Dips for Gameday Kidney-Friendly Grub

Here comes game day! Depending on what team you root for, there can be plenty of high stress on game day (you know… those darn refs, fumbles, and missed field goals). With your blood pressure already up from the game, you didn’t need any more blood pressure mania from your food. Typical game day fair is very high is sodium (chips, dips, KFC, wings, pizza, etc…). Even if you plan to just pleasantly watch without stress, the extra sodium from the party foods is not going to help you. Having a handy finger food that you and your friends and family can enjoy together will help you focus on what you “can-have” instead of what you can’t have. We made these chicken nuggets and then looked into several “dipping” choices. Even if you don’t choose to make homemade chicken nuggets, you can still benefit from cutting back sodium in your dips. For game day, offer your guests a variety of dipping sauces. If you don’t love honey mustard, you could do a lower sodium barbecue sauce, low sodium ketchup, or even ranch. We’ve included some brand examples of these condiments as well as their sodium and potassium content. These also make a delicious meal combined with some sweet peppers, salad, or carrot sticks and a side of rice. Balance your meal out with some vegetables, salad, or other lower protein foods if you are watching your protein intake with CKD.

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Below you will find our sodium and potassium breakdown for the above sauces. The Mrs Dash Ranch does take a little preparation, but it is really an excellent ranch dip. I use it for all my ranch dressing recipes now – no msg – just a perfect blend of ranch herbs and spices! Remember portion size is 2 tbsp (about 1/2 of the cups above) so you don’t need to baptize your chicken nuggets in any of the sauces, just, um, dip them for a bit of flavor.

Serving size: 2 Tbsp	Sodium	Potassium
No Sodium Ketchup	6	114
Regular ketchup	167	57
BBQ Sauce (Ntnl Brand like Heinz)	392	73
BBQ Sauce (lower sodium brand)	47	73
Honey Mustard Sauce (from this recipe)	133	50
* Lower sodium if low sodium worcestershire sauce is used
Mrs Dash Ranch Dip	59	19.5

This recipe was taken from Davita.com ( Click here for the original recipe from Davita). We didn’t change much to this recipe but we do give you some added condiment choices. Hats off to Davita for having a pretty extensive database of kidney-friendly recipes. I’ll warn you though, they’re not all tasty, and they’re not actually all low sodium or low potassium by our standards. Most are lower sodium and lower potassium then a similar item, but don’t assume just because its on their site that it is going to work for you.

Recipe

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Kidney Grub Chicken Nugget Kidney Grub Chicken Nugget Recipe

KidneyGrub Verdict:

We really liked these, especially hot out of the oven. They are crispy and especially go well with the honey mustard sauce. They could have used just a little bit more flavor if eaten plain (maybe some Mrs Dash Garlic and Herb), but with the sauce we really liked them. We had ours for dinner with salad and strawberries on the side/ Then the next day we had a chicken nugget salad, with shredded carrots, honey mustard dressing,and some bread on the side. Both great meals! They are best hot, but even lukewarm they are a worthy treat and won’t leave your fingers greasy or your blood pressure sky high. Again, leave the stress and high blood pressure for the bad ref calls… you don’t need it from your food.

Article: Jessianna Saville MS, RDN, LD

Photo Credits: Rebecca Barksdale