Spin Cycle--Food, Glorious Food

Jen at Sprite's Keeper wants to hear about food this week for the spin cycle.  I foresee everybody being quite hungry by Friday.
There's lots of ways I could go with this topic.  We love food around our house (really who doesn't love food?)  The biggest change we have made recently has been reducing sodium from our normal diet.
Four years ago I had a fun adventure into the world of kidney stones.  I passed two--worst experience of my life, and yes they were far more painful than labor.  I ended up in the hospital so they could remove the 20+ stones that remained in my kidney.  After recovering from the surgery my urologist ran tests and told me I needed to cut down the amount of sodium I was eating.
Do you have any idea how pervasive sodium is in the diet of the average american?  I started checking labels as religiously as some check for calories.  What I found startled me.  Sodium is everywhere.  It is incredibly difficult to avoid.  Even soda has a ton in it.
The place it impacted my cooking the most was in side dishes.  I liked using those easy to make pasta and rice mixes.  Easy to throw one of those in to go with our veggie and meat.  When I started looking at the amount of sodium a serving has (and who decided that a serving was so stinking small?) I shuddered and put the packages back on the shelf.  And started to hunt through the recipe books looking for simple alternatives to the packaged side dishes.  It's not easy to find simple to make side dishes.  Most are as complicated as main dishes.
I floundered along cutting sodium where I could (which is much easier now than it was when I started) and being frustrated by the amounts in everything.  There are a lot more no sodium added canned goods now.  and reduced sodium products are showing up more and more often.  But what really helped with the meal planning was winning a subscription to Emealz.  It's a site that give you an itemized grocery list and recipes for a week.  I found that knowing what we are having, and having all the stuff to go with it, side dishes and vegies included, makes cooking a much easier endeavor.  And what really impresses me about Emealz is that most of the things you make are from scratch, not totally from packaged foods.  This helps with the sodium issues I have.  And really, we are all benefiting from the reduction in intake of sodium.  Although, I still have trouble with the whole snacking thing--I love sunflower seeds, and chips, and dry roasted peanuts, and just about every other salty snack out there.
Over all, the more I make from scratch, the more I can control the salt I eat.  I'm learning to enjoy the art of cooking and getting way better at the planning part--you know getting everything to be done at the same time.
So now go see the other spins that are up about food.  I guarantee you'll be hungry by the time you are finished.