Manjula's Kitchen

Manjula's wonderful Indian vegetarian cookery site is full of inspiration for great home-cooked food. One section I really like is the breads; it's so easy to spend time making a low sodium curry from scratch, but then mess up the meal by eating it with salty supermarket naans.

Making fresh Indian breads is really easy - especially the roti, which I can now knock up in about 10 minutes, having watched the easy step-by-step video on Manjula's site, and a bit of trial-and-error. I don't have a US cup measure, but use a little rammekin instead. Of course I leave out the salt :-), and they are fine without, but I found some black onion seeds at the market which are great for making salt-free naans more interesting.

Salt in Pasta Sauces

No shock here, as shop-bought pasta sauces are revealed to be high in salt. You can read the full report, from CASH, here. Worst of the lot was Jamie Oliver's range, with 5.3g salt per portion for his Spicy Olive, Garlic and Tomato sauce (no excuse for all that salt if it's spicy!). There are a couple of good Weight Watchers options there though, and it's worth noting that, although the pestos were generally high in salt per 100g, you would of course eat far less of it per serving than a sauce.

Pret a Manger - Update

Just been onto the Pret website to get some details so I can post some of the lower sodium sandwiches at Pret for my other half, for the days I don't manage to do him a packed lunch!

Egg Mayo & Bacon Breakfast Baguette 0.4445 g sodium per pack (this is lower than the egg & tomato version)
Posh Cheddar & Pickle Baguette 0.5048 g sodium per pack
Mature cheddar & pickle sandwiches 0.5906 g sodium per pack

500 Low Sodium Recipes

"500 Low Sodium recipes" is a book that I have heard of before, but hesitated to buy it as it's written by an American author, and I have often found that online recipes from the US contain ingredients not available here. However I found an extract available online, for free, today and it's really very good, so I have ordered a copy from eBay.

You can find the extract, which is 60 pages long, on Google Books here - there's a very readable introduction, and pages of salt-free seasoning mixes, sauces and marinades.