Love Your Heart Recipe Rally

Ah, love is officially in the air. Can’t you smell it?

Chocolate, rose petals, lavender, maybe even the citrus sweetness of a slow-roasted, blood orange, pulled pork.

Okay, maybe that last one only spells “love” to someone like me.

But whatever olfactory essences speak soft, sweet nothings of amour to your nose, eyes, and ears, one thing is true when it comes to your mouth: you can taste love when it is poured into food.

So I started thinking.

February 14th is Valentines Day.

February is also National Heart Health Month.

And February welcomed the USDA’s newest dietary recommendations, which spelled out the need for a lower sodium diet (1,500 a day) for over 50% of Americans.

That’s a lot of hearts, love, and health wrapped up in twenty-eight days.

So clearly, a cyber celebration that involves gluttonous proportions of food is in order.

As such, I’ve tapped my favorite party people and next Friday, February 18th, 2011, me and some wonderful (non-restricted) blogger friends will gather together and post heart-healthy recipes on one single day. It will be an outpouring of low sodium love and proof that cutting down on salt does not mean losing flavor. Or friends. Or a spicy relationship with your food.

The rules are as follows:

1) Participating bloggers will a choose a typically salty recipe they adore.

2) They must then recreate the recipe with as little sodium as possible – i.e. no salt (obvi), no salted butter, and no products that contain sodium content higher than 40mg per serving – or “very low sodium” according to the American Heart Association.

3) And finally, they can feel free to use resources like the USDA National Nutrition Database to see how much sodium naturally occurs in the whole ingredients they use. Just a little bit of extra education fun.

From there, you will hopefully have a new arsenal of tens, maybe even hundreds, of low sodium recipes to choose from. And for those of you who are just starting to navigate a low sodium diet, hopefully this exercise will help you feel less lost or alone. Together, we will put on our creative cooking caps and come up with new and exciting solutions to replacing that salt shaker.

So stay tuned. On Monday I’ll announce the blogger roll of particpants. And if you are a blogger (of any kind) and you want to play too, just send Sodium Girl an email – or comment below – and join the fun.

Kiss kiss. Hug hug. Heart Heart.

Chow on.