Potassium-Friendly Cooking Demonstration: The Cooking Doc

well good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining today's potassium friendly cooking demonstration as a reminder today's event will also be simulcasting on facebook live that's our first time doing this so thank you for joining our inaugural uh uh event here my name is mike spigler and i am the vice president of patient services and kidney disease education at the american kidney fund i want to uh thank you again for joining in today's potassium friendly cooking demo this activity is part of akf's beyond bananas hyperkalemia awareness campaign and i want to give a special thanks to astrazeneca for being the sole supporter of the campaign beyond bananas helps people living with kidney disease understand high potassium which is also known as hyperkalemia and it empowers them to control their potassium through medicine and food for more on beyond bananas you can visit kidneyfund.org beyond bananas to help us learn more about managing potassium through food and elite today's cooking demonstration i'm excited to uh present dr blake schusterman also known as the cooking doc dr blake is a practicing nephrologist at carolina nephrology in greenville south carolina and he is on a mission to help you enjoy eating healthy while living with kidney disease we hope that today's cooking demonstration will help you find the joy in preparing and cooking meals using low potassium foods and if you're watching live please join our conversation you can let us know you are here in the comments section and type any questions you have in the q a section on zoom or the comment section on facebook we'll try to get as many questions as we can during the q a session so dr blake before we start cooking what is hyperkalemia uh sure thanks mike hi everybody uh so hyperkalemia is something that happens when the potassium gets high in your blood it's hyper for high and kalimia relates to the potassium and potassium in your blood is really tightly regulated by the kidneys but when that level gets too high it can lead to dangerous things like heart problems so what happens is when you eat potassium the kidneys are able to filter most of it but if you have kidney disease if your kidneys don't filter correctly or if you're on certain medications that potassium level can increase in your blood uh and get to a level where it can cause problems so the good news is that sometimes by adjusting the things that you eat you can help manage that high potassium level very easily okay great so i mean you must see patients all the time you know as part of your practice what's the biggest misconception you hear from people that are living with kidney disease about keeping potassium under control yeah sure i think there's two that i hear most often um the first is that people who have high potassium are under the um they have the feeling that they can never eat anything that is high potassium so they automatically throw away all the bananas and oranges and avocados and things like that um in their pantry and the good news is that if you have high potassium um in your blood you don't have to cut necessarily all the all those things out right from the beginning you know you can have maybe a little slice of banana or a little bit of orange and there are ways to incorporate those foods into your diet without giving up the things that you love completely sure um the other thing that i hear sometimes is that when people get a diagnosis of kidney disease they go right to the internet and it doesn't matter what their kidney disease is what stage they automatically stop eating all potassium and it doesn't have to be that way there are people with kidney disease who don't need to limit the potassium in their diet so understanding that it's really an individual decision and not everybody with kidney disease needs to cut out all the potassium is probably uh the other misconception that i hear most of the time yeah that makes that makes total sense i mean i i have family members with kidney disease and um this is actually one of the things they don't struggle with they struggle with lots of other things but you know uh it's something we hear all the time um it's such a personalized thing for people with a diet and it's so hard to say you know sometimes people hear well you know i'm just eating a kidney friendly diet it's really not that simple um it's really about kind of managing it for it for you so um well i want to turn it over to you now to to introduce today's recipe i'm excited everyone's usually trying to get something fun to eat on a friday uh dinner so uh hopefully we can help spark that today so why don't you tell us what we're gonna be making today sure um so we're gonna be making a roasted couscous roasted i'm sorry roasted carrots roasted onions and cranberry couscous dish and it is um really one of my favorite things to eat and i it's one of my favorite recipes and first before we get going though i want to thank you all for for being here and just really let you know that um you know as a doctor seeing people coming to a an event where they're really trying to improve their health and understand their health conditions i think is uh is amazing so thank you all for coming the other thing that i know some of you are thinking is aren't you a nephrologist don't you have anything better to do like see patients and i understand that but i really think that food and eating good food and cooking really is a way to help manage your kidney disease and it's really important no matter where you are in your journey so if you are at risk for kidney disease like you have high blood pressure diabetes uh the foods you eat can help protect your kidneys and then if you have stage one all the way to stage five chronic kidney disease the food you eat and knowing how to eat the right amount of potassium is important and it even goes through if you're on dialysis or if you've had a kidney transplant so yes i see a lot of patients in the office and prescribed medicines but food and cooking is really a key no matter where you are along that journey so with that said we let's get down to the recipe so the first thing we're going to do for this recipe so when people are learning to eat a little bit different or eat healthy food i think it's important to have a few basic cooking skills and also to learn to try new things so we're going to introduce you to a new kind of couscous recipe here today and we're going to roast some vegetables so if you've never roasted vegetables before this is a great skill to have and a great way to incorporate more vegetables into your diet so we're going to start with carrots and so i picked carrots because they're kind of a medium potassium vegetable and when you're trying to control the potassium in your diet one of the things that you can do is you can choose whether to put a little of ingredie of an ingredient in your recipe or a lot of an ingredient in your recipe so i'm using five carrots here but if you wanted to make it an even lower potassium recipe you use two if you don't have any potassium restrictions and you love carrots you can use eight so it's a huge difference depending on how much of an ingredient you use so i'm gonna slice these carrots here if you've never sliced carrots before i like to slice them on a bias so on an angle and what that does is that gives you more surface area of the inside of the carrot and allows it to be more flavorful and roast a little more evenly when you cook it and dr blake when you're producing this is kind of like for one person is that what's the serving size that you're making today with that amount so uh this uh will serve six people i think each uh serving size is about a cup okay um and this recipe um is a great side dish for uh salmon or uh some grilled chicken um you know it it kind of can take the place of a traditional pasta side dish or quinoa or something like that i serve it with thanksgiving actually okay wow so so we've got our little uh carrots here i don't know if i hope you can see them kind of slice on the bias and we're going to put them on a tray and get to our onion and everyone if you're just joining us now please remember you can put your comments down in the chat section of the facebook live or in the comments section of the uh zoom webinar we're glad to to answer questions as we're going along yes please uh ask away if we can get to them i'd love to answer your questions um and so so this is this is my onion and uh there are lots of different ways to prevent the onion from making you cry while you cut them and put them in the freezer or the refrigerator run them under water i'm gonna um show you my favorite it's my onion glasses here what else has the side effect of looking cool at the same time right so that's yeah right you're wrong nobody's ever accused me of looking cool with these glasses on before but what we're going to do with this onion is we're going to uh slice an end off slice it in half and we're gonna peel off the peel onion is a great vegetable to use for people who have a a potassium restriction because it is a very low potassium food and it has tons of flavor so so choosing a food that has a lot of flavor but not a lot of potassium is a great way to um to adapt your diet to to that so you see we've got our nice onion here on a flat surface and what we're going to do is just slice kind of some onion rings some little little slices of onion that we're going to roast in the oven i didn't mention this before but i've got my onion preheating to 400 and really you talk about roasting vegetables for dummies you can cut up just about any vegetable turn your oven on to 400 do what we're going to do with these vegetables which is mix them with a little bit of olive oil and a little salt and pepper and then roast them in the oven for that period of time somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes depending on the vegetable dr blake is that olive oil is that uh kind of just because for for flavor is it better for kidney patients when there are other oils that that patients or shouldn't use so you know let me take my glasses off now okay so um the uh the olive oil will do a couple things uh the main thing it will do is it will help those um um those vegetables brown a little bit the oil and that will give it a little bit of a caramelized flavor a little bit of a roasted kind of toasty flavor you know we're using such a little amount of olive oil with this maybe a teaspoon or so that it doesn't matter too much which olive oil which oil you choose as a health base because we're losing so little but olive oil has been shown in many studies to be a healthy choice of an oil to pick so that's what i use and it roasts really nicely at 400 plus i really like the flavor of olive oil great dr blake we have a question that came in asking about this recipe is it's also low in phosphorous this recipe is low in phosphorus yes and all these vegetables these are these are low phosphorus vegetables for sure perfect okay so we're going to take our um our vegetables we're going to put olive oil like we talked about just a little bit of a pinch of salt now i know there's um probably a lot of you are on a low sodium diet and i think a low sodium diet is a great way to help manage your blood pressure i think a little bit of salt is a great way to bring out flavor in a dish so i just use a little bit and if you look at the rest of the ingredients that we're cooking with there really is is no other sodium in anything else so we're not taking a lot of processed food with our which already has a lot of salt we're using food that doesn't have salt and then adding just a tiny bit to get the flavor that we're looking for okay and some pepper now i'm gonna mix it up with my hands i think that's kind of the best way to make sure that olive oil gets all over those vegetables and i'm going to pop that in the oven uh for about 20 minutes all right all right and dr blake where can uh uh they it looks like actually we can get this uh this link uh to this recipe on kidney kitchen and for those of you not familiar uh with kidney kitchen that is uh american kidney funds um it's a great website we have uh over 500 recipes on there and dr blake is so kindly uh provided some from from his experience and his cookbook too so uh you can find that there yeah this recipe is on the kidney kitchen it's also in my book my cookbook and i think probably also on my website too this is one of my favorites that's there so next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna get to the couscous and if you've never cooked with couscous before there are a couple of different kinds this one is almost like a uh it's like a pasta it's it's a toast it's a pearl couscous and i'm going to open it up and you can you can kind of see it's these little round round balls and you'll notice as i cook these these uh these little balls and um as i go through this recipe i'm doing a lot of little steps along the way and one of the things that i've learned in my cooking and from watching professional chefs cook is that it's these little steps along the way that really can lead to a delicious final flavor so you know and that can also keep you from adding a lot of extra salt and a lot of extra fat to your dishes to keep them healthy so this couscous that i'm going to use i've got two cups of this couscous and we're going to toast it on the oven so i'm going to turn this on to high just let that get a little bit hot dr blake a question about onions uh any prefer uh preference on types of onions does it matter white yellow purple any difference in the kind of orange juice as far as like safety for kidney patients no all all onions are are safe they're all low potassium i you know i choose my onions based on what's in season and what's uh flavorful or what goes well with the dish you know vidalia onion or yellow onion sweet onion it doesn't matter really as far as potassium is concerned use whichever one you like and really that whole family of onions and garlic and scallions all those things are great ways to add flavor without adding a lot of extra salt and i have one of my patients that keeps telling me that she wants me to make recipes without onions because she can't stand onions or garlic and i'm very sorry if you're watching that this definitely does not fall within those restrictions yeah for sure a question regarding the couscous uh for those with like diabetes um diabetic nephropathy you know is how is how does couscous line up with some of the other you know carbs that someone might encounter great question you know i think that a lot of times people with kidney disease when they're trying to figure out what to eat there's also always this struggle between what's safe for my kidneys and what won't raise my sugars up and so you know a pasta sometimes you really get into trouble is that the pastas or these grains like couscous may raise up your sugars a little bit and then if you use something that's whole grain like a quinoa it's a little bit of a higher potassium dish but won't raise up your sugars as much so it's kind of a trial and error thing so this is definitely a carbohydrate and so if you have diabetes this would be one of those things where you want to eat in small portions if if your sugars are really sensitive to carbohydrate foods great thank you all right so i've got i've got this heated up and you'll see what happens so we're going to put a little bit of olive oil in there again i love the olive oil and then you know you could do this same kind of thing with with rice as well kind of toast ingredient to give it a little bit of an extra flavor so i'm just going to pour that in and then i'm going to stir it a little bit and i'll show it to you in a minute or two you'll see that it becomes uh brown and i wish you all were here with me that's the one thing about these zoom cooking demos is that you can't smell how good that couscous smells once it starts toasting a little bit well the good thing for me is i i can't be asked to help so i won't screw up your recipe because i'm not there with you so there are some bright sides of this too there you go oh you're welcome to come anytime and help me um okay so while that's heating up is there any got any questions loaded up mike uh so questions regarding just um how much potassium can someone have i mean especially and are there differences between someone you know with the early stages of kidney disease versus someone say on dialysis absolutely not only are there differences between early stages of kidney disease and people who are on dialysis but there are differences either even between two people who are on dialysis and two people who are on different types of dialysis as well so potassium restriction is a really um individualized restriction and so i always tell my patients whether or not they have high potassium because that really makes a difference in in the limitations on what they eat and so if i have somebody with stage 3a chronic kidney disease who has no potassium no potassium restrictions because their potassium is in the normal range you know i don't want them to give up all these foods that are also good for them like greens and spinach and some whole grains so i tend to tell them they actually need probably a high potassium diet sure and then somebody who is on dialysis especially hemodialysis where it's three times a week you don't have the same kidney clearance and so you have to be a lot more careful so talk to your dietician talk to your doctor you know medicines play a large role in the potassium level as well so this is kind of an individualized uh thing from person to person great uh one more question that came in also just regarding um you know there's a lot of people like any patients know you can you know leech some potassium from that from like potatoes are there other vegetables that can some of the potassium from and if so you know do you risk losing any of the other nutrients the good things from it when you do that um yeah you you definitely do uh so um potatoes are the most common thing and and honestly i have not soaked other vegetables but my guess is that they will least leech the uh potassium the same way especially if they're kind of cut up in small pieces and uh soaked for two hours or more you do lose some of the other things that are in there i know you may lose some of the water soluble vitamins you may lose some magnesium you may lose some zinc so you know the way i look at it is if you are leeching your potatoes because you love potatoes but you need a low potassium diet basically don't worry about what you're losing in there you're just eating the potatoes because you want potatoes not because you're worried about any other health benefits from it so that's my beeper i put in the carrots and onions a little bit early so i'm going to get that out we'll take a look at those and for those of you that are just joining us right now again please feel free to send in your comments uh we're answering lots of questions coming in so we will get to as many of them as we can uh if you're on facebook you just drop in the comments section um and on the zoom webinar you can put it in the q a section and we will answer as many as we can so you can see these onions have gotten a little bit brown uh roasting in the carrots as well and uh don't be afraid of a little brown there's a fine line between brown and burnt but browned to me means flavor so these have a lot of added flavor to them and i'm going to put them on the side and let them cool a little bit great and dr blake a question that came in also you know your for your cookbook and and your other recipes that you focus on what are some of the things besides potassium we talked about fosters that you focus on uh one of the questions that came in was in regards to protein too yeah so um you know well while we're talking so so here's our couscous you can see it's been toasted and there are some kind of brown couscous uh kernels in there and it really smells toasty and what i'm gonna do to that is i'm gonna add um i started with two cups of the couscous i'm gonna add about three cups of no sodium vegetable stock and then i'm gonna bring this to a boil and i'm gonna let it cook with the cover on for about eight to ten minutes um and then i'll talk about that other stuff here sure well that's stock is that something you just buy in the store did you make that stock yourself um so that is store-bought stock but um there's nothing better than homemade stock because really you control all the ingredients in there and uh there's a recipe for the homemade stock in my book which is basically you put all your all your scraps into a uh a pot of water and you let it boil and it really makes a delicious flavor you don't have any sodium and you can store it in your freezer for as long as you want it great um and getting back to the other question about other dietary guidance uh so you know in my book i break it down basically into 10 steps about how to manage your kidney disease through diet and we've talked about uh sodium so creating flavor without adding a lot of sodium and salt to your diet and how to do that and make it try to taste as good as it does if it has a lot of salt we talk about plant-based foods how vegetables and avoiding red meat can help your uh your kidneys we talk about uh potassium just like we're talking about today uh we talked about protein the question was about protein and protein is a really difficult thing um because it's also very individualized but the most recent guidelines suggest that people who eat a lower protein diet and what that is is between 0.6 and 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day and so a lot of people that ends up somewhere between 60 and 80 or 40 and 80 grams of protein a day can help slow the progression of your kidney disease over time now a lot of people with diabetes have trouble with that because uh the higher protein foods allow them to manage their diabetes more closely and so having a dietitian to help guide you through those protein needs is very helpful but also in my book we have a chapter on uh phosphorus we have a chapter on the mediterranean diet there's a chapter on alkaline based foods so there's a whole host of uh there's a whole number of things uh that determine the way food can affect your kidneys and i kind of break it down into ten steps in the first part of the book and then the second part is uh is recipes to go with it okay and you know for for some of the we're getting several questions about the specific foods and potassium and you can find many of those on our kidney kitchen website and the beyond bananas campaign that we have where we have several potassium trackers and some eat this not that uh information too uh dr billy just regarding the recipe itself someone's asking again how many minutes was that oven roasting again for the vegetable so somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes uh what i'll do is i'll put it in there i'll check it about 10 minutes and at that time often i'll flip them if one side is getting really brown and this is these are roasting at about 400 degrees and then check it again at 20 minutes see if it's gotten to the the brown level that i like it and if not i let it go another five ten minutes and just keep checking frequently you want it browned but not burned so the this these cooked for about 20 minutes okay getting some questions also just regarding like how does someone know what their potassium is and is there you know people that are familiar with diabetes you know there's an a1c test we're kind of looking at like the average over time anything like that available for patients for potassium or what's the best way to know how they're doing with their potassium the best way is to ask your doctor to check either what's called a renal panel or a basic metabolic panel and that blood test will give you the sodium the potassium the bun the creatinine and a potassium of below 5.2 for most labs is considered normal once you get above 5.2 you're getting a little bit on the high side and then when you get above six and higher you get to a level where it eventually gets dangerous for your heart so it's in those blood tests that if you go to the doctor they will check that you can see what your potassium level is and they can tell you whether or not you need to be on a potassium restricted diet great thank you um okay so we've got now our um couscous cooking and i've i was also went a little ahead of time and made a batch of couscous already so you can kind of see what it looks like when it finishes um and this is this is our finished product so it's kind of a uh starchy um turns a little darker with the vegetable stock and with the toasting and we're just going to let that cool to about room temperature and kind of break up the little clumps that happen in here and then we're going to make our dressing that's going to go on top of this as we mix everything together great i bet that is feeling great right now everything cooking so this this dressing is um one of the most important things to learn about as you're learning to cook in ways that can improve your health especially low sodium diets dressings can be put on anything they can be used as marinades for meat or tofu sometimes i'll put them on the roasted vegetables obviously you can use them for salads and if you're getting dressings from the store they're almost all either or high sodium high sugar or high in saturated fat it's really hard to find dressings that uh that fit all of your dietary needs without spending a fortune so this is a very easy dressing and i'm using a combination of lemon juice so this is the juice of one lemon and it comes to about a quarter cup maybe a little less i love lemons a great way to add flavor to your dishes i'm using sherry vinegar i also stock my cabinet with all kinds of vinegars so we're going to use two tablespoons of sherry vinegar got a clove of garlic that's been chopped and then we've got our olive oil again which we're going to whisk in there and get our dressing and what you can do is you can make a big batch of this and let it sit in your fridge for a week and use a little bit at a time but it smells really really good um you know you could do it with lime juice you could do it with balsamic vinegar you could do it with red wine vinegar lots of ways to bring out the flavor without a heavily salted dressing from the store and most of these dressings there's no ingredients in here that are high potassium so the dressing is is not contributing very much potassium at all to this final dish all right mike questions yeah um this is a great one and something we run into all the time you know one of the things that kidney fund does is helping patients who are struggling with some of the costs of their medical care and the question what is what advice do you have for those looking to bike uh kidney-friendly but on a budget it's yeah it's really hard um you know i my my bias is to say if you have the um ability to learn how to cook and you have the ability to uh you know you've got a stove and you've got utensils if you can find a few things that you can make at home and if you can kind of learn a few tricks of the trade which things to avoid then i think it's it's not any more expensive to eat a uh a low potassium diet than it is to eat a high potassium diet it's just learning to know exactly what to buy with what you have um so yeah and i know that um that cost is an issue a lot of times for a lot of people whether it's making food or whether it's getting the medicines and so cooking at home at first may be a little bit more expensive because you are um you're loading up your cabinet with things like these uh these vinegars and spices but over time you notice that the the cost of cooking at home will go down some especially if you can utilize things like frozen vegetables and kind of the more inexpensive ingredients from the store great another question that came in uh regarding uh potassium someone's struggling said you know they they're basically saying i swear i'm eating all the right things my potassium's still going up what options do people have in that kind of a situation if someone is struggling with potassium and diet's just not doing the trick yeah i see this all the time and uh and and i see it also with phosphorus in the dialysis centers and i want you who are asking this question and anybody else out there who is facing this i really don't want you to put the blame on yourself or think that you're doing wrong these are difficult things and oftentimes the relationship between what you eat and what your blood work shows is not exact so you may be you may be limiting all of your potassium in your diet you may be limiting all the phosphorus in your diet but because of your kidney disease or because of the medicines that you're on or just because of the way your kidneys filter there may be nothing else that you can do in your diet to manage things and the good news is that nephrologists like me have lots of other options for ways to help you manage your potassium without necessarily doing anything more for your diet especially if you're doing everything so sometimes nephrologists will add fluid pills sometimes they'll cut the doses of other medicines that are causing problems with the potassium to go high there are medicines that you can take to help your body not absorb the potassium as you eat it so there are lots of options out there for people that are struggling with high potassium even though they're trying to do everything uh that they can great all right so um i'm going to go to the next couple things that we're going to be adding to this bowl so we're going to we're making these the base for kind of all these dishes and then we're going to mix it all together in a big bowl i'm using fresh parsley here and parsley is an ingredient that will definitely add potassium to your dish and so i like parsley because it's a nice fresh green and it will add a little bit of extra good flavor to your dish but it will add a little bit of potassium so if you're on a really really strict low potassium diet you may just add a couple of sprinkles of potassium because that green will make the final dish look pretty but you don't want to add as much as somebody who doesn't have any potassium restrictions and so we're just gonna i have about a half a cup here and i'm just gonna chop some of this parsley you know you could use you could use dried herbs as well if you didn't want to use fresh herbs dried parsley or a little bit of oregano would be great and it seems like with this dish there's so many kind of components to it it's the kind of thing where you could if you you know if you're trying to make a meal for someone that's not on the same kind of a diet you know or a picky eater you mean my kids i i same with you i don't understand how my kids don't eat onions because i love them but you know but you could easily kind of pull some things out because it's such kind of component driven for this meal absolutely um okay so we've got our parsley and then the last ingredient that we haven't talked about yet is dried cranberries and i've got a little a few examples of other things that i've brought with me as well so dried fruit can be a very high potassium addition to your meal you know dried fruit has a lot of good good things good qualities often they have a lot of fiber in it but they can be high potassium so you know i've got some raisins and some prunes and some dates and so all of these are dried fruits that have a whole lot of potassium in there excuse me but the dried cranberries will give you that uh that same um kind of sweet addition to your dish without giving all that potassium that's why i chose cranberries for this dish sure a couple of substitution questions uh dr blake one regarding the the vegetable stock could you use like a chicken stock instead and what would be the the danger either from a taste standpoint or from a health standpoint uh that would be perfect uh chicken stock versus vegetable stock i don't think there's much difference in the nutrition the nutritional value of either one just you know when you go to the store there's no sodium there's low sodium and then there's full sodium and you know the full sodium is can be somewhere between 500 and a thousand milligrams of sodium per serving so can add up very quickly as long as you're choosing the no sodium version you know if you like a vegetable based flavor there really is a huge difference in taste between a chicken-based stock and a vegetable stock so it depends on what what you like as far as your flavor and what your family likes but either one would work fine you can even make this just with water if you don't want to add the stock water would be a cheap easy addition and it won't change the flavor too much you know the stock just is one of those components that adds on top of everything else to make the final dish as good as i want it to be okay and for parsley any other suggestions uh someone asked about cilantro specifically or any other substitutions you might suggest for that cilantro would be great uh you could do a little bit of cilantro and mint mixed together you can even put just a tiny bit of mint in this that's kind of a typical um mediterranean spice mix either cilantro or parsley and a little bit of mint and and it'd be delicious with that great great okay so i think we're ready to start putting this all together um so this is the easy part so i'm just going to start with my couscous all right we've got our vegetables roasted vegetables and if you wanted to use different vegetables to roast you could do that you could use broccoli broccoli is another kind of medium potassium vegetable you know what you wouldn't want to do if you're on a low potassium diet is use something like uh cooked spinach or cooked greens like beet greens those are things that are really high in potassium you could also roast some garlic cloves in there then broccoli you'd cook it the same amount of time as you would with the carrots basically the same kind of instructions exactly yes so roasting vegetables for dummies cut up your vegetables put it on your tray add a little bit of olive oil maybe a pinch of salt and pepper or if you have a no sodium like cajun spice or something that would be really good roast in the oven for anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes checking frequently and that's it right all right so we've got our cranberries and then our parsley and you can see we've got a nice really colorful dish the more color you put in your in your food the better it tastes in my opinion so we're just going to stir that up kind of mix it all together and then we're going to add our dressing and when you're adding dressing one of the keys is you add a little bit at a time so you don't over dress it from the beginning you can always add more but you cannot take the dressing out so i'm just gonna kind of whisk and pour and if you're and and now you like to serve this dish um at room temperature or warmed up and if you put it and i make extra so if you put it in the refrigerator for a couple of days you want to have a little bit of extra dressing on hand because it will get dry if it's in the refrigerator beforehand and could you pull it out of the fridge and just eat it cold if if you wanted to as well or yeah absolutely so uh i you know i can usually judge the uh um the merits of a recipe by how much is left over at the end of two to three days and this is one that there's almost never anything left over because it'll go in the fridge and then i'll have it and i'll put some um chickpeas in there to make kind of a salad with a little bit of protein or i'll have it on the side of chicken or even on the side of a green salad mixed it all together so this is one of those that you can use a million different ways and and and will keep for a few days in your fridge great it won't freeze well so you know you don't want to make so much that you have to uh freeze it but really good let's see if we can kind of get a nice shot of that there um so it looks great by the way you're getting lots of compliments on your camera work today dr blakes i'm good thank you um so this is this is one of my favorite recipes um does anybody have any other questions about potassium that i can answer or about cooking or the um we actually had a question come in kind of early on regarding and if you don't know this answer that's okay but uh sardines where would something like sardines register on a scale for potassium so um i think sardines are kind of a most fish are kind of medium potassium foods so oftentimes when we're thinking about potassium restriction we jump right to the fruits and vegetables because for some reason they can have the most highly dense potassium concentration but sardines are kind of a medium potassium food probably online with things like uh salmon or or white fish i i think um uh from what i remember somewhere between 300 and 500 milligrams of potassium per serving someone uh just asked a question can you stop eating potassium totally uh will that hurt you in some way um boy it'd be really hard to stop eating potassium fully because there's potassium little bits of potassium in almost everything but your body will not work with potassium the same as high potassium can cause problems for your heart so can low potassium and low potassium can cause muscle weakness and cramps uh and problems as well so low potassium can be as dangerous as high potassium usually low potassium is related to medicines that that people are taking that make them lose their potassium but it'd be really hard to to totally cut out all the potassium in your diet in fact i don't think it could be done great uh someone asked questions regarding those cranberries you dropped in earlier were they the sweetened dry type uh unsweetened dried okay great uh question regarding saffron uh i know that's kind of one of the more expensive ones that's out there so you look for a budget maybe not the best one but saffron do you use that in your cooking um a little bit i love the taste of saffron it's so delicate that you know i i can't always get the right flavor and the right amount in the final dish so it's not something that i um cook with often but if i have the the time to really make sure i'm doing a good job i will buy some saffron and put it in my food and uh you know you're using such a little bit of of saffron that i don't know how much potassium is in there but my guess is that you're using such a little amount of the spice anyway that it's probably safe great and a question so could you just repeat what you said the uh the serving size was you recommend for this dish per person yes uh one cup per serving so you know one cup will have about um if you make it with all the carrots and all the parsley one cup will have 350 to 400 milligrams of potassium if you cut out on the parsley and you cut out on some of the carrots you can get down to about 200 milligrams of potassium in that same one cup serving um without changing the flavor all that much okay we just got a question someone loves tomatoes and tomato sauce is there any way to lower the amount of potassium and tomatoes or tomato sauce and if not you know are there other suggested substitutions you might have so tomatoes you know i i can i can guarantee you when august comes around end of july august that somebody will come into my office and ask me that question because those uh fresh tomatoes that they've grown in their garden seem to be kind of their their absolute favorite food uh and and i understand that so with with a tomato what if you are able to limit it to one or two slices and i'm not talking like the big thick beef steak slices but kind of thinnish slices so you get the flavor of that tomato on something like a sandwich you're using only a little bit of potassium you know the whole tomato will give you a lot but if you're using just one or two slices you can usually keep that potassium level low now the thing about tomato sauce and tomato paste is that all that all those tomatoes are kind of concentrated down and the potassium doesn't go anywhere so all that potassium gets concentrated down and it's sometimes difficult to make those dishes that are low potassium so what i suggest sometimes is uh if you're making a dish with tomato sauce sometimes you can use half of the tomato sauce and then you can use some stock a little bit of chicken stock or beef stock which will give you uh that's no sodium which will give you the flavor as well you know it's not going to be the tomato sauce maybe that your grandma used to made because it's not going to be that thick and have that rich rich tomato flavor but you can still make it taste good without getting all the extra potassium okay uh do you have time for a couple more questions in the next year all right so one regarding you talked about fish what about shellfish how does shellfish kind of rank in the potassium world um i know i i think based on what i can remember shellfish is kind of a medium sometimes a medium to medium high potassium food again when i think about foods it's hard to think about uh one thing on its own because you know i don't want people to have to give up their shellfish completely so i would recommend that you know maybe you use instead of a pound of shrimp in your recipe you could use a half a pound something where you still get the flavor and you still get to enjoy the shellfish that you like but but you're you're lowering the potassium by not eating quite as much great and just one more regarding the couscous i know that that's something i introduced to my parents that never had it i just certainly never had it growing up in uh you know western maryland but uh you know where can people get it uh it's you know their local grocery store wherever they find it yeah local grocery store this is um i got this this brand from the the harris teeters right around the corner but they have it at almost any grocery store that i've seen recently not so much 10 years ago but now they do have it just i'm a much bigger fan of the uh the bigger couscous the pearl couscous rather than the the tiny couscous that's just my uh my preference okay all right so we've got about five minutes left for for that any last pieces for your dish uh dr blake you want to cover or talk about i mean i just wish all of you were here to eat it it's really really um flavorful it tastes really good if you like the idea of learning to cook and learning to flavor your foods with with herbs and spices and learning to cook new things this is kind of the type of recipe that's in my book if this is too fancy for you you know there's we have chicken thighs or salmon or uh really easy recipes that can bring a lot of flavor to your final dish okay we had one more question going back to uh when we were talking about kind of a leaching potatoes i think that was uh the first time a couple people had heard that can you talk a little bit more about kind of what that practice is and how you do that yeah sure so um for people who really love uh potatoes and root vegetables that are high in potassium what you could do is you can you can remove some of the potassium by soaking them um in water so a couple ways to do it one is kind of you you double boil your potatoes so if you cut them up into cubes put them in a pan cover them with water bring them to a boil let them boil for about five minutes get rid of the water put water in let them boil for about five minutes again dump out that water excuse me that will cut down a lot of the potassium in the food the other way is to let them soak in water overnight that will also cut down between 30 to 40 percent sometimes even more of the potassium in there the keys are to the smaller you cut up the vegetable the more surface area it has to get in touch with that water and the more potassium will leak out you know it will change the way the potato cooks and the way it tastes so you have to uh just take that into mind when you're leeching your vegetables to try to get rid of some of the potassium okay uh question regarding cheese is cheese a consideration for someone that's trying to watch the potassium yeah i think so uh cheese is not um you know when i think about cheese i think more about certain cheeses are really high in phosphorus um but um you know a little bit of cheese mixed into your salad or um uh shouldn't be too much potassium in there cheese is not necessarily a really high potassium food okay great all right and just one last question so i know we talked about as you were doing kind of the stock vegetable stock we talked about chicken stock uh you said you could just use water is there something kind of just basic a seasoning that you that you could also put in the water to boil with your pasta to give it some flavor um yeah sure sometimes i'll put a little bit of garlic powder or onion powder in there uh if you want to just use plain water um even a little paprika sometimes okay a couple questions regarding uh this i think it's probably the last one we have time for just about uh nutrition labels and you know what some things that you buy you know in like a takeaway location you might not have that on there i mean how do you advise patients on knowing what's in those kinds of things obviously if you pick up you know a rutabaga or carrot in the store it's not listed on the package so how do you advise patients to deal with that kind of what's in their food i think this is really where you have to have a guide for what foods and kind of some basic knowledge of what foods are high in potassium and what foods are low in potassium because you know a lot of that fresh stuff um won't have those labels and if you are flying blind you know you may pick up a bag of spinach and cook it not knowing that it's high potassium because it's not listed necessarily on there so you know there i know the the kidney kitchen has has some great resources as far as fruits and vegetables and what's high in what's low potassium and i think once you have the basic understanding there then you can look at the ingredients on you know if you got something from the the deli and you can uh have an idea for how much potassium is in there the other thing you could do is uh you know google is pretty good about giving you um potassium content of different foods great well dr blake i want to thank you for walking us through this great cooking demonstration and sharing your expertise on how to manage potassium and the foods that you eat if you're interested in more of dr blake's recipes you can check out his new cookbook which is the cooking doc's kidney-friendly cooking uh it features a simple 10-step guide that he mentioned earlier to kidney wellness are also more than 50 recipes specifically designed for people with chronic kidney disease and with modifications for each stage of ckd all the way from stage one to stage five he has tweaked classics in there such as vegan bolognese macaroni and cheese to modern and diverse fair he's got a thai shrimp salad chicken ferro bowls his book really covers the best food and drinks for your kidneys uh eating a low sodium diet plant-based foods low potassium and high potassium diets protein needs phosphorus the dash diet mediterranean diets diabetes wherever you might be even starting dialysis this book covers that and you can order a digital copy of dr blake's book through his website which is dot www.thecookingdoc.com or you can get a paperback book available on amazon and uh as a thank you for joining us today we actually a cafe is going to be selecting 20 of you at random to win a free digital copy of dr blake's book and winners of the giveaway will be notified after today's event via email so dr blake one last thing before we wrap up what's the main takeaway that you want people with kidney disease to know about potassium the main takeaway is that you can make good food low potassium or high potassium you just have to have some basic ideas of what foods to modify and how to modify the the dish that you're creating and then you can easily fit it into your dietary needs and make sure you talk to your doctor or your dietitian that you see to really get to understand where you are in that high potassium or low potassium spectrum because that makes all the difference great well i can't thank you enough dr blake um you know in covid to run a food network level studio by yourself was pretty impressive and we can't thank you enough for doing it today and i want to thank everyone for your participation in today's event you can find more information on high potassium foods along with a potassium tracker a food guide with a low with a list of low medium and high potassium and delicious low potassium recipes at kidneyfun.org beyond bananas you can also visit kidney funds kidney kitchen at kidneyfun.org kitchen for more information about nutrition a searchable database of over 500 recipes including the cooking docs recipe collection video tips and many other resources about kidney friendly eating you can also follow us on facebook or send us your email through kidneyfun.org and you'll be the first to know about other resources just like this one today so thank you all and have a great evening

Channel: kidneyfund

Views: 69,177

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Id: mNMN6hrm5ao

Length: 53min 30sec (3210 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021