RDtipoftheday's Gift Guide for your Chef, Baker, or Foodie Friends: Under $10

The Christmas season can be hurried and rushed. Sometimes, we lose focus on what's important. This season should be a time to be thankful and remember our foundation for hope.

If you are like me, I sometimes take on too much, get too busy, and miss the importance of this season. What I'd like to do is help free up some of your time. Be a helping hand. Over the next few days, I'm sharing some gift guides for your favorite chef, baker, or foodie friend. My hope is that these gift lists will be a time saver. You can find great gifts for your family and friends. And, have more time to focus on the season. Merry Christmas!

 

Cooking Tools 
These make a great gift. You can choose from silicone, wood, or nonstick. Some of my favorites come from William Sonoma and Crate & Barrel.

Kitchen Towels

I LOVE kitchen towels. It seems like you can never have too many. I love the size and absorbency of the towels I recently got from Crate & Barrel. They make a great gift and really cute gift wrap.

Striped Dish Towel $5.95

Tomato Dish Towel $5.95

Steamer
I love this steamer basket from World Market.  It is stainless steel and turns any pot into a steamer. It works great steaming vegetables. This is a great gift for someone working on eating healthier or someone with a small kitchen. This steamer is compact and under $5!  

Measuring Spoons

Every chef and baker needs measuring cups and spoons. Why not get cute ones? Anthropologie has really cute sets of cups and spoons. I also love my stainless steel measuring spoons from William Sonoma.

 

Special Ingredients

Some spices and herbs are expensive, but they can make a great gift. I like gifting pure vanilla extract or vanilla beans, homemade spice blends, or herb plants make great gifts. Considering gifting a rosemary, basil, lavender, or thyme plant for your favorite foodie.

4 ounces Vanilla Extract; Image via Wikepedia

Vanilla Beans

Please note this is not a sponsored post. I'm simply wanted to share some of my favorite tools and products with you to save you time and focus on having a Merry Christmas.

For more recipes, encouragement, and tips for healthy eating, follow me on Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. 

If you liked this post, you may enjoy:

Top 10 Kitchen Tools You Need

Dietary Sodium and Heart Health: 10 Tips to Reduce Your Salt Intake

February is American Heart Health Month, so we are looking at lifestyle changes you can make to be more heart healthy.

So, how can you be heart healthy? 
- Eat a Healthy Diet
- Be Physically Active
- Check in with Your Doctor

Today we are focusing on healthy dietary choices to be more heart healthy. A diet low in sodium can help keep your heart healthy. High sodium diets are linked to many health consequences including: heart failure, enlarged heart muscle, kidney disease, kidney stones, osteoporosis, and stroke.

So where does sodium come from?
Most of our dietary sodium comes from table salt, which is sodium chloride. We get sodium in processed foods where it is added to increase shelf-life and enhance food's taste. Foods high in sodium include: cheese, condiments, deli meats, pizza, processed foods, soy sauce, and many more. We also add salt when cooking or eating foods. And, we get sodium from many foods consumed when we eat out. Many restaurants or "fast foods" are high in dietary sodium.

How much sodium should I consume?
The American Heart Association recommends reducing dietary sodium intake to 1,500 milligrams per day to promote heart health. The average American usually eats 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day. That's more than double what the AHA recommends! For reference, there are ~2,300 milligrams of sodium in 1 teaspoon of salt.

How can I reduce my sodium intake?
1) Choose low sodium foods

• Read the Nutrition Facts Labels when grocery shopping. Try to find things < or = 140 milligrams of sodium per serving. This will help keep your dietary sodium intake from processed foods low.
• Look for lower sodium substitutes. Many products offer reduced sodium alternatives. For example, most canned vegetables and soups have a lower sodium alternative.
• Choose food naturally low in sodium. Fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables are naturally low in sodium. Canned fruits and vegetables usually contain sodium. You can drain the liquid and rinse canned foods until not foamy (see picture). This will greatly decrease the sodium. 
• Eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are naturally low in sodium, and eating fruits and vegetables has many health benefits. The DASH diet, which is an acronym for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, is low in sodium, high in potassium which is a mineral naturally present in many fruits and vegetables, and has been shown to decrease blood pressure (aka hypertension).

2) Add flavor without adding salt

• A lot of our dietary sodium is added while cooking. So, try reduce the amount of salt you add when cooking. 
• You can flavor foods with a salt substitute. Salt substitutes are made from potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride (table salt). Note: Some medications or disease require a low potassium diet, so check with your RD or MD before starting a salt substitute.
• Use herbs and spices while cooking. Salt adds flavor, so if we decrease salt we need to increase flavor with something else. For example, try using garlic powder or fresh garlic instead of garlic salt when cooking. You still get the garlic flavor but without the salt!
• Use aromatic vegetables to add flavor. I'm from Louisiana, and most Cajun or Creole recipes start with adding onion, bell pepper, and celery. Why? Because these three aromatic vegetables add flavor!

I hope these ten tips will help you reduce your salt and dietary sodium intake. Please check with your RD or MD before starting a new diet. Some medications and medical conditions require regulation of dietary sodium intake.

If you have a family history of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or heart attack (myocardial infarctions), please check in with your doctor to get a physical. Tell your doctor your family history of heart disease, your concerns for your health, and ask about what screening you should do.

We will go through each of the dietary and lifestyle topics this week to look more in depth on how you can be heart healthy. Stay tuned.

For more recipes, encouragement, and tips for healthy eating, follow me on Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter . You can subscribe to this blog, RDtipoftheday.blogspot.com, through BlogLovin.

A Tale of Two Spices: Banana Bread and Mace

It amazes me how much I continue to learn about cooking, baking, and nutrition. For example, it is amazing how many spices there are from all-spice to za'atar? There are spices that define cooking from the North, East coast, West Coast, and of course from my beloved Southern states of the USA.

One of the new recipe books that I received for Christmas included a recipe for banana bread and mace. What?!? I immediately thought of the defense spray mace, but this is different. Mace inside the defensive spray is a concentration of a substance from hot chili peppers. Mace that is used in cooking is actually kin to nutmeg.

Nutmeg is a brown spice. When whole, it is an oval-shaped pit. Nutmeg can be found dried or whole. It is a warm spice that pairs well with cinnamon and is used most often in baking. It is also used in some savory cooking. For example, many of the recipes I have for béchamel sauce (aka white sauce) calls for a little bit of ground nutmeg.

Mace comes from the same plant as nutmeg. Mace is bright red and actually surrounds nutmeg when both are on the nutmeg tree.  Mace is more red than nutmeg. The taste of mace is more concentrated and peppery in my opinion.

I hope you've learned a little something today in "RD school" about spice and baking. For more recipes, encouragement, and tips for healthy eating, follow me, RDtipoftheday, on Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You can subscribe to this blog, RDtipoftheday.blogspot.com, through BlogLovin.

Cooking with Spice

One of my first baking memories was with my grandmother. She always made brownies and pancakes when I visited. I've always had a sweet tooth and an interest in science. So, baking was always something that intrigued me. How can you take something like flour, eggs, sugar, and oil that no one would eat together like that and turn it into something delicious like pancake?

It seemed like my mom was always cooking. When I was growing up, I liked to watch her cook especially when she was making one of my favorite meals. She was also patient to let me "help" her cook, which I'm assuming slowed her down a bit. In my childhood, I did learn how to make hamburgers, mashed potatoes, meatloaf, and green bean bundles for the holidays.

I became really interested in cooking in high school. I new that I would go off to college, so I needed to learn to cook to survive on a college budget. In my 20's, I had a roommate and best friend that was not picky at all. She introduced me to new foods, restaurants, and recipes. I took a few cooking courses in my undergraduate Dietetic programs. My freshman year of college, I was living in a dorm without a kitchen. When I moved to a condo off campus my sophomore year, I was happy to have a kitchen where I could create. Cooking has always been a stress-reliever and a creative outlet for me.

This year, I received many cooking-related gifts. I invested in some cookbooks. These cookbooks have renewed my interest in cooking and challenged my to try new things. Some of these new things include spices. Since I grew up in Louisiana, I am familiar with garlic, cayenne, and Louisiana spices. These new cookbooks gave introduced me to a ton of new recipes and will provide many opportunities for learning, tasting, and trying new things. Some of the new things include trying new flavors and spices. I bought several new herbs and spices to cook with: ginger, crystallized ginger, sage, cardamom, thyme, and mace. Stay tuned as I try new recipes, new spices, and kitchen tools. I'll share some recipes and results. To follow my journey to cook 50 new recipes in 2015, search #50RDrecipes, #NYNR, or #NewYearNewRecipes.

I hope that you learn a little something from the blog. For more information, recipes, and tips and tricks for healthy eating, follow RDtipoftheday on on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and you can subscribe to this blog, RDtipoftheday.blogspot.com, through BlogLovin.