with nutrition, a bowl of this soup has as little as 75mg sodium:

Hearty Venison Stew

By slowly cooking a soup (or stew) in a crock pot, more of the flavours are released and mingle together in the broth. This pot cooked on "low" for 24 hours, with the lid on, though it was perfectly edible after 12. The longer you wait, however, the tastier and more satisfying your meal will be. Very little salt is required, so you do not have to stop at one cup!

We rarely have the same exact soup twice because making soup is the perfect opportunity to clean out the crisper.  Today's bowl contains:

Start with Quality

Salt can be used as a preservative, as a flavour enhancer, or to help cover up funky ingredients. If you keep your ingredients fresh (or frozen) and of high quality you will need less seasoning of any kind to make a delicious meal.

Produce

When possible, cook with vegetables that are in season or were frozen in season. I got a great deal on some tomatoes at our local farmer's market this summer and froze them- some simply skinned, and some made into sauce- for the winter. Last week I fetched a ziplock full for minestrone and WOW! Compared to opening a can of big brand tomatoes the flavor was intense. 

It hardly seems fair to mention fresh produce long after harvest. Your local grocery store is likely stocking things that "keep" well over winter, like root crops and hard-shelled squash, and others that have been brought in from far away. Aside from potatoes or anything you would prefer to eat crisp, look to the freezer section. Corn, peas, berries, broccoli... you can find them all frozen at their peak. 

Meat

Among my reasons to refuse to buy pork at the grocery store is the taste. Is it from the unnatural way that the hogs are confined and fattened in the factory farm, or does that subtle funkiness come from the processing? No idea, but if seasonings are required to cover it up I don't want to eat it. 

I was fine going though life without eating pork, but poor Stealthy Dad missed it. We found a local farmer who raises hogs the "old fashioned way," and purchased half a hog this spring.  Everything, from chops to roast, has been great tasting and naturally lean. 

Speaking of funky, how about that roll of mystery ground beef? It came from a huge processing plant that ground up meat from umpteen different sources. What may seem to be a good buy might actually provide less nutrition per dollar because of the amount of fat that you have to pour off. Sometimes the mystery ground beef has an odd smell, too, that has to be covered by a plethora of seasonings. Is it "pink slime?" Decay? Contamination? One can only speculate.

Buying grassfed beef from a local farmer is the best alternative. Second is to buy from the grocer's butcher department instead of pre-packaged. Fresh ground chuck makes better burgers, runzas, and lasagna and was ground from a recognizable cut, right there in the store.

Eggs

You will find many of the recipes from the Stealthy Kitchen have been adapted to be egg-free. No one in this house is allergic to eggs (thankfully) but there were a couple months when we had no eggs. We do not buy eggs from the grocery store and our local supplier- who has the chickens running around in the yard- had none for a while. No egg is better than a factory farmed egg, I say. How healthy can those hens be, stuffed into crates and laying eggs onto a conveyer belt? The factory farm eggs are tasteless, have soft shells, and are already several weeks old before they get to the grocery store. No thank you. We'll stick to good old fashioned eggs from chickens who eat bugs in the yard.

To find a local producer in your area, check the Eat Well Guide's listings.

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The Hidden Danger Ranch

I love that TV commercial for ranch-style salad dressing, the one where kids are gobbling up plates of veggies as if they were funnel cakes at the fair. Read the ingredients, and you will see why that dressing has no place in the Stealthy Kitchen: it contains Monosodium Glutamate.  MSG may be a carcinogen, triggers migraines for some people, and is a source of sodium. (Go ahead and argue with me that you think it is harmless, naturally occurs in seaweed, has been eaten since the beginning of time.... You can try but I won't be buying it. The chemical listed in most commercially packaged food came from a lab.)

As appealing as it seems as a veggie-sneaking tool, ranch is not as "innocent" as the marketing suggests. A couple tablespoons of ranch dressing contains 14 grams of fat and 260mg of sodium. The "lite" version cuts the fat to 7g but ups the sodium to 290mg. That's a lot of sodium to make a vegetable appealing to kids.

While most vegetables are perfect just as they are, kids do sometimes need a little push to get them to snack from the crisper. Try these ideas:

"Candied" carrots. Put a couple cups of either carrot sticks or "baby" carrots into a pyrex bowl. Dot a tablespoon of butter onto the top of the carrots and microwave on high for 5 minutes. Stir, then microwave again, two minutes at a time until they are cooked just right. Toddlers will need them soft, while preschoolers will want a crunch. (Since we have a toddler and a preschooler, I take half of them out at this point and cook the rest a little more.) Sprinkle with a bit of brown sugar and stir again. (1/2 tablespoon of butter has 7g of fat and about 50mg of sodium. Butter gets a bad rap, but it sure beats ranch dressing!)

Hummus If you take your favorite hummus recipe and make it with unsalted chick peas, you have a low-sodium veggies dip. Two tablespoons will have about 6g of fat and very little salt if you make your own.

Mascarpone cheese. Two tablespoons has about 12g of fat and 10g of sodium. You can stir in a bit of maple syrup or some sugar and cinnamon to make a creamy, cheesy sweet dip. Also try garlic powder and basil. 

Fun shapes. I don’t know why, but G-man will try anything if it is cut into triangles. Maybe it is because he can bite off the tip to see if he likes it. Japanese cucumbers are sweet and crunchy and have tiny seeds. Peeled and sliced, the slices are easy to cut into triangles. He also approves of carrot sticks cut into match-stick sizes. Rutabaga, summer squash, and the hearts of broccoli stems can be cut into fun shapes.


Homemade Ranch dressing. Take a cup of plain yogurt, and stir in a teaspoon of onion powder and a quarter teaspoon of black pepper. A quarter cup of parmesan cheese will thicken the dip and make it cheesy, and you can add garlic or tomato powder. Two tablespoons, including the parm, has about 60mg of sodium and a gram of fat.

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Bake your Own Bread!

Is your bread a sodium saboteur?

Store-bought bread can have 125-150mg sodium per slice. A sandwich, then, can have 250-300mg of sodium in the bread alone. For someone on a low sodium diet, say 1500mg or less per day, that is a fifth of the recommended daily amount for a sandwich with nothing on it!  (Pita pockets and wraps are even higher.)

If you bake your own bread you can make the sodium content negligible, leaving lots of wiggle room for peanut butter, some condiments, or even cheese! It takes all morning or afternoon, when you consider prep, rising, and baking times but it can be a great activity for the kids.

G-man loves to help bake bread. He's only three, but can tell you that first you mix sugar in water, then stir in the yeast, exclaiming "Wake up, yeast!" He helps count out cups of flour and tips the cup into the bowl as I stir. If the the cups are not perfectly full or the count is a bit off, that is okay. The cups of flour indicated in a recipe are guidelines to make sure you have enough available. When kneading you will work in as much flour as you can. (I have never seen anyone use too much flour when kneading by hand.) When G-man sticks his hands in the dough he won't hurt it. When it is time to let it rise, G-man has usually wandered off to play with something else. He generally reappears when it is time to shape the loaves or to put them in the oven.

The Cadet is too little to help yet, but when he starts asking, "Bite? Bite?"  G-man is proud to share his creation with his baby brother. Neither kid suspects that this delicious, fun activity is good for them.

For a basic, white bread that makes great grilled cheese or peanut butter toast click here.

For a hearty, artisan-style bread with the added bonus of Omega-3s from flaxseed meal click here.


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Cottage Cheese Recipe- from Out of Date Milk

Everyone in our house likes cottage cheese. The kids like it with macaroni and I’ll catch Stealthy Dad eating it right out of the carton. Since the kind from the store is so high in sodium, it is a rare treat unless we make it ourselves.

Cottage Cheese made from Out of Date Milk

Once in a while, an out-of-date gallon of milk will peek out at me from the  back of the fridge. Out-of-date milk is not safe to eat without boiling first and purist cheese makers will tell you not to boil milk before making cheese.  If I have learned anything from my trials and errors with making cheese, it is that every time I mess up I end up with pretty much the same thing. I took all of my mistakes, put them together, and came up with a fool-proof method for making dry cottage cheese. 


Have a gallon (4L) of milk that has "expired?"  You can use it to make a great cheese for perogies or in the place of store-bought ricotta in lasagna. We also use it tossed with penne, garlic, olive oil and parmesan.