Food, glorious food

Nothing to report on the transplant, so I thought I'd post a little about food. I love food. All food. The medications I take severely affect my appetite (kills it, actually), so I indulge every craving and try hard to only eat good, nutritious food. I have to make every bite count! But I don't turn down a nice fried onion blossom every once in a while :-)

So when I was told to reduce and watch my sodium a few years ago it was a shocking experience. I didn't consume that much sodium from the foods I cooked at home, but Jeff and I enjoy eating out. Since most of the places in Pensacola are chain restaurants (explains a lot about the area), it was fairly easy to find nutrition info. I was appalled by the HUGE amounts of sodium in EVERY item. I would find one or two menu items that would have the least amount of sodium but were still over half of the daily recommended amount! It was so depressing that I started cooking more and more from home.

I know that I am preaching to the choir about most of this stuff... but maybe someone will turn over the package and read the sodium on some of their "staple" foods. High sodium is bad for everyone. I stopped buying most prepackaged frozen foods. The sodium in those items is very high also. I started looking at every package for the sodium content and was amazed by what I found. When I met Jeff he was a big proponent of "low-fat" and "low calorie" items. Most of those items are crap. They use more chemicals, fillers, and SALT to make low-fat and low calorie taste better. Seriously. Read the packaging. You're better off buying the real stuff and managing portion size. Now, there are some items I do buy that are low-fat. Milk, cream cheese, cottage cheese, etc. I buy real stuff whenever I can. I use butter. I use heavy cream in my sauces. I buy organic as much as possible because hormones and antibiotics and GMO are bad for you (especially dairy, produce and meats).

And I have discovered that I really enjoy cooking. For me, the prep work is one of my favorite parts. They key to enjoying prep work is to have lots of small bowls to put the stuff into. I use ice cream bowls from Crate & Barrel. And good knives. For goodness' sake... buy some good knives!! The best you can afford. Avoid serrated edges so you can sharpen them and so they don't tear the food. And some nice cutting boards. Avoid glass! They dull your knives. Having the right tools makes cooking so much easier and much more fun.

I also highly recommend learning some basic knife skills. I watch The Food Network quite a bit. Some of the shows on there are really lame, but there are some people that I enjoy watching. I learned how to properly chop an onion. Probably the most useful skill I have. I use the same technique for garlic too (gotta be kinda big cloves, though). Garlic is sticky and can be a real pain in the patootie to finely chop. I do most things from scratch- chopping, grating, etc. I like having control over every aspect of my food.

Here's a link in case you have no idea what I'm talking about. How to chop an onion.

I don't bake much. I don't like precision in my kitchen :-P I rarely measure when I cook. I don't like to be encumbered too much by measuring cups and spoons. I like being able to add more of the ingredients I like and reducing or removing those that I don't. But I stretch myself by making myself use ingredients that I don't normally like (mushrooms). I have been pleasantly surprised every time. High quality ingredients make a BIG difference. There is a huge difference between the taste of shiitake mushrooms and white button mushrooms in a recipe. And as I cook more I trust myself not to screw up and ruin nice ingredients.

I do toy with the idea of enrolling in some sort of culinary arts class eventually. I would love to be an even better home cook. Of course, I'd love a new kitchen too. But I'll be dreaming about that for a long while. My kitchen was designed by a moron. Obviously not by someone who cooked anything. Ever. They bought the cheapest cabinets on the market. They all have center stiles (that big piece of wood in the center of the cabinet so storage is a pain and pullout drawers for pots/pans cannot be utilized). Boo. But I knew that I didn't like the kitchen when we bought the house. Gotta make sacrifices somewhere... and you can't change location but you can change a kitchen! Hey, after surviving 2 kitchen remodels, what's one more? Wanna see some pictures?

Yes, the stove is next to the wall. And I have less than a foot of counter space b/n the stove and the fridge.

Hmm... love the huge hole on the other side of the fridge. At least the trash can fits? Sigh...

The "normal" side of my kitchen. 

We've also started composting. It's harder than it seems. It was too dry for months. So we started watering it every so often and now it's a mushy mess of smelly nastiness. Added a LOT of paper last night to dry it out a bit. Hopefully we can find the happy medium! 

Well, I hope this post was somewhat entertaining. I like variety in my life, so I thought you might like some variety reading my super exciting blog too. I might start posting links to some of the recipes I make and that I really like. I love when people give me recipes! Okay, here's a link to the potatoes I made last night. I just used up the small red bliss potatoes that I had left from my produce bag (maybe 6-7?). There are only 2 of us... I try not to make gargantuan amounts of anything. I adjusted everything for the smaller amount (I did not salt the water) and added sauteed onions (I have lots of onions that I need to use up- gotta be creative!). We had this with a grass-fed grilled steak.

Smashed Potato Gratin

Oh, and in case you have LOTS of potatoes, this is another fantastic recipe. I used store bought mayo and added less vinegar. It was delicious! Jeff liked it warm (more vinegar flavor). I liked it better cold the next day (flavors mellowed a bit). And I used the real bacon bits in the bag. Yeah, yeah, I wasn't about to slave over some bacon on the stove. And I definitely didn't use enough to equal 6 slices! Just a bit for flavor (gotta watch the salt but all you healthy people can use more). I did put the already cooked bacon bits in the skillet with a touch of oil to crisp them up before adding the veggies. Worked great!

Super Zesty Potato Salad