Food & Eating on a Restricted Sodium Diet

I want to mention two grocery items I found lately that are super low in sodium, in case there are some folks reading me who want or need to lower their intake of that yummy but possibly unhealthy food.

I found this brand of salad dressing....

Braswell's brand of dressing.  This particular one is a peach vinaigrette.
It only has 30 mg sodium(compared to the 250 or much more in other commercial dressings).
The herb vinaigrette variety has only 100 mg as well. 
This peach flavor goes well with greens and nuts, not so good if you add tomato to your salad.
It's not cheap at $3.99 a bottle but it's been on sale at Weis(Poundmeintheass)Markets lately for $2.99(not on sale this week).  It comes in a reusable glass carafe....very convenient for your summer wine soirees. ;-)

I know I can probably makes this cheaper myself(I buy bulk bags of frozen peach slices at the restaurant supply store, so the cost of the fruit is lower than paying $3 or more for a 1lb. bag in the grocery store), but it's good to have on hand for those days when you don't have the time or energy to make 6 or so items from scratch because you can't have the commercially prepared equivalent anymore.

I also found a partial answer to my cheese dilemma.....I LOVE cheese, but it's basically all sodium, even fake cheese has tons of sodium in it.
HeluvaGood is my new "besty".....

They make a reduced sodium cheddar cheese.
25 mg per 2 oz. serving.
I found the only place around here that carries it is Wegman's.  It's $2.49 an 8 oz. package.
Now I say this is a PARTIAL solution for two reasons.

1-They only make this reduced sodium cheese in a cheddar variety.  Cheddar cheese is a very small part of the Fromage Universe and being restricted to 1 type of cheese for life chaps my butt.
But at least there IS some cheese I can have in quantity.

2-It tastes terrible.  Ok....maybe not terrible but it's not as good as cheddar cheese make with salt.
It's terrible as an "let's have cheese on crackers" cheese, but it's good as a "melted in a sandwich or in a casserole" cheese.  It just doesn't have much flavor at all.  And I am telling you this as someone who's palate is use to not having salt and finding flavor in bland food now.
Mostly I'll probably be using this WITH a real cheese, to extend the amount I can have but have the flavor of reg. cheddar, on days when I have seriously restricted all other sodium consumed so I have lots of room left in my sodium allotment.

I did use this reduced sodium cheese thusly a couple of weeks back.
Weis(PMITA)Markets had Cubanelle peppers on sale for $1.29 lb.  I bought some and made Chile Rellenos one night for dinner.
Though I have enjoyed this dish in restaurants before, I had never made this myself before and was a bit intimidated.
It really wasn't too bad but it was difficult as you need to be quick once you get the egg whites whipped up.
Here are the peppers once I had put them to char on the grill and then sweat in a plastic bag.....

I should have charred them more as the skins would have been easier to pull off.   But luckily the skins of cubanelle peppers aren't as tough as poblano peppers so the dish was still edible.
I did the traditional frying of the egg white batter dipped peppers(the most difficult part was coating the peppers) but next time I'll try baking them instead.  I stuffed my pepper with my special RS cheese but still put some reg. Monterey jack cheese on top when I baked them off in the casserole dish.  It was enough to give it cheese flavor but not so much that I went over my sodium limit for the day.

Sorry I forgot to snap a photo of the finish dish, but trust me, everyone ate them right up! lol

Last week I had a 2lb. bag of large shrimp(21-30 ct. I think?) I wanted to use.
Not wanting to go the battered and fried route, I tired grilling them on skewers.  I went searching online for a honey garlic sauce recipe.
Found one and then did my monkeying around with it to make it almost sodium-free but still tasty.
Let the shrimp skewers marinate for an hour before I threw them on the grill and used a can of coconut milk to make coconut rice to go along with the shrimp.
Then I thickened the marinade with cornstarch and served the resulting sauce over the shrimp.
Hubs & I agreed that the sauce tasted just like the Garlic Sauce they put on Eggplant at our favorite Chinese restaurant!
I could have sworn I snapped a picture of the finished dish but can't seem to find it in my files....

The sauce was so good, I used leftover sauce to form the base of a new batch of sauce last Saturday and made Garlic Chicken and Broccoli over leftover Coconut Rice.  I also added water chestnuts to give the dish a little crunch....

"Good enough to eat" close-up.....

I'm so spiffy, the dish coordinates with my dinnerware colors! lol
We have 2 servings of this dish left so it will be on the menu either tonight or tomorrow as it's too hot to cook here the next couple of days.

If anyone would like my reduced-sodium Honey Garlic marinade and sauce recipe, just give out a holler and I'll post it.

I'm off to another dr. appt. in a bit here....oh goody!

Sluggy