Honey Grilled Chicken Breasts

photo source

This recipe comes from Spark People and was pretty tasty.

Marinade:

1/4 C orange juice (this called for fresh, I used Florida's Natural that comes in a carton)

3 T honey

2 T fresh lemon juice (I did use fresh this time)

2 T soy sauce (I used low sodium because of my water retention issues)

1 T peeled and minced fresh ginger (I used 1/8 t ground ginger)

1 T minced garlic

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste (threw in some ground pepper only)

stir above ingredients together and marinate 6 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves

Grill until done

What I liked:

I am not going to lie, it is an adjustment to get used to the lack of salt, but this recipe was tasty even without it.  Of course there was some sodium provided by the soy sauce; as I posted earlier, even low sodium soy sauce is loaded with sodium.

Because there is no oil in this marinade, there was no flare up on the grill, and the chicken browned nicely.

Enough juice came off the chicken that it helped flavor the rice that I served with it.

About the rice and getting used to low/no sodium:

I thought I would beat salt at it's own game. I sauteed a mixture of brown and white rice in a teaspoon of olive oil with some very finely chopped onion (to fool my kid). Then I poured in the water and shredded a carrot and threw that in, covered and cooked for 35 minutes.  Blah, it was tasteless.  But then I got used to it, and kind of mixed my zucchini in with it. And it was passable.

See here is the thing. I have two more weeks on my diuretic, and then I have to see if I can control the water retention on my own with diet. Now I do not think that I took in a ridiculous amount of sodium before, at least not compared to everyone I know. So I suspect that my body is a bit inefficient at filtering the sodium. And I suspect that I will have to be pretty strict to be able to stay off medication. So I would rather not add sodium to foods and learn to live without it and let my taste buds adjust.

I am also a simple kind of gal. A very busy simple kind of gal. There is so much swimming around in my head at any given moment that I don't need any more crammed in there kind of gal. I bought one DASH diet cookbook, but I need SIMPLE EASY NO MORE THAN 5 INGREDIENTS kind of recipes. So, if I can learn to enjoy a plain rice, perhaps cooked with a vegetable or two thrown in, I will be very happy.

So I am not dismissing my rice recipe. Perhaps it is me that needs to be adjusted.