Category Archives: low sodium

Shimeji Mushrooms + Soba Noodles : Chillyyyyyy

Trying this out for the first time : shimeji mushrooms and making a chilled soba noodle dish.

Soba Noodles with Shimeji Mushrooms

Soba noodles boiled separately. The Shimeji mushrooms were also boiled but with some soy sauce and mirin sauce with leeks added in much later just to make it soft a bit. Then mix together with chopped dill, mizuna and leek. Added in some more mirin sauce and a wee bit of soy sauce.

Turns out that shimeji mushrooms aren’t so strong in taste compared to other types of mushrooms. Which was a good thing as I don’t quite like strong flavoured shrooms too much.

Packed this as a small carbo dish for lunch usually. What you see there is enough for 3 lunches. A picture of it packed in the bento box will be put up once I grab it from my handphone. ^.^

Novelty Flower Salad

Salad : Novelty Flower Salad

I saw some edible flowers in a pack at Cold Storage, Green Heights Mall, Kuching, Sarawak. So bought a pack and made a salad. This is what’s inside that salad. Certainly tasted better than what I had expected although hopefully the flowers are ok to be eaten. These flowers are grown in Genting and surprisingly, came out tasting really well. The only flowers that I recognized were pansies and chrysanthemums. The problem with flowers in salad is that they should be added in last as the petals started peeling off after mixing. Found that out the hard way.

-celery
-carrot
-tomato
-pickled pear/mango? Not sure. Stole it from my Uncle’s stash in the fridge
-edible flowers that included pansies, posies and chrysanthemum
-Dill
-Lemon juice
-Pepper
-Nutmeg powder (seems to make a lot of difference)
-Raisins

: : Bento ~ Playing around with new toys : :

bento9_1

I had new cutters. 🙂

bento_cutter

The faces were cut using the red cutter in the picture above (left). Bought them from Bentomarket.com. And yes, it’s just as expensive in Japan or US as the pricetag you see there.

One thing I realised about using those cutters is that sometimes the vegetables will crack a bit. The cooked carrots actually did crack a bit although I think it was probably due to it being too thick a slice. Need to cut it smaller. Those smilie faces will go a long way in decorating salads though. Hee hee hee!

: : Malaysian-made Food : :

This is a bit of thinking post because I have been a bit stumped at times. It’s one of those “guilt-trip” feelings where after watching a TV commercial on “Buy Malaysian Products”, I actually don’t do it much when it comes to food.

Oh, I eat the raw food that are grown locally i.e. vegetables, fruits, meat and fish. It’s just that majority of the seasonings or processed food, I’ve bought imported stuff. And all for one reason : reduced salt or no-salt labelling. Malaysian seasonings or processed food will either have no labels about sodium content or they would put a generic one of “Less than 2,400 mg” (equivalent to 1 teaspoon).

A good example is the Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. The one that is packaged in Malaysia doesn’t have the sodium content. However, the one imported in from the US does. So I bought the one in the US and not the Malaysian one.

A lot of people have also advocated that sea salt is also good because it has reduced sodium in it. Unfortunately, for a person who has a blood pressure condition, any salt intake is enough to get the heart beating. It also isn’t comforting to know that my Uncle Doctor mentioned that Norvasc will make my heart palpitate a bit more anyways. Aiya…

The difficulty about going on such a strict diet was the amount of hearsay that I hear from people. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Relax a bit. Little do they know that I eat enough now to be satisfied. Plus, because my diet is so clean now that taking outside food will give me discomfort. I either have a lot of gas in my stomach causing me to burp a lot or I get heartburn. I get the feeling that friends are trying to tell me to go easier to comfort themselves that they couldn’t do it. Haha! Ah well.

The one thing that is motivating me from going back to bad habits is my skin, to be honest. It’s starting to clear up a lot and if I ever went back to eating uncontrollably, the reddish bits are going to come back. Now that’s something I do not want to happen.

Also, Malaysian-made seasoning in the rare occasions, will give me allergic reactions. So, I tend to keep away from things like Chilli Boh which I suspect has a lot of artificial vinegar/acids inside it or there’s some bizarre chemical in there that’s giving me problems.

In any case, I hope one day that there will be a Malaysian Food Company who is like Del Monte. They took a very strong stand of reducing salt in their products that their competitors just loses out. Whether it’s can products or sauces, it’s reduced. They didn’t always promote their products as reduced salt but when you compare the products side-by-side, they use less.

Now, just to end this post. The number of people who I meet are now surprisingly starting to eat more healthily. It was an eye-opener for me as they came up to me to either say it worked for them or they are enjoying their meals more. So there is some truth at least in this clean diet business.

Anyway, I have had my cheat meal this week already. Lunch with Dad at Sushi King and an ais kacang dessert. Which resulted in me not being able to sleep well at night. Also, a bowl of Sarawak Laksa for lunch yesterday with Granny. So yes, I have these cheat meals but they are rare and in-between. I compensate it later with more veggie and no-carb meals later on. 🙂 It balances out pretty well, if you ask me. 🙂 But I can’t do this for long. 🙂

I’m off the whole week so posting up stuff on the blog again. Next week is back to work so less time to blog.

: : Breakfast salads : :

I find that in order to eat raw salad, I had to chop up the veggies into small pieces so that it goes down better.

The other thing that I find that I had to do was not include lettuce so much. Can’t stand the taste of it too much.

And finally, the salad needs to have a minimum of 4 different ingredients so that I get an interesting flavour.

Breakfast : SALAD again!

This was an experiment with feta cheese. In it, I had fresh cherries, shallots (small onions), 1 glove of garlic (minced), celery, carrot and onion. The size of the container was 200 ml and surprisingly, that amount is enough to last me until lunch time. Not bad for a person who used to have huge carb breakfast meals.

More pics another day. Cheerio!