A Hint of Normalcy

I worked very late on Tuesday, and when I finally got home my husband had dinner in progress on the stove (because he is awesome like that). The remarkable thing about this meal is that it was so much like what we used to eat before Low Sodium. He is very good at making burritos from scratch using a variety of ingredients, but it didn't seem like we'd be able to make a low enough sodium version of any of them - tortillas have a LOT of sodium, as does cheese, canned black beans or refried beans (even the "low sodium" varieties), and even hot sauce isn't sodium free. And of course he would always include salt in the seasoning mix applied to whatever meat we used as well.

PDM's delicious low sodium beef burritos were made possible by: not including any salt in the seasoning for the meat (he used a lot of other spices), making more carmelized peppers and onions than usual to add delicious flavor and aroma without any sodium, starting with dried black beans rather than canned (much more work and time required, but no sodium unless you add it yourself), using some no-sodium "chicken flavor" fake bouillon powder to add flavor to the cooking water for the beans in lieu of salt, finding a semi-lowish-sodium cheese blend and not using very much of it on my burrito, and some very tasty tortillas that had less fat and much less sodium than our usual brand (Tumaro's jalapeno and cilantro gourmet tortillas, with 105 mg sodium each). He made a fresh jalapeno and onion salsa that was very tasty sans salt. I ended up using it to perk up my black beans, which were sort of bland. I also put just a tad of "No Salt" (which is KCl - potassium chloride) on the beans because they really needed it!

All in all, I could barely tell that this meal had FAR less sodium than any of our old burrito concoctions. And since the lowly burrito (done creatively with whatever we happen to have around) has been such a staple of our dinner routine, this success was quite a relief! It also means that we should be able to make quesadillas using some of the same methods, although I will have to make mine small to limit the tortilla and cheese sodium contribution.

And for whatever reason, I've been eating smaller portions than I used to. My theory is that (so far) the food isn't quite as tasty, which makes it easier to stop when I feel full. Since I only ate half my burrito, this helped further reduce the sodium count of this meal, and gave me a low sodium lunch to bring to work the next day.