The term heart-healthy diet has been co-opted by all sorts of people to push their favorite products. Many processed foods call themselves heart-healthy when they are still loaded with salt, fat and sugar. So it’s refreshing to see some tips for a truly heart-healthy diet in this piece,Ask A Dietitian: What Makes a Diet Heart-Healthy?
One of my favorite here is to develop a collection of seafood recipes you can’t wait to eat. A good place to start is on our recipe page, where we have a seafood section all ready for you. Supermarket fish counters often give away seafood recipe cards too. You may have to modify them to take out butter and salt, but they’re a starting point for you.
Tilapia such as these would work for fish tacos.
Another good tip is to use more spices instead of salt in your cooking. When you do, be sure to buy salt-free spice mixtures. Many pre-mixed spice offerings are loaded with salt. If you see salt listed as the first ingredient on such a mix, you know it is primarily salt, avoid it.
Check the article for other tips, just click here.
The most popular page on my food blog, by far, is my no-salt, no-fat, no-sugar recipe page. People are hungry for healthy recipes and we do our best to supply them on that page. Check it out, we’ve just expanded it, adding a section of pandemic meals, recipes we’ve been trying during the pandemic when we’re all cooking more at home.
And we’ve also added a slide show of some of our favorite dishes. Enjoy and let us know what else you’d like to see on that page..
We’ve taken down the picture of my low-fat, low-salt manicotti that was on the top of our recipe page, replacing it with a slide show of some of our favorite healthy dishes.
Trying to stay on a heart-healthy diet means giving up almost all of the foods I once enjoyed.
Salmon, thankfully, is not one of those, however. Current nutritional thinking is that salmon has “healthy” fats and so is fine to eat for everyone, regardless of health concerns. In our house, salmon really has come to replace beef several nights a week.
So I have a lot of salmon recipes on my recipe page. But you can never have enough.
A nice feature about these recipes is they include nutritional information so you can see if they’re truly healthy, i.e. low in salt, fat and sugar, or just claiming to be. Remember, never assume a recipe is healthy just because whoever posts it says so.
Supermarkets often supply recipes to encourage people to shop for the items they’ll need to make a given dish. These days, they will call a recipe “healthy” even if it’s still loaded with salt, fat and sugar. But one I received recently from my local Jewel store (owned by Albertson’s) actually might be healthy and tasty as well
I love making salmon in a variety of ways.
It’s called one pan salmon. The ingredients list and my modifications and comments: 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 small onion (chopped) 3 cloves garlic (minced) 20 cherry tomatoes 1 cup dry white wine 4 cups chicken broth [I’d use the lowest sodium broth you can find here to cut salt] 1 lemon (sliced) 1 teaspoon dried basil 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt [cut this, not really needed with all the other flavors here] 12 ounces linguine [go for whole wheat to address sugar concerns you may have] 4 (4 oz) Waterfront BISTRO® Salmon Fillets [note the branding here, as I said, they want you to buy this but any salmon will do]
Google “Low Sodium Christmas recipes” and you won’t find a lot, unfortunately. We know, we just tried it. But we have found some for you, so don’t lose hope. Ourcommuntiynow,com, for example, runs through where you can find low-salt ways to make turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. It sounds a bit Thanksgiving, but I have made turkey for Christmas too, so it’s feasible.
Epicurious.com has a page of side-dish recipes that are low in sodium.
I’ve been eating a lot more fish since my heart issues started back in 2012, but fish preparation can sometimes confuse people and take time. So when I came across a recipe called Easy Baked Tilapia (or Cod), how could I not check it out, and try it?
I used tilapia and the result was a very tasty dinner that was, indeed, easy to make. I made one major change to the recipe, however, switching in olive oil where it called for butter in the topping to get a healthier fat into the mix.
My baked tilapia just after it came out of the oven. Using panko breadcrumbs cuts the salt in the dish since they normally have less salt than regular breadcrumbs.
Also, because I had five large tilapia fillets instead of the four in the original recipe, I doubled the amount of everything to make the topping, which worked out great. I also used bottled lemon juice since I did not have a fresh lemon.
So, as with any recipe, be prepared to adjust depending on what you have available for cooking.
Here are the details:
Easy Baked Tilapia
PREP TIME 5 minutes
COOK TIME 15 minutes
TOTAL TIME 20 minutes
SERVINGS 4 servings
AUTHOR Holly Nilsson
COURSE Dinner
CUISINE Asian
Ingredients 4 filets white fish such as cod or tilapia ½ lemon 1 ½ tablespoons melted butter
Topping
¼ cup panko bread crumbs
2 tablespoons fresh parmesan cheese
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon paprika
1 tablespoon parsley
1 teaspoon butter melted (I used olive oil instead)
Instructions
Preheat oven to 400°F.
Combine topping ingredients in a small bowl.
Rinse tilapia filets, pat dry and place on a pan sprayed with cooking spray.
Squeeze lemon juice over the filets.
Top with the Panko mixture.
Cook 15 minutes or just until cooked through and fish is flaky.
Broil for the last minute if desired
And kudos to Spendwithpennies.com for also listing the nutrition information for the dish.
This year promises a Thanksgiving unlike our usual holidays thanks to the ongoing toll the Covid pandemic is taking. But hopefully people will still gather, albeit in smaller groups, to give thanks. And thos eon low-sodium diets will wonder what they can eat of the traditional Thanksgiving fare. I’d suggest starting our with one of our most popular posts, Here’s your low-sodium Thanksgiving menu!!!
Not enough there to suite your taste? Here are some other sites and recipes to look into:
Buy a fresh turkey to cut salt that comes in self-basting, frozen ones.
I’m a big believer in buying what’s on sale each week and creating meals around those items. Recently, frozen flounder fillets were on sale at my local store, so I bought some and went recipe hunting.
The recipe I found to make them, Garlic Parmesan Flounder, was delicious and didn’t use fatty butter as did so many of the other flounder recipes I came across after a quick search. The cheese does have salt, so go light on it.
My garlic, parmesan flounder
Making it was fairly simple too. Let’s start with:
INGREDIENTS 1/4 c. extra-virgin olive oil 4 fillets flounder Freshly ground black pepper 1/2 c. freshly grated Parmesan 1/4 c. bread crumbs (I use panko crumbs, they’re lower in salt) 4 cloves garlic, minced Juice and zest of 1 lemon (I used bottled lemon juice to taste)
Then the steops:
Preheat oven to 425°.
Drizzle 2 tablespoons oil on a large baking sheet. Season flounder with salt and pepper.
Combine Parmesan, bread crumbs, garlic, and lemon zest. Season with pepper.
Dredge fish in bread crumb mixture, pressing to coat. (I first coated the fillets with egg whites to hold the crumbs on)
Place fish on prepared baking sheet and drizzle with remaining two tablespoons oil and lemon juice.
Bake until golden and fish flakes easily with a fork, 20 minutes.
We had them with a side of steamed green beans for a wonderfully tasty fall meal.
Grilling chicken with rosemary and lemon is such a classic, you can;t go wrong making it this Labor Day. And here’s a new take on it that involves grillings leeks to give the chicken an added flavor dimension.
Rosemary, lemon and chicken are a natural, and tasty combination.
Shrimp is always a nice change-of-pace to build a meal around. I’m always looking for new recipes that include shrimp, such as one with fennel and cucumbers I wrote about. So I was attracted to this recipe I found on CookingLight.com for steamed shrimp and watermelon salad.
A wonderfully simple shrimp, fennel and cucumber salad
The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 