🔍 How We Develop Our Food Resources
What we do, what we haven’t done yet, and how you can help us improve.
🌿 Our standard: SOS-free
SOS-free means no added salt, added oil, or added sugar. Foods can still contain their own natural sodium, fats, and sugars. SOS-free does not mean sodium-free, fat-free, sugar-free, automatically low-calorie, or right for every health condition. Our recipes are also whole-food and plant-based, following the Center for Nutrition Studies SOS-free introduction ↗ (an independent organization that hasn’t reviewed our site).
🧾 How we handle tricky ingredients
| Ingredient | Our current decision |
|---|---|
| 🌴 Whole dates (all varieties) and ripe fruit | ✅ Our whole-food sweetener |
| Date syrup, maple syrup, honey, agave, sugar | ❌ Not used (concentrated sweeteners) |
| Canned beans and tomatoes | ✅ No-salt-added only. Rinsed regular cans are a helpful transition step, not equivalent. |
| Broth and seasoning blends | ✅ Salt-free only |
| Vinegars | ✅ Plain; flavored only with no added sugar |
| Nut and seed butters | ✅ Only if the ingredient is just nuts or seeds |
| Plant milks | ✅ Unsweetened, without added oil or salt; fortified is fine |
| Tofu and tempeh | ✅ Plain; check that no salt or oil is added |
| Breads and tortillas | ⚠️ Only those with no added salt, oil, or sugar (check the label) |
| Soy sauce, tamari, miso, sauerkraut, coconut aminos | ❌ Not in strict recipes (added salt) |
| Baking powder and baking soda | ⚠️ Interim: not used in strict recipes because they add sodium. Baked goods that need them will be labeled separately. |
| Pure vanilla extract | ✅ Small amounts |
| Fortified foods (B12, calcium, vitamin D) | ✅ Fortification is welcome |
🏷️ What our recipe labels mean
- ✅ Verified SOS-free: every ingredient meets the standard above.
- 🔄 Suggested SOS-free adaptation: we describe the changes, and say whether they’ve been tested.
- 🌱 Transition resource: useful for moving toward this way of eating, with the differences stated. No shame in starting here.
- ↗️ External recipe: on the creator’s own site, with credit. We don’t copy it, and we haven’t reviewed the whole site.
🧪 Four separate checks, reported honestly
| Check | What it means | Status today |
|---|---|---|
| 👩🍳 Culinary testing | Cooked exactly as published, with yield and time recorded | Not yet recorded for our recipes |
| 🧮 Nutrition calculation | USDA FoodData Central values × amounts ÷ servings | Done for 11 recipes; second-person check pending |
| 🩺 Clinical review | A qualified professional reviews condition-focused use | Not yet done; registered dietitian review planned |
| ✍️ Editorial review | Wording, links, credits, accessibility | Ongoing by the author |
One kind of check never implies another. A page shows only the checks that actually happened. 🧮 Our nutrition numbers are estimates, not lab results. Energy is the standard USDA database total, with no adjustments, so anyone can reproduce it. Missing values say “not available,” never zero.
🌾🎉 We celebrate fiber everywhere. Meals with 18 grams or more in one serving get a 🎉, because most people eat far less fiber than recommended, and every gram is a win.
✏️ Corrections
Recipes and links can change, and we welcome error reports. Spot an ingredient, portion, nutrition, safety, or credit problem? Email rfjeep@gmail.com. We fix material errors and recalculate when ingredients or portions change. Please don’t send personal health information.
🍲 Share a recipe with the Garden Table™
We’d love to see your favorite SOS-free plant-based dish. Please email it to rfjeep@gmail.com with:
- 👤 Your name, or how you’d like to be credited
- ✍️ Whether the recipe is your own, or where it came from
- 📏 Ingredients with amounts, steps, and how many servings it makes
- 🧑🍳 Whether you’ve made it as written
- 📸 Any photos you took, and whether we may use them
Nothing is published automatically. Before publishing, we check the credit, the SOS-free ingredients, allergens, food safety, and nutrition. Your email address stays private. Sharing a recipe gives us permission to publish it with your credit; you keep ownership of your recipe.
Kitchen Monk food resources are general education, not medical care or individualized nutrition therapy. Written by Nathanael Elijah Smith, MSN, APRN, FNP-C, DipACLM, with AI-assisted drafting. Ingredient decisions in this table are our current interim standard and may be refined after registered dietitian review. Published October 3, 2026; nutrition method updated the same day.
