Healthy Ingredients and Which Ones Make Me Squirm – Rookie Tip

My biggies are any form of vegetable oil and “cream of” soup… YUCK!

I haven’t made tuna and noodle casserole for a long time, and I’ve been craving it. I have a killer recipe, where the “secret ingredients” are parmesan and sour cream. I have some good tuna from Vital Choice, but no chicken stock to make homemade cream of chicken soup. I really NEED to menu plan, so I roast a chicken and make the broth before I want the tuna casserole.

ohhh- was JUST thinking about it this week- I wanted to make strawberry jam… and realized that Certo’s pectin REQUIRED so much refined sugar! blegh. WHITE SUGAR.
Although I can’t seem to find any alternatives to pectin-based agents for jam locally, and I can’t replace the sugar with honey (boo), I’ll probably try to buy fair trade organic cane sugar (still processed, but better than refined white sugar and minus the slave labour and pesticides).

I AM excited about my harvest! I’m glad to hear that it just keeps getting better

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We’ve got a boatload of food allergies and intolerances in our house, we also decided a couple of years ago to eliminate anything with high fructose corn syrup from our lives – so that cut out a bunch of stuff! I avoid HFCS and carbination both because they inhibit calcium absorption – and have bone demineralization issues that I must be consciencious of.

I, too, shudder at canned soups. They are just WRONG in my book. It is just so easy to throw together a roux and make your own – I can’t imagine now not doing just that for anything that called for a cream of!

I think you’re right – it’s the jumping in point where you panic a little and wonder if you’ll ever get your footing. Now it’s just so natural to us that we hardly even consider the cost (and honestly, it’s about a convenience cost – not a $$ cost – it works out cheaper more often than not for us to be choosy!).

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I also try to avoid any processed product with “milk powder” in it. It’s surprising how many brands of sour cream will use it, even organic ones. Besides not being a real food, it’s terrible for your heart. I always shudder when people recommend using it as a way to stretch the budget in baking.

Alyss – sorry, *snort* “better end of the Spectrum”… anyway… I have my moments with the “healthy” “vegan” Spectrum spread I see ending up on tables all around me. (Ahh… it’s late, I’m tired. I’m seeing irony everywhere.)

ANYWAY… My pet peeve is “natural flavorings” and “modified starches”… they are SO sneaky! It’s all MSG, just labeled differently. Nasty buggers.

Oh, and to EcoYogini, KP, and Bonnie – Pomona Universal Pectin DOES work with very low sugar/honey. BeAuTiFulLy… Just put up a ton of berry and apricot jam using it, and it worked wonderfully. (I used the honey with the apricots, and, like, 1 CUP of sugar for a full batch of berries. Amazing. Seriously.)

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I am in Philadelphia, PA until Sunday (LLL EUS Conference) and wanted to chime in. Before I left, I made a pork chop meal in my slow cooker. One of the main ingredients was a reduced fat cream of chicken soup. Well, I didn’t have it in my pantry. So, I made a cream sauce with butter, flour, chicken stock, and mushrooms. It turned out delicious.
So, there are ways around that stuff, you just need to figure out what you want to do and do it.

Two toe-curler ingredients that we see quite often in our local southern cookbooks – Cool Whip and boxes of pudding! My daughter’s favorite birthday cake used to be a chocolate eclair cake – very easy to make with all boxed ingredients including the two mentioned above (we didn’t know better then!). We began to make the switch last year to a real food diet, but I decided to make it for her just once more on her birthday. The only milk I had was our wonderful raw milk, so I mixed it into the pudding, then added the cool whip. I could not believe it when I tasted it – it tasted like soap! I thought I had either forgotten to rinse the dish or spilled some detergent into the bowl, but when I experimented some more I realized that it was the combination of cool whip and raw milk! I guess that shows us what is really in Cool Whip. Needless to say, I haven’t bought it since:)

Kelly, do you know if a soy sauce is fermented if it says “naturally brewed” on the bottle (Kikkoman is what I bought hoping that was the case!)? The ingredients are better than the cheap stuff – no hydrolyzed soy or HFCS – but I guess I don’t know if it’s fermented for sure…any help?

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Margerine!!! (grrr). Because I keep kosher, I see this a lot (can’t eat lard, and can’t eat butter with meat). Most Jews who keep kosher REALLY jumped on the margerine bandwagon (no help from loads of marketing to them of course). What’s wrong with good old chicken fat? (well, I guess the fact that chickens don’t have enough fat…. lol, always feeling short on natural schmaltz).

Re: soy sauce. I buy san-j tamari and shoyu (depending on price. I like the tamari slightly better, but they’re both fine, and money saved is money earned). Its on the WAPF shopping guide as good (fermented but pastureized so you don’t get any good bacteria from it). The raw ones are hard to find though.

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Wow, Kelly, I could have written this post, but I’m glad you did. Sounds like my kitchen and pantry, for sure! Must have my pastured eggs, meat, and lard. Spending more on fresh ingredients is important and as Michael Pollan says in FRESH: The movie, “Cheap food is an illusiion” paid for with tax subsidies, environmental damage, and poor health.” Love your blog!

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I wanted to mention that I make my own butter from organic, grass-fed, vat pasturized cream (just cream, nothing else added.) It’s $5.15 for a quart and I it seem to make quite a bit – 1lb perhaps. I made it for the first time last week and I didn’t get all the buttermilk out so some it spoiled because I left it on my counter. I’ll have to try and get all the buttermilk out next time. It was super easy to do. I just blended it in my blender until it was butter. It saved me plenty since Kerrygold butter is $4.99 for 8 ounces.

I wonder what others do to save money and still eat nutrient dense foods. I’m sure it’s in the archives. I’ll look there…

Great information. Thanks for a very comprehensive list.

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Rebecca K,

I use Ohsawa Organic Nama Shoya unpasteurzed soy sauce. This is the only unpasteurized soy sauce I’ve found. I’ve been to three different Asian markets and two health food store. It is expensive. I paid $7 for 10 ounces. I have it for months though. I bought mine at a health food store but I think you can order it online but then you pay for shipping and handling.

Tina

Tina

Rebecca K,

I don’t have an answer for you about gelatin but the yogurt I make (from a cultures for health starter) is pretty thin and I like mine really thick so I just drain it. I line a strainer with a piece of cotton (I cut up on old tea towel) and let it sit for a few hours. It ends up as a nice creamy yogurt, plus I get whey left over.

MacKenzie

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What to do with your box of powdered milk that you don’t want to consume: Mix with baking powder and sprinkle on soil around tomato plants = blight and bug defender! Gelatin is made from cow hooves and hides (straight from my uncle in the food business), so if you gotta thicken, that has to be “natural”, yeah?

Kelly,

Great, great list! Looks like my pantry too.

Have you tried Bragg’s Liquid Aminos in place of soy sauce? Very good stuff! We’ve been using it for a few years now. My mom has used it for several years, probably like 15 or 20 or longer.

It’s very light tasting, not heavy like many soy sauces and contains 16 naturally occurring amino acids, has no trans fats, nothing artificial, no alcohol, chemicals or colorings, certified non-GMO, and no cholesterol. It has a small bit of natural salts, 310 mg of protein and 100 mg of carbs. That’s it.