In praise of MSG
When I first got diagnosed with this eye issue and learned that its cause could be largely traced to my high blood pressure, I took a couple of steps to address that. Even though my doctor assures me that my sodium levels are fine, I reasoned that nobody was ever worse off for trying to lower their sodium intake a bit. To that end, I added Potassium Chloride and monosodium glutamate to our next grocery order. My thinking was that MSG has about a third of the sodium content as table salt, and by combining that with KCl, I could get the same seasoning effect with lower sodium.
So far, so good.
MSG gets a lot of undeservedly bad press, but the more I have learned about it over the years, the more I have come to realize that most of the negative talking points come from the kind of people who got their information from places like Facebook. It's fine.
I felt slightly vindicated this morning when I tuned in to CBC radio while I was making coffee, and they had a segment discussing the myths and misconceptions about MSG. It's mostly harmless, and it makes things taste better. I'm glad to see the media getting onside to persuade people that it's not the bogeyman that they believe it to be.
Speaking of MSG...
It was really hot in the house yesterday, so I started bandying about for lunch ideas that wouldn't require adding more heat to the kitchen. I had a bit of pasta dough in the fridge, and we had some cocktail tomatoes that needed to be used. I tried to think of what would go well with tomatoes and gathered up a few ingredients. I decided to keep it simple.
Pictured here are tomatoes, a sweet onion, a green onion, some basil leaves, three large cloves of thinly-sliced garlic, a knob of butter, about 30ml of olive oil, some hand-cut fettuccine, tomato paste, and a mix of salt, pepper and MSG.
I cooked it all on the grill out back, using the side burner for the pasta water, and the centre burner for the cast iron pan. Fortunately, with this heat dome settled over our city we've been getting very little wind lately.
Maybe I should put the word "fortunately" in quotes since there is very little fortunate to be found in our current heatwave/drought. Well, other than this being another mosquito-free year.
Anyway, the end result was really good. I think if I was going to change one thing the next time around, I would reduce the salt by about half. By the time we seasoned it with a bit of parmesan it was a tiny bit too salty.
So far, so good.
MSG gets a lot of undeservedly bad press, but the more I have learned about it over the years, the more I have come to realize that most of the negative talking points come from the kind of people who got their information from places like Facebook. It's fine.
I felt slightly vindicated this morning when I tuned in to CBC radio while I was making coffee, and they had a segment discussing the myths and misconceptions about MSG. It's mostly harmless, and it makes things taste better. I'm glad to see the media getting onside to persuade people that it's not the bogeyman that they believe it to be.
Speaking of MSG...
It was really hot in the house yesterday, so I started bandying about for lunch ideas that wouldn't require adding more heat to the kitchen. I had a bit of pasta dough in the fridge, and we had some cocktail tomatoes that needed to be used. I tried to think of what would go well with tomatoes and gathered up a few ingredients. I decided to keep it simple.
Pictured here are tomatoes, a sweet onion, a green onion, some basil leaves, three large cloves of thinly-sliced garlic, a knob of butter, about 30ml of olive oil, some hand-cut fettuccine, tomato paste, and a mix of salt, pepper and MSG.
I cooked it all on the grill out back, using the side burner for the pasta water, and the centre burner for the cast iron pan. Fortunately, with this heat dome settled over our city we've been getting very little wind lately.
Maybe I should put the word "fortunately" in quotes since there is very little fortunate to be found in our current heatwave/drought. Well, other than this being another mosquito-free year.
Anyway, the end result was really good. I think if I was going to change one thing the next time around, I would reduce the salt by about half. By the time we seasoned it with a bit of parmesan it was a tiny bit too salty.