2022 starting with salad recalls, so beware

The new year is barely upon us and we already are dealing with salad recalls that started in late December. “The FDA announced recalls from Fresh Express, Simple Truth and Nature’s Basket. Many bagged and boxed greens are affected,” reported the Food Network on Jan. 7.

Fresh express announced a recall Dec, 20 of salads bearing its name and store brand names as well because of concerns of Listeria contamination.

My Garden Bar salad — *Always wash your lettuce, even if it comes bagged and supposedly pre-washed.*

The second recall of Simple Truth Organic Power Greens and Nature’s Basket Organic Power Greens happened early this year. “The CDC posted an outbreak warning of E. coli 0157:H7 on January 6th, 2022 linked to boxed salad greens sold in Washington, Oregon, Ohio and Alaska. The power greens have Use-By-Dates through December 20th, 2021, which means products will not be in grocery cases but could still be in home fridges. They were sold at Fred Meyer, QFC and Giant Eagle grocery chains and should be thrown away immediately,” Food Network reported.

A reminder, thoroughly wash all your lettuce, whether bagged or not. Lettuce can be a great place for these pesky bacteria to hide

January 10, 2022 1

10 Helpful Sites for Thanksgiving prep & cooking from the No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal

With Thanksgiving 2021 almost here, you’re likely scrambling to get ready like so many of us are. As a service, here are links to 10 stories that might help. The best place to find low-salt, low-fat and low-sugar holiday recipes is still our recipe page, just click here to see it.

*Happy No-salt, No-fat, No-sugar Thanksgiving!!!*

Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving. Even in this difficult year, hopefully, you have much to be thankful for.

Continue reading →

November 23, 2021 0

Holiday gift idea: The Complete Quinoa Cookbook

If you know someone who loves quinoa, here’s a great holiday gift suggestion for them (or for you if you love quinoa) — a new cookbook that has more than 100 recipes using quinoa.

Written by Catherine Gill, who writes the Dirty Vegan website and wrote the Dirty Vegan Cookbook, the book is aimed at vegan and plant-based diets adherents.

But quinoa also is a heart-healthy ingredient that anyone like me with heart disease should be aware of and use in their cooking.

“The fiber in quinoa can also help with cholesterol and blood sugar levels, lowering your risk of diabetes and heart disease,” notes WebMD in its discussion about quinoa.

The book includes recipes using quinoa for breakfast, snacks and appetizers, lunch and dinner, and even desserts. Quinoa-stuffed grape leaves in the appetizer section got my attention, I may try those for a holiday meal.

Each recipe comes with a tip for making it, but unfortunately, the recipes don’t list nutrition information for finished dishes.

Not many cookbooks do that, granted, but seeing that can make heart-healthy meal planning so much easier.

The book retails for $20 on Amazon. At a time when everyone is cooking more because of the Pandemic, this could be a great gift.

November 4, 2021 0

Looking for a low-sodium Thanksgiving turkey during the Pandemic — shop early, buy big

Time to eat all those turkeys! Happy Thanksgiving! — *Finder smaller, fresh turkeys under 16 pounds could be a challenge this year, shop early, and buy bigger.*

Shortages, and talk of soon-to-happen shortages, have become a regular feature of the Covid Pandemic over the past two years. Already, stories are emerging about turkey shortages for Thanksgiving.

Doing some research, I found some of those stories overblown. The shortages are likely to be for fresh, smaller turkeys, those under 16 pounds. Of course, fresh turkeys also are low-sodium turkeys. They haven’t been injected with high-salt solutions like many frozen ones. I wrote about salt differences in turkeys back in 2014, read details by clicking here.

So, if like me, you’re planning to buy a fresh turkey, shop earlier than usual and freeze it until Thanksgiving. And think about buying a larger turkey than you otherwise might to get a better selection. I did that last year after a long quest for a fresh turkey, grabbing a 19-pound bird at a local Whole Foods for our small Thanksgiving gathering in the first year of the Pandemic.

You can easily freeze leftovers for a variety of future uses like your own homemade low-sodium soup or turkey fajitas which I made after last Thanksgiving.

Good hunting, and an early Happy Thanksgiving to you!

October 24, 2021 5

Healthy Emmie sees good eating habits coming as we emerge from the pandemic

It’s always fun to speak with someone who is passionate about food. Online nutritionist Healthy Emmie certainly fits in that category. We recently spoke about her expectations for American eating habits post-pandemic, as well as about her philosophy of healthy eating.

“This pandemic is changing everything, it’s making people look twice at taking health into their own hands, ” says Emmie, who began her healthy eating quest at age 19.

Healthy Emmie

Now 26, Emmie, a vegan, offers a program called the Slim on Starch Weight Loss Program. She developed her eating philosophy as she helped her parents become healthier. Seeing it work on them, she now promotes it to the world.

She believes in whole-food, plant-based eating and includes starchy items like potatoes and white rice — which some nutritionists shun — in her diet.

Her theory — eating only greens (as I did after my first heart surgery) will leave you hungry and likely send you back to unhealthy eating habits. Including healthy starches can fill you up and keep you plant-based.

“Starch is to satiety as water is to thirst,” she says.

You can download her sample one-day eating plan from her website by clicking here. Scroll to the bottom of the page to get it.

Plant-based, whole-food eating for her doesn’t include all the imitation meat products coming to market in recent days. I agree, so many of those are high in salt and fat, they really are no better for you than real meat.

I’ve written in the past that I’m not ready to go completely plant-based (my daughter has, she’s leading the family on that front). But I see world eating habits moving in that direction, especially among Millennials and Gen Zers.

As the Pandemic has progressed, Emmie has seen two types of people — those who used the pandemic early on to get a better grip on their health; and those who binged, gained pandemic pounds, and now need to address being heavier than they want or should be. Her business doubled during the Pandemic, says Emmie, who in based in Boston.

“No matter what has happened during the Pandemic, it’s never too late to get started with a healthy diet, start today,” she advises.

I couldn’t agree more.

October 18, 2021 0

Some Berry, Berry good advice on storing berries

With summer drawing to a close, fresh berries seem to be everywhere in food outlets these days. You can find them from farmers’ markets to your local supermarket, often on sale at the larger outlets. And if you’re hardy, you may even be picking your won at a local farm.

So here’s a guide to keeping those berries fresh as long as possible from Myrecipes.com.

Some tips surprised me — like don’t wash them all as soon as you get home. Wash them as you use them. And don’t store in air-tight containers or zip-lock bags.

I’m not a berry eater myself, but my wife has them every morning with her Greek yogurt, so I buy them weekly for her. Here are some raspberries I bought today, on salt 2 containers for $3.

September 14, 2021 0

Wondering what to do with your basil? Here are 87 recipes that use the tasty herb

Growing your own herbs is something you can do inside or out, adding a variety of nee flavors to your food so you won’t miss all the alt you don’t eat any longer. We have an indoor herb garden in winter and big pots of basil outside in summer. So I was happy to see this piece in Epicurious, 87 Basil Recipes, Because You Can Only Eat So Much Pesto Pasta.

*Some of the ways I use basil, keeping it simple and delicious.*

The headline appealed to me because I actually don’t like pesto because of the nuts in it, so I’m always looking for other ways to enjoy my basil.

You can see some of my choices in the photo gallery here — basil-topped, thin-crust, low-sodium pizza; basil topped chicken breast with tomato and low-fat mozzarella; and a simple basil and tomato salad.

Let me know your favorites, and which of the 87 you try out.

September 7, 2021 0

Give iceberg lettuce a break — it’s ok to like it

Iceberg lettuce tends to get a bad reputation in foodie circles as not as nutritious and healthy as greener types of lettuce like Romaine. But it still has its benefits and so shouldn’t;t be written off, states this article from Eatingwell.com.

My wonderful salmon salad. — *My salmon salad, made with leftover salmon. A salad is my lunch daily these days.*

“Iceberg lettuce also has a lot to offer when considering the roster of vitamins and minerals it contains. From immune-supporting vitamin A to bone health-supporting magnesium and calcium, it would be a stretch to claim that this lettuce is nutrient-free, as some folks on the internet claim,” the article states.

I tend to buy whichever lettuce I can get on sale during any given week. Iceberg has been featured quite a bit this summer as a sale item by several supermarkets. I buy it because I like it too, and because too many leafy greens mess with the blood thinner I take for a heart issue.

If you can, mix it with greener, leafier types of lettuce in a salad to add texture and a needed crunch to the mixture. If you have to eat a salad every day for lunch as I do, at least make it fun. Enjoy!

September 2, 2021 0

Another flavorful way to cook white-meat chicken — and it’s fast!

Early on in this blog I wrote a post asking how many ways someone could prepare white-meat chicken. I was making the transition to how I had always eaten to eating only items my nutritionists had recommended after my first stent was put in, back in 2012.

Tomato & Mozz smothered grilled chicken cutlets

I’ve since found and written about many options for making the driest part of chickens, the white meat, tastier and more palatable.

Check my recipe page for some of those past recipes. This post will look at a new, simple variation I recently came across, 10-minute chicken.

The ingredients, with my notes about them, are:

4 thin chicken breasts (boneless, skinless) (be sure they’re thin, the thicker the chicken, the longer you need to cook it)
4 tablespoons olive oil (one for rubbing and one for cooking)
2 teaspoons kosher salt (leave this out,m you don;t need it)
1 teaspoon black pepper
4 cloves garlic (pressed)
2 teaspoons parsley (dried)
1 teaspoon thyme (dried)
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (I’m not a fan of hot peppers, I’d substitute Mrs. Dash chicken spice mix instead)

Then,:

Rub the chicken breasts generously with oil. Season with all of the seasonings.
In a large skillet over medium-high heat, heat another 2 tablespoons of oil and add the chicken breasts. Cover the pan with a lid, leaving a small gap for steam to escape. Cook for 3 minutes without touching the pan or the chicken. Once the tops of the chicken turn white, flip and cook for an additional 3 minutes. Remove the chicken from the pan and serve immediately.

Remember to always cook chicken thoroughly. If you can cut it and see red meat or meat that looks more like jelly, it’s not done, the meat should be white all the way through the entire breast.

August 16, 2021 0

A simple yet very tasty tomato salad recipe using heirloom tomatoes

I’ve always been a giant tomato fan, perhaps because we always had them handy in the Italian-American household of my youth. I’m always on the lookout for fun tomato dishes, and this one, Tomato Salad with Lemon-Basil Vinaigrette, fits the bill.

I like its use of heirloom tomatoes. If you’ve never had those, find some and enjoy. Their flavor is so much more intense than most store-bought tomatoes. And, as this recipe notes, you can find them in different colors and combine them for a colorful salad.

This salad uses heirloom tomatoes and English cucumber. It also has a simple recipe for a lemon-basil vinaigrette. I’d leave out the salt and use low- or no-fat feta instead of regular feta to get the salt content down even more than the 213 mgs of sodium per serving noted in the recipe.

The ingredient list is:

Ingredients

¼ cup chopped fresh basil, plus more for garnish
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
¼ teaspoon salt (eliminate this)
⅛ teaspoon ground pepper
4 large firm multicolor heirloom tomatoes, sliced
2 medium English cucumbers, thinly sliced
⅔ cup crumbled feta cheese (look for low- or no-fat feta)

You can watch this video for assembly instructions.

July 29, 2021 1

Category: smart eating