mdeatherage's Profile

Oh, for the love of…

Did any of you read the recipes before automatically launching into the "don't mess with carbonara / I don't like 'light' recipes" formula?

The first one is by Frances Lam and starts out explaining that he agrees with you on those things, but that he finds lightly sautéed hearty greens with a bit of fish sauce or good soy sauce for deep flavor and pimentón for smokiness are really good things, and even better when combined with traditional carbonara ingredients. He says, "I’m not going to go with the diet-book clichés about how 'you’ll never miss the bacon!' because that’s…a lie. But you might just find yourself wondering if it’s normal to become obsessed with hearty greens."

The Oprah recipe does leave out the eggs, but uses 2 oz of pancetta and 1½ of parmesan, combined with low-fat milk combined with the pasta water to finish the sauce.

The third recipe is, I think, Canadian, because it calls for "6 rashers of back bacon" as well as "5 tbsp low-fat fromage frais," which I guarantee I cannot find in my small-town grocery store. I can't exactly tell where the savings are here other than maybe using canadian bacon instead of bacon (or guancale or pancetta), so I'll ignore it.

The fourth one is for vegetarians, who just might reject the idea of "don't mess with carbonara" because they like the other tastes. What replaces the traditional smoked pork? Smoked sun-dried tomatoes, which "add an amazing savory quality to this rich dish." The recipe includes 3 eggs, pecorino romano, ¼ cup cream (or milk) -- to serve two people. This is not exactly light in any sense.

And the final one, from "weekday vegetarian," takes a similar tack but uses smoked tofu instead of smoked pork, again because they're vegetarians who might like to have a carbonara-style dish even if you don't think it's worth doing, but think it's worth looking down on those who do. And yes, it includes both eggs and "two handfuls" of parmesan, or parmigiano reggiano if you have it, of course.

Some of us have dietary restrictions, and some of those aren't exactly voluntary. And some of that subset likes to have these flavors and textures more often than "never" or "annually." If you prefer to eat the real thing in small portions less often, more power to you. But for those who can't, these kinds of posts are good idea factories for improving the food in our lives and deserve better than the scorn of people who are lucky enough not to have such issues.

We'll be cooking a turkey this year, but I'm pretty sure mother nature or modern agribusiness made it.

No one's mentioned Saveur…any thoughts?

I ate a mostly vegetarian diet for about 10 years, but when I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure (due to a virus—my arteries were clear and my cholesterol low), I had to give that up and start eating more meat.

Why? Sodium. The vegetarian and vegan recipes I had been making often turned out to be 3-4X higher in sodium than simple meat recipes. Olives, capers, and miso are all quite high in sodium (I keep Eden Organic Shiro Miso when I can, but at 330mg of sodium per tablespoon, it rules out those recipes that call for 1/2 cup of miso for what turns out to be three servings). Reduced-sodium soy sauce is around 500mg of sodium per tablespoon. Olives and capers are also quite salty, as can be some sun-dried tomatoes, usually the ones packed in oil. Bragg's Liquid Aminos, IIRC, are about 720mg of sodium per tablespoon.

Tabasco is actually pretty decent, at 30mg per teaspoon. The newer Tabasco-brand sauces are more like 200mg per teaspoon and must be used much more sparingly.

My go-to add-on of choice, which surprises me as much as anyone, is the Sunny Spain seasoning from Penzey's Spices. It's lemon pepper but without the salt (salt is usually the first ingredient listed in lemon pepper blends, and if not first then second). I mix it with salt substitute, which works for me because a) it tastes salty to me (I'm lucky) and b) my meds require me to get extra potassium anyway, and salt substitute is potassium chloride.

Non-CHF patients can probably go with regular lemon pepper. it's got salt and pepper, and some lemon zest, but also powdered citric acid. I heard Thomas Keller on The Splendid Table say that salt and acid are the only two real seasoning ingredients we have, and using this stuff in a shaker has made a world of difference for me. It brightens up nearly every dish, from tomato-based pastas to fried rice to soups. It has made a huge difference for me in dishes that normally involve salty-briny ingredients that I simply cannot use in any noticeable quantities. Check it out.

Eden Organic has BPA-free cans for beans (and has paid extra for them) for more than 11 years.

However, they say they cannot do the same with tomatoes because the FDA has not yet approved any BPA-free food can plastic linings for use with tomatoes.

https://www.edenfoods.com/articles/view.php?articles_id=178

That makes me wonder about Muir Glen's claim, because Eden Foods has been trying to get a safe way to do that for many years. I would suspect that either it's extremely new, or it's got something else unsavory instead of BPA in it.

Eden's statement on BPA (from before the study) is here:

"Eden Organic Beans are packed in steel cans coated with a baked on oleoresinous c-enamel lining that does not contain bisphenol-A (BPA). (Oleoresin is a natural mixture of an oil and a resin extracted from various plants, such as pine or balsam fir). These cans cost 14 percent more than the industry standard cans that do contain BPA. This costs Eden $300,000 more a year. To our knowledge Eden is the only U.S. company that uses this custom made BPA-free can."

In other materials, Eden has said that these cans come from Ball. If Ball certified that these cans were BPA-free and it turns out they're not (and I'd bet a quarter Eden is having empty cans tested now), then Eden has paid Ball $10 million extra over ten years for something that wasn't up to spec. That spells "lawsuit."

I don't subscribe to the magazine so I can't see the actual tested product, but from the picture it looks like one of Eden's prepared rice-and-beans seasoned blends. It's possible that BPA got into the food chain from one of the other organic suppliers, and they'll investigate that, too.

But I'm sticking with Eden tomatoes because I'm on a low sodium diet and their tomatoes are never salted, nor do they have calcium chloride added. Even if the cans have a trace of BPA, it's still less than in every other tomato can, and no other company makes such a wide variety of no-salt-added tomato products. If they sell them in jars, I'll buy them in jars. They sell them in cans now, and I'll buy them in cans.

I have heart failure and no pregnant or very young family members. I'll take traces of BPA and that risk vs. the very real, documented-in-my-medical-records results of eating too much sodium.

I have dietary sodium restrictions (no more than 3000mg of sodium per day), and even low-sodium soy sauces (I use Eden Organic's Low Sodium Shoyu) are about 500mg of sodium per tablespoon, so limiting soy in a recipe to 2 tablespoons or less is vital to me. Most of these work, so thanks! (Even with a lower-sodium sauce, 2/3 cup of soy is 5333mg of sodium, and that's not counting any other sodium in any other component. That's a problem! lol)

"Regular" soy sauces are 1000-1500mg of sodium per tablespoon. Fish sauce is around 1200mg per tablespoon, so that's out for me too (oyster sauce is around the same as well). In the current issue of Everyday Food, there's a very tasty Cashew Chicken recipe using only 2 tbsp of soy sauce, and I've made that several times already. It won't be online until the next issue is published, though.

Dick Logue has a recipe for a low-sodium soy sauce substitute, but I don't find the flavor to be anything like soy and haven't used it often. Other people swear by it, so your mileage may vary. (I do notice his latest version does not include reducing it on the stove by half, as older recipes of his you can find online do. I haven't tried the newest one, but I can handle limited quantities of the real thing.) It would work nicely for some color and a little of the flavor.

For thickening, I tend to use King Arthur Flour's Signature Secrets Culinary Thickener, because as they say, it dissolves instantly in hot or cold liquids, it survives freezing and reheating well, and doesn't have raw flavors that need to be "cooked out." A PR-type page with all kinds of claims for it is here, but I've generally found it to work as this page says. (I follow recipe instructions for roux or cornstarch, but if something is done and isn't thickened enough, I reach for a little bit of the SSCT to fix it instantly, and it works.)

King Arthur's page lists ingredients and nutrition information so you can check for allergies. Good luck!

Does the recipe really mean 1/4 tablespoon of chili powder (3/4 teaspoon)? It's just an odd way of expressing it so I wanted to be sure.

I live in Oklahoma, and I've checked about 10 grocery stores ranging from small to mega-huge. None of them have frozen artichoke hearts, none have ever carried them, none say that they even can get them.

I'd love to keep them in the freezer. I can't tolerate the sodium levels in the canned ones.

Blended pastas aren't so fragile, but true whole wheat pastas are like whole wheat flour: they go rancid. Check the dates on the packages carefully, because whole wheat pasta is still a small enough market that packages could sit on the shelf (or in hot areas) for too long.

If you're going to hold onto uncooked whole wheat pasta for a while, do what you'd do with whole wheat flour: store it in the freezer.