Na+: the silent killer
One of the things that is markedly different about my new life is my salt intake. Before I was "watching my salt" and was supposed to avoid anything high salt, including Chinese and Japanese food (as if!), and avoid cooking with it or adding it to anything (which was easy for me).
Now, it's an absolute imperative. I'm limited to 1,000 mg per day of sodium; the US RDA is 2,400 mg per day and the average American consumes between 4,000 mg and 5,000 mg daily. (The UK RNI is a much more reasonable 1,600 mg per day.) The human body only actually needs roughly 500 mg of sodium per day to function properly, so I try to keep it down at those levels. Given that your average store-bought food is incredibly oversalted, I've had to start pretty much cooking everything I take in myself from basic raw ingredients, many of them organic. It does mean, however, that I am getting a lot of practice in the kitchen and really shaking the rust off my cooking skills, as well as pushing into new places I'd always wanted to go but never had before (such as roasting my own red peppers). Since there are probably other people who are looking for ideas for minimized salt foods, I'll be posting some of my recipes — the successes and the failures — in the days to come.
I only cooked one new dish today, but boy did it take a long time. I'd have to call it a hearty tuscan tomato and wild mushroom bisque. It didn't turn out at all how I had planned, but it actually seemed to hit the spot somehow. Definitely a good soup for this fall snap we seem to be having outside. It's getting too late to go into the extended discussion of it, so it (like the rest of the soup) will have to wait for another day to be finished.
