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Even "real" mayonnaise from Hellman's or other regional/national brands has water in it, which (along with chemical stabilizers) lightens it up some. Jackiecat may be distressed to learn that Hellman's Real Mayo does not include HFCS unless they're allowed to count it as a "natural flavoring," and I don't think they can. They do list sugar as an ingredient, though.

And as for homemade not lasting—it lasts about a week in a sealed jar, and you can easily make just one cup (16 tablespoons, 8 sandwiches) with one egg yolk and a cup of oil. Heck, make it directly in the jar that you'll store it in if your immersion blender has one of those otherwise-useless whisk attachments. That kind of speed in an enclosed space is just perfect for homemade mayo in a wide-mouth jar. That's what I do.

It's loading reasonably well today, but I can pinpoint the problem more clearly because it's still failing to load. It's in the "skybox2" div, in the ad that (on the page I'm viewing) for "Unique Food Trends from around the world, brought to you by The International Culinary Schools at the Art Institutes."

The site calls a complicated URL to get the image for the "bite" taken out of the upper-left corner of that ad. When the URL resolves on the Scripps Network servers, it eventually winds up at the wrong URL, the one at the domain "adimages.scrippsnetwork" instead of "adimages.scrippsnetwork.com". It looks like the folks providing the ad dynamically are causing that problem. I can only speculate as to whether it's the key problem that stops the whole page from rendering.

There's a version of this in "The Best 30-Minute Recipe" that I make fairly regularly, but it adds the tomatoes and water all at once with the pasta so they all simmer together, no reducing of tomatoes first. I make it without the cream and find it quite filling, comforting, luxurious, etc. I'd rather have an extra ounce of cheese than 4oz of cream that just deadens the tomato flavor.

(I use Eden Organic Crushed Tomatoes, which come without salt, and adjust the seasonings as appropriate.)

I make popovers with skim milk all the time and they turn out just fine. If you're really concerned about not having enough fat (despite the butter), start with a tablespoon of heavy cream and fill up the rest of your milk measure with skim milk. It'll be close enough.

It's doubly ridiculous when you consider that all Grey Poupon mustard sold in the US is made in the United States, with mustard seeds from Canada and white wine from upstate New York. Kraft owns Grey Poupon, and for at least 20 years, it's been distributed from (and probably made in) New Jersey.

The Grey Poupon you buy in other countries (including Canada) is probably a product of France, but American Grey Poupon is entirely a North American product.

I'm a heart patient, saltcrystal, and have to take things a bit more seriously than I used to when it comes to food—both noting the bad things that are hidden in common foods (cough tons of salt cough) and the good things that get a bad rep.

This is the latter, I think. I'm fixing it for dinner now. :-)

While the role of dietary cholesterol in blood cholesterol is still under investigation and isn't as bad as was believed 20 years ago, the main item still says to watch intake of saturated fats. Egg yolks have saturated fats, and ironically, the more boutique eggs available nationally (like Land O' Lakes Omega-3 eggs) have more saturated fat than an average egg (1.5mg for a Land O'Lakes egg, 1.1 for an average egg, 1.0 for an Eggland's Best egg which isn't all that high in Omega-3).

Even so, the Land O' Lakes eggs make particular sense if you don't eat "a lot" of eggs, because as the January-February 2009 issue of Cook's Illustrated noted, they are tastier: the richer diet fed to the chickens to up the Omega-3 fatty acids leads to a deeper yellow yolk and a more "farmstand" taste than just about any other commercial egg.

Just don't go crazy. The recipe I use for Spaghetti Carbonara is very light on bacon because I have a sodium-restricted diet, so for 12 ounces of dried thin spaghetti, it has two eggs, about 2.5 ounces of lower sodium bacon, 1/3 cup heavy cream, and 1.5 ounces of (good) Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.

And even with this moderated amount of ingredients? 36g of saturated fat in the recipe, or about 9g per serving. For someone who should eat 2000 calories a day, that's more than half of the day's dietary saturated fat. And I don't know about you, but I can eat more than 1/4 of that recipe if I'm not really careful.

I could only find data on restaurant (Golden Corral) corned beef hash, but one cup of that, without eggs, has 13g of saturated fat. Add two eggs to it and you're at or near your day's limit without treating eggs as specifically "worse" than any other saturated fat.

So yeah, dietary cholesterol isn't the entire picture, and eggs are quite nutritionally dense, and those from chickens with better diets are even better for us than average eggs. But don't go crazy. If you want the corned beef hash, fix yummy vegetable soup for dinner that night with a nice salad using homemade dressing. Go without the whip on a Starbucks hot beverage and save 3.9g of saturated fat (four eggs!) or 5.0g on a cold beverage (five eggs!).

Eggs aren't a poison pill but they're not a magic fat-free bullet, either. Use common sense and enjoy your eggs. :-)

(Dang, I plum forgot the spaghetti with fried eggs recipe, which I also use, but not as often as some because it uses so much oil. Working on trimming it down to be even more minimalist!)

While the amount of sodium (not just salt, but also MSG, baking powder, baking soda, etc., etc.) in processed foods is a serious problem, the fact remains that most adults should get no more than 2400mg of sodium per day, and no more than 1500mg per day if they're over 50. (See, for example, the article from The Mayo Clinic, which also points out that 77% of most people's sodium intake comes from processed foods.)

And it remains true that one teaspoon of table salt (two teaspoons of Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt, one and a half teaspoons of Morton Kosher Salt) contains 2400mg of sodium. Did you make a recipe with a tablespoon of salt and eat a third of it? There's your limit right there. Add onto it the 500mg per cup of prepared "low sodium" chicken stock, 400mg of sodium per ounce in domestic "Parmesan" cheese, 250-400mg per slice of almost every commercial bread, 890mg of sodium per ounce of ham...well, it adds up fast, even if you largely avoid boxed foods.

Yes, I'm one of those who now has to avoid sodium because of medical restrictions (which came out of nowhere, so I had few warning signs), but it's a lot harder to "salt your food naturally," as Ruhlman recommends, when it's all but impossible to make standard recipes and still stay within USRDA requirements, much less any lower requirements that heart or hypertension patients may have.

Most of the recipes on here aren't so bad, if you don't eat them all yourself (of course). The recent entry for Kale, Onion, and Cheddar Frittata works out to about 1000mg of sodium for the entire recipe, so 250mg for a quarter of it is not bad at all (provided you don't add more cheddar cheese, or use more than 1/10 tsp of salt for the "couple pinches," or don't have 16 fl oz of milk with it for an extra 250mg of sodium). Blake Royer's recipe for Caesar Salad isn't so great, largely because he calls for (as the classic recipe would) 2-3 anchovies that come out to about 700mg of sodium each, and half a cup of parmesan (which comes to about 750mg of sodium for most domestic brands; real Parmigiano Reggiano has significantly less sodium). Add to that a "generous amount of salt" for the croutons, say 1/2 teaspoon, and the average for commercial breads, and you have a bowl of salad with about 4400mg of sodium in it. If you truly only eat one of the four servings of it, you only get 1100mg of sodium from it—but that's nearly half your USRDA in one meal's salad.

Most people will exceed that without even thinking about it. Soy sauce? 1100mg per tablespoon. Baking soda? 1260mg of sodium per teaspoon. I mentioned "low-sodium" chicken stock at 500mg per cup, or 2000mg per quart. Vacuum-packed tuna pouches? 700mg each. It goes on and on - chipotle peppers in adobo, canned tomatoes (one 14oz can usually has about 900mg of sodium!), canned beans and vegetables of any kind.

Did you brine the chicken? Was your chicken or pork "pre-brined" for you before you purchased it (check the label to see if it was "enhanced" with "chicken broth" or other stuff—if a 4oz serving of chicken has more than 70mg to 95mg of sodium, they pre-brined it, and most of them sold around here have 350mg of sodium or more per 4oz serving). How much bread did you eat with it? (Can't make bread without salt, and commercial bakers use more than you would because it keeps the bread from spoiling longer.) Anchovies? Pickles? "Fat-free" foods often contain more sodium than the real ones to make up for lost taste. (Egg Beaters contain twice as much sodium as real eggs!)

Sadly, it's not just about avoiding Big Macs or the Bloomin' Onion or the latest Big Fried Plate O'Crap With Cheese. Even if you want to cook for yourself, the sodium is hidden everywhere in your food. It is a real, significant, ongoing effort to eat under 2400mg of sodium per day. It is impossible if you eat out a lot, and it's not a lot easier if you cook "natural" foods for yourself, even if you never add salt to anything, even if you reduce the salt in recipes.

You can balance it out, of course. Some days I go over my restrictions, and I make up for it by staying well under the next day (or staying under the previous day, if I know I have to eat at some unknown place). I'm lucky that chocolate is still low in sodium, and luckier still that my particular health problems didn't come with fat restrictions, though I try to avoid the all-oil diet.

But this bit about "just cook naturally and you'll stay within the guidelines?" Untrue, and perhaps dangerous if you're not aware of it. Only you get to decide how much sodium you can or should eat, but you deserve to know that keeping within the current, well-established, peer-review sodium limits is almost impossible in today's United States food culture—even if you cook every meal you eat for yourself.