What do we have hidden under the ham today?
Cream cheese spread and Tomatoes! I have also added mustard to this in the past.
I should take a moment to talk about the cream cheese spread. Aldi make two versions – a regular and a lite. I’ve used them both in my No Bake Cheesecake recipe – to me they taste almost identical but the lite one is less dense.
For those who like to read the nutrition panel, this is for the light one. :) Me personally I probably get 15-20 servings per container. I do not like to spread it very thickly. I just want to get the flavour of it, not drown in it with every bite I take. :) If you do not like cream cheese spread but you still want to spread something on the rice cracker, I suggest Hommus or maybe smashed avocado.
You could stop with the tomatoes if you wanted to. I always like to salt and pepper my rice cake snacks well because I find that brings out the natural flavour of whatever has been placed on top.
So a word about ham and nutritional info. Alternatively, a slightly embarassing Snoskred story. We’ve been enjoying this Don ham. One day I read the nutritional info on the packet – which looks like this.
Having used several of these packets previously, I know in each packet there are 12 slices of ham. How can I divide 12 slices into 16 serves, I thought! How ridiculous, I thought. They are really trying hard to hide how much sodium is in this stuff.
A couple of weeks later I sent an email to Sephy titled “Mathematical” with the following content –
“The Don ham I have been buying says there are 16 serves in a packet, but there are only 12 slices of ham. *boggle* How would I have to divide these round slices of ham up in order to get 16 equal serves out of them?”
His reply – “You take the 12 pieces and cut them in fours. That will give you 48 pieces. Give each person three slices and you’ll have 16 servings.”
Then I arrived back at my computer with photos, and realised they mean there are 16 servings in the 4 packets. I’m no genius, but I would suggest if you are making 4 packets of 100g, you should probably give the nutritional info for each *packet* of 100g. Not many people are going to eat all 4 packets at once.
So, all this to say, 3 slices of ham = 1 serving. And that will give you 10% of your daily required sodium intake. That is fine for me because I have low blood pressure and am actually supposed to ingest more salt according to my doctor. For the other half, with high blood pressure, this ham is not so great. I’ll have to do some packet comparisons on future shopping trips. But we love the taste of this one.
Next time, I will put something else on top of tomatoes. :)
Clearly I’m not the first to put tomato on there then ;) I’ve also put lettuce in there, it’s a good addition :)
Also I think there was more to that email, no? Something about three bus services? :)
One last thing re the nutritionals: they do have the averages per 100g right on the label, but it’s only on the main label. It’s something that I would love to have on our labelling here, average per 4oz or something. Or just say average per 100g.
I’m anti lettuce in general. I could try baby spinach. :)
Having the opposite blood pressure issue to you, I avoid salt. I never add it to anything, it is not used in cooking and often processed food tastes salty to me and I am fairly sure I ingest plenty of salt.
The thing I find is that salt heightens the flavour of the food for me. In a way that is an interesting concept – if I make 4 of these and only 2 have salt, it is like two completely different tastes to me. That might be an Aspergers thing, though. It has been said by doctors that if my blood pressure were to get any lower I would be dead, so they do encourage me to salt it up.
It is easier to salt up than salt down, that much I have learned from The Other Half and reading food labels. :)
Because of the curing process ham is inherently salty.
I have not got around to doing a full label check on hams yet – when I do that, I’ll take my time and read all the packets I can find and figure out which one is the least salty because The Other Half prefers ham to all other sandwich meats. Of course salt is not the only consideration – price and value for money are important too. For now, I’ve just cut back on the amount of slices he gets in a sammich. :)
I don’t like the pre-sliced packet hams; I buy the small smoked hams from the meat department, like the Christmas hams, but much smaller. I dry off the moisture, then take my big knife and ‘shave’ slice it all at once, then freeze individual portions, enough for one good sized sandwich at a time. The only trouble with my method is sometimes you decide at the last minute a ham sandwich would be nice but the ham is frozen (*~*)
We have a meat slicer, so I might investigate those kind of hams. :)
I love the idea of “Manhattan” cream cheese spread. People in Manhattan use “Philadelphia”!
We have Philadelphia here too.. this is the Aldi brand name. Now I wonder what Aldi call it in the USA.. :)
The main brand is Happy Farms (similar to all of their cheese products), and the lighter styles is Fit and Active. :)
Ooh, I like the sound of Happy Farms. :) You must do a post with photos!