Food for thought
Think food will taste bland if you don’t lace it with salt to enhance the flavour? Here are three cookbooks that aim to prove you wrong.
The No-Salt Cookbook
Dad (David), a veteran journalist and son (Thomas), a self-taught chef, have teamed up to prove you don’t need salt to make food taste good.
Part cookbook, part health guide, their collaboration includes more than 250 salt-free recipes, as well as practical shopping tips to avoid buying high-sodium foods and helpful advice for counting your daily salt intake to keep your blood pressure in check and avoid water retention.
Recipes cover breakfast, lunch and dinner and include everything from soups and salads to comfort foods such as shepherd’s pie, pizza and beef Stroganoff. There’s even a recipe for decadent brownies.
You Won’t Believe It’s Salt-Free
Spice it up; not salt it down. That’s the advice nutritionist Robyn Webb is dishing out in this cookbook, featuring 125 low- to no-sodium recipes spiked with a host of tasty herbs and spices, including garlic, chipotle and herbes de Provence.
“With these easy recipes, not only can you skip the salt, you’ll truly appreciate a whole new world of flavourful and wonderfully aromatic herbs and spices,” writes Webb, author of 11 cookbooks and the online food editor of Diabetes Forecast magazine.
The culinary creations in her new book include herbed mashed potatoes with olive oil, Caribbean-style pork tenderloin with melon salsa and chipotle chips. Yum.
500 15-Minute Low Sodium Recipes
Dick Logue knows how difficult it can be to shelf the salt shaker. In 1999, he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and given doctor’s orders to follow a low-sodium diet.
“At first, like many people, I found it easiest to avoid the things that had a lot of sodium in them. But I was bored. And I was convinced that there had to be a way to create low-sodium versions of the foods I missed,” he writes in his latest cookbook promoting healthy eating.
Like one of his previous cookbooks, 500 Low-Sodium Recipes, all 500 recipes in the new softcover are low in salt, but even better than that, they take 15 minutes — or less — to prepare.
But don’t expect bland or basic dishes. Instead, Logue has created healthy versions of some of his favourite recipes, including angel hair pasta with spicy shrimp, chocolate chow mein, garlic steak and berry cobbler.
Each recipe includes nutritional facts per serving to help you keep track of your sodium intake.