Adding Flavor Without Fat and Salt

As a heart failure patient, I have found that staying compliant with the sodium restrictions helps manage my symptoms. Also, as someone with 6 stents, my interventional cardiologist told me to get as close to vegan as I can. Neither of these directives are easy!

Also, as someone with fatigue issues who also enjoyed food, trying to make food taste good when you cannot turn to easy flavorings of salt and saturated fat (like butter, bacon, bacon grease, sour cream, mayonnaise, etc.) is challenging. I want to share something I have found that helps, in case it might help you as well.

Finding flavors

One things I have found that helps easily bring flavor to my food is being creative with flavored olive oil and vinegars and experimenting with various combinations.

Personally, I live in the Metro Detroit area. There are several stores around us that specialize in tea and spices, and they have a bunch of flavored olive oil and vinegars. For instance, this weekend, I bought butter flavored olive oil, bacon flavored olive oil, and Tuscan flavored olive oil, in addition to a caramelized onion dark balsamic vinaigrette. This particular specialty store has about 30 olive oils and 20 vinegars (including balsamic and white vinegars), so there are SO MANY options! You can probably even find a lot of specialty stores online that will ship to you.

Some of my favorite ways to add flavor to food

So what to do with all of that? A few of my favorite ways to use my oils and vinegars to add flavor are as follows:

1. The obvious choice is salad dressings. Personally, I hate buying premade salad dressings because they are usually loaded with salt, use cheap (and not heart healthy) canola oil, are expensive, and are easy to make at home in large batches. Using my purchases, I am excited to try a salad dressing using Tuscan olive oil, and I have used a roasted California garlic olive oil in the past to make a terrific Greek salad dressing. The mixture of different oils to different vinegars can help you get really creative to find a combination that you particularly enjoy.
2. You can also use the oils to roast veggies or meat. For instance, I have used Harissa olive oil when roasting carrots and the sweet and spicy (Harissa was spicy) is terrific.
3. The oils and vinegars can also make terrific marinades for meat!
4. Oils and vinegars also make great dipping sauce for bread - but watch out for sodium content in bread!
5. Olive oil is used in a number of popular dips like hummus, bruschetta, spinach dip, which can be dipped with veggies instead of bread. I also use olive oil to make a great green sauce that I put on breakfast tacos using olive oil, avocado, cilantro and lime.
6. I also found that olive oil and vinegar is a great way to jazz up your fall soups without adding salt! Canned soup is another premade product that, I have found at least, has a lot of sodium, so when I crave soup I have to make it myself or go without. So, when I make it, it tends to be in large batches, and it's nice to have different easy ways to change the flavor so it doesn't get boring.

Heart failure diets don't have to be bland

Think about this - the tongue can taste salty, bitter, sour, umami, and sweet. So, if you cut out salt, there are actually other flavor profiles that you can highlight so your food doesn't taste bland.

Has anyone else tried experimenting with olive oils and vinegars, and if so what do you think?