I am a planner. I like to organize, write my lists and get things ready. When I leave the house in the morning, I like to make a clean getaway with the things I need for the day neatly packaged the night before.
    So how does this happen?  Every year at the last week of school, I suddenly feel overwhelmed that I have not planned enough for the summer.
    Summer vacation lasts so long here! I detest the idea of letting the kids waste away in front of a TV...so I plan things. I plan our outings, our museum visits, our outdoor adventures and sports. I like to have an idea of where to begin each week.
    I also look at my garden and every single year, I wish I had done more. Every year I feel a sense of tremendous urgency to add a few more things before it gets too hot.
    This year is no different. 
    Yes, I could make the excuse that we have had so much extra going on this year, but really, it is the same thing.
    I have not had a garage sale yet. That bothers me as I am trying to greatly reduce the clutter and extras that we have. If I want to stick with my goal of moving, I really need to get more stuff out of this house.
    So, just like every other year, I will begin my mad dash. I will plan and order more supplies for the summer. I will plant a few extras and work like crazy to keep them alive before the real heat of the summer. I will go through the arduous and most hated task of picking through thousands of belongings and deciding their fate. Stay? Go? Garbage?  And get it done.
    By the middle of June, this will all be a memory that I have forgotten. By the middle of June, I usually have all of this completed and I am just "living" again. I glance at my calendar, check the weather and follow my plans.
    For better or worse, I like my life this way. I even have a place penciled into my calendar to watch for back to school sales. I also have notes made at the beginning of each month for annual deadlines for contests and other fun education things.  It makes me happy.
    Yes, when I was younger, I was living more freely. I did what I wanted when I wanted. I don't know exactly when that changed, but I can tell you that life without my calendar of notes terrifies me. 
    I know that I would still remember to pay the bills, I would still take my children to events and probably sign them up for sports, but somehow seeing my notes makes it all easier.
     I looked at my sparse calendar today. I have one item each week.  I will fill in at least two more each week and then I will be filled with relief. Some things are taken care of. I work, they have committments also. We have a zoo membership that we use when the weather is right. That membership is a handy fill-in.
    Here we are. It is the last week of school and we have no idea what we will do next week. 
     Something tells me we will figure it all out.
   

What? It's THAT Easy??

     A long, long time ago, people ate fresh foods. Do you remember fresh foods? They are the ones that do not come in a bag, can or box. I say this because even most of us who cook our own foods use convenience products, canned vegetables, prepared spaghetti sauces, frozen dinners, box meals with instructions. But, if you read those labels and wrote down all of the nutrition content for a day, you might be tempted to try another way.
     A few people have asked me how we alter our recipes for sodium content and cholesterol. 
     I will admit that a few years ago, I had purchased a few recipe books for heart healthy meals. We never really used them. A lot of them contained recipes that simply were not going to be eaten here. They were either too exotic, or too bland, or simply just not that tasty for our palates.
     So began my label reading frustration. I like to make my own soups and stews and it began with finding a prepared stock I could use. I don't just have a doctor's request to cut back sodium.  I can feel it. When I have too much sodium, I cough all night long as the fluid quickly builds up in my lungs. I noticed this happening on days that I made soups and thought that was ridiculous since I did not add salt at all. I chopped my own vegetables.
    I thought I knew what was in my soup. Then I read the label on the vegetable broth carton. 550 mg per serving. WOW! The next time I went to the store, I picked up the lower sodium products and flipped them around. WOW! Most of them contained 400 mg of sodium.  Let's just remember that is for 1 cup of soup.  Ummm.. If soup is my main dinner, I will be honest and say that I would count a serving as a cup and a half... It's a good thing I never added crackers with that.
     I was annoyed. I looked online at how to make my own stock and broth. I learned to preserve my own so that I could make a large batch and then be ready for the next time also. 
    It was time to get out a calculator and a nutrition guide.  I calculated that when I made my own, The entire huge batch had less than 300 mg of sodium. Hmmm.. so then I added all of the vegetables to make soup and I was up to a whopping 450mg if I used a LOT of carrots. That is for an entire pot of soup!  So, before adding chicken or noodles, I have a soup that was very very LOW in sodium per serving. 
     Spaghetti sauce presented the same issue. The prepared sauces were very high in sodium. 600mg per 1/4 cup serving. So if I add meatballs to my sauce, and then count the sodium from the noodles, that is a very high number for those of us with heart issues.
    Why is it like this? It seems so complicated to keep sodium around 2000 mg per day now because processed foods are a main part of our diet.  Before the age of sodas, chips and frozen dinners and canned goods, I'm sure this was just a normal amount. Now it seems restrictively low.
    So, here I go with spaghetti sauce. I wont lie. We very rarely have a vegetarian spaghetti meal. We like meat with our spaghetti, either italian sausage, meatballs, ground meat in the sauce... something. We just like it like that.
    Off I go to read labels at the store again.
    I can do this. I can do almost anything, right?  Okay, so here we go. I have made homemade sauce from tomatoes in my garden and it was a big hit. Everyone LOVED the flavor. All I did was roast the tomatoes in the oven, peel them, chop them up and toss them in a slow cooker with a ton of other stuff.
     I cannot always get good fresh garden tomatoes, so I went to the canned tomato section in the grocery store. Aha! There were cans labels "low sodium".  They were again too high.  Soo, I searched and found cans labeled "no sodium added".  HUGE difference! The no sodium added contained approximately 30 mg of sodium per serving! No kidding! That is the kind of number that will make room for MEAT!
     I bought several cans, crushed, diced and whole to experiment with and this is what I came up with for our family.
     I dump three large cans of tomatoes in the slow cooker. (We personally like two diced and one crushed for the texture.)  We then chop up a whole green bell pepper, a whole red bell pepper, one medium yellow onion, four cloves of garlic and about a pound of crumini mushrooms. (The cruminis taste meatier than those icky white button mushrooms.... personal preference.)  I then add some fresh basil, oregano, parsley and thyme from the garden and set it on low.  I then take a look in the freezer to see what I have prepared... This week, there were meatballs that I had prepared over the weekend so I dump those into the slow cooker also. There is about 1/2 pound of meat in the entire pot, but with the cruminis, it tastes very very meaty when it is done.
     Since everyone is having less than 3 oz of meat per serving, this spaghetti sauce is less than 100mg of sodium per serving. Oh, but there will be noodles..
    If you use typical noodles, you will get 100-300 mg of sodium per serving. If you use whole grain pasta, you will get less than 10mg.  That's right. I don't know why, but there you are. So, we toss our sauce with whole grain noodles and add a sprinkle of cheese. 
    I want salad with that. Okay, so most vegetables contain naturally occuring sodium. Carrots are the ones we watch out for. Everything else is less than five. Carrots contain 42 for 5 baby carrots.  So, we make our salad, and then we get to  the dressing. I had the same issue with dressing as with the stock/broth, so I created my own.  If you get a salad dressing cruet, you can add the vinegar of your choice, olive oil (or something of your choice) and then add chopped garlic, onions and herbs to the mix. Once you have all of that together, add a tiny pinch of sugar, shake and leave it alone for a day before you use it.  The flavors will come together nicely, the sugar will take some of the vinegar bite away, and you will not even miss the salt.  VIOLA!
     Our entire spaghetti dinner contains less than 400 mg per serving.  Take that canned sauce! Now, some of you may be asking about the bread. We rarely added garlic bread to our spaghetti meals before. It just seems too much with the noodles. If you do, I recommend using whole grain bread and roasting an entire garlic in the oven. It comes out smooth and buttery.  Spread the roasted garlic on your bread without butter and keep the portions small. Don't wreck the meal with breads.
      To be honest, this sounds like more work than it is. When I get the groceries home on the weekend, I typically spend some time prepping for the week. I wash and chop vegetables and have them in containers ready to add to things.
     I spend about 4-6 hours prepping everything usually on Sundays. I don't like to spend an hour or two every single day in the kitchen. We eat lunches here also, and I decided long ago that I just do not enjoy being in the kitchen that much.
      I began doing this when I was working overtime every single week and I was not willing to let my family eat fast food and frozen dinners every single day. We are building the bodies that these children have to live with when they are 40 years old.
     For instance, last Sunday, I browned 4 lbs of ground beef with onions and green peppers and then seperated it into seperate pans to add other things. To one pan, I added chili seasoning, (no salt) and a small can of crushed tomatoes. Once that one is done, it is packaged into three containers in the freezer for taco meals.  The other pan gets packaged up as is into four containers for other meals. Labels are important. The final pound of meat is mixed with egg white, chopped peppers, onions and herbs to create meatballs. I bake them and when they are cooled and drained, they go into a freezer bag into the freezer.
     I then made a chicken noodle soup with my broth and chopped vegetables. I tossed in some herbs from the garden and leave that one to cook for a while.
     I have a fabulous grill pan with a grill press so I grilled 8 chicken breast fillets. Four of them get regular cracked pepper only, the other four get cracked pepper and cayenne this week as I am making a chipolte chicken salad. Yummm.  Once those are done, I chop up two of them and toss them into the chicken soup pot, the rest I cut into strips for salads and other things.
      In another slow cooker, I had a 2lb pork loin.  I turn it on high while I prep everything that will go into that pot. That sears the bottom of the meat. It takes about an hour, but remember I was busy chopping and packaging other meals.  Once the outside is browned, I poke two holes in the top of my loin and add a bit of apple cider vinegar to the holes. I then toss in chopped potatoes, carrots, celery, onion and peppers. I add freshly ground pepper and thyme from the garden. This week it will be a savory pork roast. I add about a cup of hot water and then turn it down to low. That will cook for 6 hours.
     Some weeks I make a pork loin with cranberries, oranges and ground pepper. It is DIVINE. 
     Once that pork roast is done, I let it rest for 30 minutes, then slice it up into 3oz portions and package it in containers as meals for four. Hmmmm...
    The chicken soup was packaged into containers and frozen. When we are ready to eat it, we will just plop it into a pan and add noodles just before it is done.
      VIOLA!  Easy dinner nights!
      Now, while I was chopping away, I made quick veggie snack containers for the fridge. There are usually four containers filled with celery, carrots, broccoli, cucumbers and other goodies. This also makes it easier to prepare fresh salads as I add container with chopped celery in water, chopped cucumbers in water.
     When we make salads, we tear the romaine, (I buy it at Sam's, 5 heads for $3.89) add baby spinach leaves, sliced yellow squash and or zuchini, chopped carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, celery and we have a great salad. If we want an extra crunch, I add roasted soy nuts. (unsalted, of course)
    Now, if you are reading this, let me tell you this is not all we will eat for the week. Last Sunday, I made enough things for approximately 18 meals. I do this every week so that we always have an assortment. We still have some grilled chicken and wild rice meals from last week. We also still have a couple of containers filled with roasted herbed vegetables that we can use as side dishes. I try to always have extra choices. We are not living with a strict "menu" per se.  We are really not so different from other families that look into the freezer wondering what sounds good today. We just have healthy choices when we do it.
     We typically also purchase one or two pineapples from Aldi's.  I chop those up and freeze one for yummy summer snacks and put the other in containers in the fridge for afternoon snacks.  (For adults: Put the frozen pineapple chunks into a cup, smash them and add rum for a wonderful tropical summer evening "snowcone")
      I also created my own version of "ranch seasoning" to grill chicken with next week.  Next week I will be grilling a LOT of meat outside to package. Even when added to stews, soups and other meals, grilled meats just taste better! :)
    For all of my work on Sundays, I typically only spend about 30 minutes per day in my kitchen the rest of the week. Most of that time is doing dishes and cleaning up. 
     I have an ongoing list of dinners to adapt for us. We are working on a pizza, chicken enchiladas and more salad dressings. I will let you know if we find success!  
    Oh yeah, it doesn't really take 4-6 hours to do all of that!  I just wrote that because I count the slow cooker time as my time!
  

    

          

     

     

One Day

    I looked through my notes from the last few months. We have made our own laundry detergent, deodorant, lip balm and created several new recipes that meet my stringent low sodium diet and we have done several art projects. We have also built our own raised garden beds and planted a lovely crop of vegetables on our tiny city lot.

   Tomorrow, I have a list. We must get through the school lessons, go to the bank and the rest is up to us. I wrote the list of things that I have wanted to do for a while but just have not been able to get to them with all of the recent mayhem. 

    I have two recipes written down for homemade ranch flavored seasoning that I would like to play with. 

    I don't know how it has happened, but I have become quite good at a few things in the kitchen. It would be ridiculous to think that I could appear on a cooking show, but I am really finding my own groove. I would never have guessed that I, who could not boil an egg correctly or make grilled cheese sandwiches without casualties would ever say this.

    I have managed to create quite a list of foods that I have recreated to have plenty of yummy flavor with much less sodium.

    Why don't I just buy the products that say "low sodium" on the packaging?  Well, I say to you that you should read the labels on those packages.  

    Recently, when my husband was in the hospital, one of the pamphlets they gave to him said that the average American consumes 8000 or more mg of sodium each day. WOW! That is a lot of sodium.  The recommendations for average humans is around 2000.  Hmmm.....

    So if you really write down the foods and their value each day, you will be shocked how much sodium is out there; or more correctly, in your food.

    This started because I like to make soups and stews and could not find a prepared stock that I could use without ending up ill. (When I have too much sodium, I get to cough up fluid all night... not fun for me.)

     I thought perhaps I could try to make my own. I began with vegetable stock. I did not add any salt. I was stunned. The flavor was much better than I could have imagined.

     I then began to experiment with spaghetti sauces, taco seasonings, and all sorts of things where sodium is found in large amounts.

    WOW!  I found cheats for everything!

    Now, since I said I found cheats, I will explain that the sodium substitute products on the shelf are not for me. I do not like "fake salt" nor any of the special seasoning blends created for those who are giving up salt. They just do not taste nearly as good to me.

    Okay, so you are skeptical. Tastebuds change. I perhaps had altered mine to accept the taste of cardboard as lovely, right?

     Well, the first meal I cooked after my husbands heart attack was tacos. I know, I know, but I hadn't exactly been to the grocery store while he was in intensive care. I just made the next planned meal. 

     I didn't use salt. I created my own taco seasoning, seasoned the meat well. (Mixed with veggie meat, but don't tell him. ssshhhhh)  I placed plenty of shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes and a picante sauce that I had made with no salt. 

       He ate dinner and made a comment that it had to be too high in fats, cholesterol and salt. MMMM  I didn't say a word until he finished his dinner.

    Then he asked me. "Okay, so what do I write down."

     I told him what was in every thing. He was shocked. He said it had tasted better than tacos from his favorite restaurant.

     Now, up until last week, we had regular prepared salad dressings in the refrigerator. He preferred his one particular brand and flavor. 

     The day after he got home from the hospital, I told him to read the labels before he had his salad as he might want to give up either the cheese or the salad dressing so that he could have dinner. 

     He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he read the labels.

     He was not happy.  "That's ridiculous! Am I just supposed to eat lettuce by itself?"

     If you want, you can try our salad dressing and our salad.

     He insists that he does not like squash.. just lettuce, tomato and carrots for him...

      My salad had Romaine lettuce, spinach leaves, sliced squash, sliced carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, chopped celery, roasted soy nuts and a small amount of cheese. 

    I make my own dressing.

     He ate my salad and said how filling and delicious it all was. He said my dressing was amazing.  How much sodium?

      Ahhhhh... I feel like I am reaching him. Finally. After all of these years. He is admitting that healthy foods can taste great and be filling.

     I wrote down the ingredients, their nutrition values and then divided it out to get the serving amounts. He was absolutely astonished!  

     Yes, he is getting it. He is now eating normal portions. He is not craving things as much. He does not tolerate eating more than a single serving well. (He did this once at breakfast and was miserable the entire day.)  He is getting it...

     His body now understands. His body likes this new way. His mind is still playing games with him though. 

     He has many years of bacon jokes and other nonsense in his head about "real men" and "rabbits".  You probably don't need that explained. 

     That is the hardest part. I can hear him saying things, and then he realizes, nope, that is not quite right.

      I am still playing with recipes to create the right flavor without using salt. Salt is my nemesis. I don't eat enough meat to do battle with cholesterol. He is now doing battle with both.

      Each week, we are finding something new to add to our list of yummy recipes... Almost as often, we are finding things that do not quite meet our expectations.

     What can we really do in one day? We can change everything. We can invent something new. We do not have to invent a time machine to be fabulous. Having a taco meat recipe that is enjoyable and filling is a major accomplishment.

     For those of you who have been warned... make a few changes one day. It will be a LOT easier for you to begin now than to have your very life depend on making several drastic changes right after a heart attack.

     Just one day can make a tremendous difference. In the case of my husband versus heart disease, one day of making the right choices may buy him many more days with his children. What you do with one day can be that important.