1000 Island Dressing

This week I'm making over my lettuce salad and definitely couldn't do that completely without addressing the salad dressing.  Thousand island dressing is the dressing I grew up on.  I have fond memories of going to Golden Corral on car trips and making myself a huge salad topped with chopped eggs, ham, turkey, bacon bits and lots of thousand island dressing.  Looking at that list, I think I might be the only person who can turn a lettuce salad into a full serving of protein!

As I researched different dressings, it became pretty obvious that one of the easier dressingsto make from scratch would be thousand island.  I finally settled on this recipe from allrecipes.com.  It only had three ingredients:  mayonaise, chili sauce, and pickle relish.  The recipe got great reviews.  It seemed like a no brainer-until I went to the store to get chili sauce.

I should've known better than to think that I could walk into the grocery store, pick up a bottle of chili sauce and walk out.  That would've been entirely too easy.  My store of choice had 4 different kinds of chili sauce, and all of them had ingredients that I'm trying not to buy.  Most notable among them are high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn syrup and corn syrup solids, and partially hydrogenated anything.  So, that was a bust, although I did pick up some organic cornstarch that will pop up in a post later on.

At home, it was back to allrecipes.com to find a recipe for chili sauce.  After looking at several, I chose this one.  It was simple enough to whip up, but I found myself with a real problem.  I don't eat chili sauce.  I can't recollect a time when I did.  That makes it very difficult to taste something and know if it's "right."  I plodded on and used it in the dressing recipe.  The results were so-so.  I have discovered that I don't really like mayonaise in a lot of things, and I could pick out the mayo taste right off-not good.  This is where the tinkering begins.  I added more chili sauce, a bit more vinegar and a little lemon juice.  It is still sweeter and had less zip than my $.99 bottle from Aldi's, but it will do.  Once I have used this up, I think I will try the second runner up and see if I like that one better.  It didn't get chosen originally because it calls for ketchup and my ketchup right now still has HFCS in it.  Since my goal is to get more natural ingredients, using the ketchup would have been counter productive.  But, I think I'll still make it with my ketchup and see how it is.  Then I can keep the recipe for when I buy better ketchup.

Sorry I took so long posting this.  I wrote my post on a different computer than where the picture was, so I thought I'd wait and put the pic on before posting-then I forgot.  Oops!  Tomorrow I'm going to try a Caesar dressing and maybe a Ranch one too (we're having guests that like ranch).

Week 1: Say NO to soda!

Happy New Years!  I am officially starting my journey tomorrow and will make a new change starting each Monday throughout 2011, starting with soda.  This is a no-brainer for most healthy people, but I've been clinging to my soda addiction for a long time.  I have definitely cut back in the past year.  But, even as recently as 6 months ago, I was still drinking 2-3 cans per day.  Last month I had cut that back to a glass every few days, and thought I had my habit licked.  I found out this weekend, when I spent Christmas at my parents' house, that I drank soda on a regular basis.  I've probably consumed a 2 liter bottle over the past couple of days.  It's obvious to me that my habit is still just that, a habit-one that I need to break.  I don't think I am going to be one of those people that can have one here and there.  I am going to have to quit cold turkey and stick to it!

Most of us know the reasons that drinking soda is not a healthy choice, but while I was researching, I found a couple things I didn't know.  Obviously, soda is full of empty calories.  I once had a friend tell me that if I quit eating Tootsie Rolls and drinking Dr. Pepper that I would lose 25 pounds.  She was probably on to something.  A 12 ounce can of Dr. Pepper (my drink of choice) contains 150 calories, and 40.5 grams of sugar.  That's over 9.5 teaspoons of sugar!  And, in the past, I would regularly drink 4 cans a day.  Hello... 38 teaspoons of sugar.  Just for the record, that's a little more than 3/4 of a cup.  Multiply that by 365 days in a year, and it ends up being just shy of 290 cups of sugar.  Wow!  If that alone isn't enough to make a person quit, I don't know what is!  But wait, here's more.

This is the ingredient list as listed on the Dr. Pepper website.

CARBONATED WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CARAMEL COLOR, PHOSPHORIC ACID, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL FLAVORS, SODIUM BENZOATE (PRESERVATIVE), CAFFEINE.

High fructose corn syrup (which I will go into later)
Phosphoric acid (it's acid-can that be good for you?)
Artifical flavor (ie. chemicals)
Sodium Benzoate (it even says it is a preservative-do you seriously need to preserve your drink?)
Caffeine (I don't have a problem with caffeine itself, but at my 4 cans a day rate, I don't think that is necessary.)

I've also read other articles regarding decay of tooth enamel and osteoporosis linked to soda.

Soda should not be the go-to drink in a healthy lifestyle.  I am sure that there are many people out there who could have a glass here and there and be just fine, and if I could do it, I would.  It has become obvious to me that I am not one of those people.  From here on out, I'm choosing to say NO to soda.  Someone might want to check on me in a few days to make sure that I haven't gone into severe withdrawl!  :)

Have you given up soda for good?  Was it difficult?