Showing You How To Give Up Sodium Without Giving Up Your Life
About Me
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Update - 08/27/2009
I just read what this page said and realized that it had been a long time since I'd updated it and a REALLY long time since I wrote it. The 4 1/2 years that I said had passed since I was diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure has become ten. The newsletter is now in it's ninth year. And I have two books out and two more on the way. But all in all, most of what I said is still true. I guess that's good news. |
So, you ask, who is this Dick Logue and what in the world does he think he's doing here? Fair enough, let me tell you a little about myself. To start with, I'm just an ordinary guy, working at an information technology job and spending a lot of my "free" time here online. I live on a little farm in the woods of southern Maryland, about 30 miles south of Washington DC. Here with me are my wife of 29 years, Ginger, two of our three children, and an assortment of animals, most of which found us when we weren't looking. |
Our place in the woods |
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I've enjoyed cooking most of my life ... I guess I started in seriously about the time my mother went back to work when I was 12 or so. Simple stuff like burgers and hot dogs and spaghetti. But the interest stayed. After I married Ginger, we got pretty involved in some food related stuff ... growing veggies in our garden, making bread and other baked goods, canning stuff ... that kind of thing. She always said that my cooking was an outgrowth of the time I spent in college as a chemistry major, and she might be right. I am sort of into the pinch of this and that and never mind the measuring spoons method of creating. We moved out here in the woods about 9 years ago ... a fairly long commute, but you can see the stars at night. And I continued cooking a large portion of the time since my job usually allowed me to be home before her's did. |
Looking across the pond to the barn |
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Then in 1999 a cough that wouldn't go away became a diagnosis of congestive heart failure. Rather scary, as you can imagine. Fortunately, I'm now at a point where I really don't restrict what I do very much, thanks to a combination of medication and diet. But one of the first, and biggest, things I had to deal with was the doctor's insistence that I follow a low sodium diet ... 1200 mg a day more or less. So I learned all kinds of new cooking things. I researched where to get low sodium substitutes for the things that I couldn't have any more, bought cookbooks, and basically re-did my whole diet. I now make from scratch a number of things I had either given up making before or never even tried ... the list includes things like barbecue sauce, tomato sauce, mustard, salad dressings, soup (yes, I make my own "condensed cream of whatever" soup for recipes), shake and bake ... in short, almost anything that I used to buy conveniently in a box or can. |
Me at the computer |
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And along the way I've learned some things ... what works and what doesn't ... what books to trust ... what stores carry what products ... what items have hidden sodium in them. I've been able to track down some sources for low sodium versions of a lot of the products I was making from scratch. They are out there, you just need to know where to look. So I thought it might be worthwhile to share some of these things so others don't have to learn them all the hard way. A few things have changed over time. I'm more aware of my cholesterol and blood sugar than I was at first, since both of those figures have been creeping up over the years. The long time thought about writing a book came true when a publishing company actually contacted me. And they must have liked it, because there are now two books and two more on the way. You can find out about them on the Books page. But the basic purpose of the site, to share information with people who need it, has remained the same since the beginning. Enjoy. |
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Contact Information
Dick Logue, Webmaster |