Last year I started having issues with high blood pressure. I’m guessing it’s mostly related to work stress, but since I’m not quitting my job I had to look into other ways to try and bring it down. I’m already a healthy weight, I don’t smoke, I already can’t drink for other medical reasons, and I exercise everyday. That pretty much leaves reducing my sodium intake as the only thing to try.

If you would have asked me before I started paying attention I would have assumed my sodium intake wasn’t all that bad. I eat fairly healthy meals most of the time and we do cook at home a decent amount. Turns out that there is a lot of hidden sodium in things I never would have thought about. Cereal, bread, even milk (this was the most surprising to me) all have more sodium than you might think. Plus the things we add to our from scratch meals (essentially sauces and marinades) are all full of sodium if you don’t pay very careful attention to buying the few low sodium products on the market.

In order to adjust what we were eating to fit within my new sodium intake plan I needed to find new recipes. My husband is a vegetarian, which added an additional wrinkle. We had to find low-sodium, vegetarian recipes to cook. In trying to Google recipes I stumbled across the Dr. Gourmet website. There’s a whole section of recipes for low-sodium, vegetarian diets. There’s a lot of other recipes there too, but I can only speak to the ones from this section of the site.

We’ve cooked a lot of the recipes from the site over the past few months, and they’ve been great. There’s only been one that I haven’t liked and that I suspect is moreso because I thought it was a good idea to make spinach alfredo even though I don’t generally like alfredo sauce. The recipes are generally easy. They don’t require any ridiculous ingredients, and many of them take about 30 minutes which is about how much time I want to spend cooking dinner after I get home from work. I’ve tried a couple that take longer than that on weekends when I have more time. This website has been a real lifesaver. I would definitely recommend it if you’re looking for some tasty, healthy recipes.