Pizza 2.0 - grinding it out

We made another Italian sausage pizza tonight and managed to cut roughly half the sodium from our previous attempt. The main two changes: no salt used in the dough for the crust (I used the herbed pizza dough recipe from Dick Logue's 500 Low Sodium Recipes book), and we made the sausage from scratch using 1/3 the recommended amount of salt. PDM consulted our low sodium cookbooks and his "normal" cookbooks and kind of split the difference in the recipes for the sausage. He made three pounds and froze most of it in 12 ounce portions for future use. It was some of the best Italian sausage I've tasted and the missing salt didn't cause any loss of flavor. If I didn't know it was "lower sodium" I would not have guessed it.


The pizza made six servings. I ate two and PDM ate four. My share of sodium was about 500-600mg. We still have about 6 ounces of sausage and about half the sauce left to use for supper tomorrow night. I am thinking of picking up some fresh tortellinis on my way home and another can of no-salt-added canned tomatoes and we are back in business! Got plenty of fresh basil growing in the garden, and we'll make some homemade garlic bread to go with.

Vacation Report

Pretty sure I didn't blow my sodium budget, although I probably came close a few days. The sodium restriction did make things much more difficult. It was much harder to find a place to eat that had something which could work for me. We had much less spontaneity than we are used to. My breakfasts were a bit monotonous - had fresh fruit and granola with yogurt every day. We always eat bananas and trail mix for lunch, which was not a problem since we chose the trail mix carefully (thank you Trader Joe's). But dinners were sometimes a challenge, especially in remote places (and also on the airplane). If all else fails, portion control is a viable option.

Other than the food restriction, we had a great vacation (if a bit overscheduled). Once we got to Seattle, we drove more than 1300 miles and hiked over 36 miles of trail. Not a lot of downtime. Very pretty scenery though, and we have this weekend at home to recover.