Helping Home Cooks Save Time and Money
Cooking Manager readers may recognize this recipe from the interview with Ruth Kilner. I’m reposting it here to make it easier to follow. Did you know that Jerusalem artichokes are a New World plant? Ingredients: 1 medium butternut squash 2 sweet potatoes 25 grams butter 1 chopped onion 2-3 cloves garlic 3-4 carrots 1-2 potatoes […]
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A reader asks what to do with her “blah” leftover gazpacho. In this post I share ideas that can be transferred to all kinds of leftovers.
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My post on slow cookers is featured in the 251st Festival of Frugality over at Fiscal Fizzle. Check it out for great money-saving ideas. Leah at Ingathered gives great ideas for packing couscous in a lunchbox. Commenter Yosefa started My Non-Recipe Blog: “I don’t have recipes to share, these are just the stories of how […]
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Chef Jamie Oliver gives a powerful talk on reversing the decline in healthy eating and the alarming rise in obesity. In one clip, he demonstrates how American schoolchildren can’t identify a tomato or a potato, much less beets or broccoli. His vision for America involves teaching every child about food, and teaching children and families ten simple, healthy recipes that they can cook at home. Well worth twenty minutes of your time.
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Wednesday is recipe day at Cooking Manager. I made this sauce last night for tortillas, but my mother served it once a week to accompany fish. It also works for vegetables and patties. My kids asked me to make it again tonight. It’s easy, and contains ingredients you probably have on hand. The recipe is […]
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We love pasta around here. But the package directions, and most cookbooks, call for huge amounts of water. Boiling all that water takes time and money. The cookbooks are wrong. Here are ten creative ideas for making pasta frugally. Cook as usual, but use less water. Start with half the amount you usually use. The […]
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Reader Ariela sent me this message: I had a “Cooking Manager Moment” yesterday and I “owe” dinner to you. All we had leftover was the sauce from a goulash. My husband had made a delicious goulash with meat and veggies, only 2-3 cups of the sauce were left. I remembered something you wrote about your […]
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Wednesday is Recipe Day at Cooking Manager. Thanks to Rachelle Isserow for sending in this elegant dish. Serves 4-6. Ingredients: ½ cup olive oil 1 medium onion 3 large cloves garlic, peeled and minced 1 pound mix of green and yellow beans, trimmed and sliced at an angle Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste […]
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Slow cookers, first marketed under the brand name crock-pot, are often recommended for busy cooks. You put in the food, turn it on low, and seven or eight hours later you have a delicious meal. Frugal cooks prefer slow cookers too. But are slow cookers truly energy efficient, as is often claimed? Apparently, we’ve been […]
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The USDA recommends that all adults consume no more than 2300 mg. of sodium a day. That’s one measly teaspoon of salt. Middle-aged and older adults, blacks, and those with hypertension (high blood pressure) or pre-hypertension should limit salt even more, to 1500 milligrams daily. The reason? Eating too much salt puts you at higher risk for heart disease.
Salt is essential for our diets, but most of us eat much more than we need. The average daily intake in the US is 3436 milligrams. And more than half of Americans have hypertension or prehypertension.
People who often eat in restaurants, or rely on canned or processed foods, probably eat too much salt. Learning to cook with less salt may be easier than you think. My husband learned this after we had been married for a while. Foods that he used to enjoy suddenly tasted too salty. According to this article from the Center for Disease Control: “A randomized trial showed that the perceived pleasantness of highly salted food was based on dietary habit and that this perception could be changed by gradual reduction of dietary intake of sodium.”
But eating less salt doesn’t mean giving up on tasty food. Here are some ideas for home cooks who want to lower the amount of sodium in food.
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