One thing you can put on a baked potato is guacamole. I make it with avocado (of course), fresh cilantro, lime juice and Mrs. Dash salt-free grill seasoning (which is mainly pepper and garlic and a little red pepper flake, so you can make your own just as easily).
It has no salt. It has no sugar. It has some fat, yes, avocadoes have fat, but it is monounsaturated fat. Guacamole, as we all know, is a garnish. So you don't eat scads of it.
You can also make salsa the exact same way but with roasted corn and tomato chunks instead of avocado. That is even better - there's no fat in it. Plus tomatoes have lycopene. It's a happy marriage of flavors. I'm a big fan of Mex food so I feel I've gotta have it. I find the fresh cilantro and lime juice make a huge difference.
And, you can eat it (either salsa or guac) on salads or with chicken or fish. Tortillas aren't required, hence there are options.
Soup: I make chicken soup almost every week these days. I make it with matzoh balls because we both like them. Matzoh balls are just egg, a little salt, olive oil and matzoh meal, smooshed together, made into a ball and dropped into the boiling soup. If you want to knock out all of the cholesterol and virtually all of the fat, just use the egg whites or use egg substitute. Chicken soup, for us, is cooked leftover chicken, often stuff that I made months ago and froze. I cook chicken with just some garlic and paprika -- I don't use salt when cooking it, so it's salt-free. But it isn't flavor-free. I keep the stock and the pan drippings frozen and just toss some stock in with every pot of soup. It makes an enormous difference re flavor. I also throw in whatever veggies I have on hand and that, plus a salad, is dinner.
I also love cheese but it has salt so it's not a food you can just eat and eat. Instead, one thing I do is use it as a topping for salad. We eat salads every night, and we find that the thing that keeps them from getting dull is having just a little cheese on them. RP likes feta and I like gorgonzola. It comes crumbled in the supermarket and you use maybe a teaspoon for every bowl of salad. Then everything else, except maybe for a couple of croutons, is vegetables. It is a little salt and fat but it makes it easier to get the good stuff eaten. I consider it to be a very reasonable tradeoff.
Pasta -- good but a lot of people lard it up with butter or oil. If you must use oil, make it olive oil, which is far better for you. And try a more vegetable-based sauce. Right now, I have zucchini, mushrooms and canned tomatoes on hand. That will be tonight's pasta sauce. I will probably toss in some garlic and basil or oregano and that's the sauce. Canned tomatoes do have a little salt, so I buy low or no sodium and don't salt the sauce. But canned tomatoes have more lycopene than fresh. Again, it's a tradeoff but I consider it to be a reasonable one.
Very often, I've found, out and out banning of a food means you just want it more. And, it's often not feasible, as we live in a society of great abundance and food from all over the world is available all the time. Hence it seems better and a lot more manageable to just limit or tradeoff rather than ban. No one feels deprived and everyone gets what they need.
