Easy Shepherd's Pie

Several years ago, I found some recipes for taking semi-prepared ingredients to speed up the dinner making process.  I needed it then and still need it now.  One that I really liked was for Shepherd's Pie.  Total comfort food - great for cold winter nights.  I've altered the recipe a bit to make it more suited to the ingredients I buy and also to up the quantity of vegetables.

The first key to making this recipe quick is the pre-made mashed potatoes.  I know it doesn't take a ton of time to make your own - so go for it, if you want.  For this recipe, I bought a bag of frozen mashed potato disks from Trader Joes.  They're super easy, and you can make up as much or as little as you want because they're in those mini cylinder shapes.  For this recipe, I just used the whole bag.  In the past, if I didn't have this brand of mashed potatoes, I have bought the tubs of mashed potatoes from the refrigerator section.  If your supermarket deli sells mashed potatoes, you could also use that.

The second key to making this recipe quick is the frozen vegetables.  You really could use whatever mix you wanted.  This time I used a bag of "Organic Foursome" from Trader Joes.  It's corn, green beans, peas, and carrots - pretty fitting combination of vegetables for shepherd's pie.  I've used combinations before that have green and red peppers and broccoli that worked out really well also.  Whatever you want will probably work.  Except if it has baby corn in it - that stuff is kinda gross.

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Here's the basic recipe:

1 pound ground beef
1 cup ketchup
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 pound frozen vegetables
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 3/4 pound mashed potatoes

Heat oven to 400 deg F.  Brown the ground beef.  Spoon off the excess fat.  Add the ketchup and Worcestershire sauce.  Add the frozen vegetables to the ground beef mixture and heat up a few minutes, mixing frequently.

Place this meat & vegetable mixture into an oven safe casserole dish.

For the mashed potatoes, Morty helped me grate the cheese (hand over hand, of course).  He likes to help fix food - even if he doesn't like to eat it...

Mix the grated cheese into the prepared mashed potatoes (if using frozen, prepare according to package directions).  Spread the mashed potatoes on top of the meat & vegetables and bake in the oven for about 10 minutes.

And that's it!  So easy and so good when it's cold outside.

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The g-tube blenderized version of this recipe is pretty easy too.  You just use about 1/4 of the shepherd's pie.  Here it is:

Whole Milk	1 cup
orange juice	1/2 cup
Shepherd's Pie	1/4 meal
applesauce	1 cup
olive oil	3 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	36
Cal/oz	36.3
Cal/cc	1.2
% Fat	20%
% Carbohydrates	63%
% Protein	17%

I recently got the Blendtec "Wildside" jar because after a little over a year of constant use, the seal on my original jar started to fail.  I chose the Wildside so that I could double my recipes and make a mix up every other day, instead of every day.  That's worked pretty well so far.  But when I made this recipe up, I doubled it.  And I also think that I used a little more than double of the 1/4 shepherd's pie.  I had originally planned to also add some kefir, but I totally ran out of room in the blender.

This recipe came out pretty thick - I'm sure because of the mashed potatoes and the omission of kefir.  What I ended up doing was warming the mix up each time before I squirted Morty's bolus in.  That helps make it easier to push.  I normally don't do that because I don't want to kill the good probiotic kefir cultures, but since I didn't use kefir this time, there's no reason not to.

The other tricky thing about this blend is that it kinda leaves a red greasy film in the syringe and tube.  Probably from the ground beef and ketchup combination.  You know what I'm talking about - the same thing that discolors tupperware.  Our extension tubes often get discolored from food, which isn't too big of a deal since we switch them out every few weeks anyway.  I did make sure that I used some dish soap when I rinsed the tube and syringe out for this blend - just to try and take the greasy film out.  That seemed to help.

Chicken & Roasted Vegetables - Double Time

I came across some recent Real Simple recipes that had 2 recipes for the same ingredients - one where you make a big meal one night, and then use the leftovers to make a different second meal the next night.  This week I tried out the chicken and roasted vegetables combo.  With a slight chill in the air in the evenings, these recipes seemed totally seasonally appropriate.

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For the first meal, Roasted Chicken and Vegetables with Maple Mustard Sauce, it was super easy.  Basically I just got out a giant roasting pan (the size of one you might use with a Thanksgiving Turkey), put a bunch of vegetables in it, and put some chicken on the rack.  Olive oil on everything, and salt and pepper to your liking.  I also added some "Everyday Seasoning" - I don't remember what's in it, but it's just some seasoning mix that tastes good.  Stick it in the oven and enjoy how delicious it makes the house smell!

For the vegetables, I buy my new potatoes at our grocery store in little 1 lb net bags, so instead of putting in 1 1/2 lbs of potatoes, I used 1 lb and added a few parsnips.  I just happened to pick the "red, white, and blue" mix of new potatoes - it made kind of a cool color mix.

For the chicken, instead of roasting 2 whole birds, which I didn't actually have, I roasted 2 split chicken breasts (making a total of 4 chicken breasts).  That's just the way I get my meat from the co-op.  It made for plenty of meat for the 2 dinners plus Morty's mix.

I found the sauce to be a really nice addition.  Tasted very similar to a honey-mustard and was good on both the vegetables and the chicken.

The second meal we made was Roasted Vegetable Soup with Chicken Melts.  This meal took the vegetables and heated them up with chicken broth and orange juice to make a soup.  Then, it was blended together.  Of course, this was super easy with the Blendtec.  I'm not sure I was a huge fan of this soup.  I felt like it needed something more... I don't know what though.  Maybe some garlic?  It wasn't bad, it just wasn't fantastic.  Maybe if it had some tomatoes in it?

The chicken melts were an open-face sandwich toasted in the oven broiler.  It used the leftover maple-mustard sauce and chicken and added some red onion and graded cheddar.  If you like melted cheese sandwiches, these were delicious.

While these recipes may look relatively complex, there was really only 1 night of "cooking", and the food lasted for 3 dinners, at least one lunch, and a Morty blend or two!

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I was originally going to make a g-tube blenderized version from the first meal, but there weren't very many ingredients, so the second meal - the soup and sandwiches - lent itself better to making a blend recipe.  

Here was the basic ingredients for the soup, if you're not making it from leftovers:

Roasted Vegetable Soup

carrots	1 lb
new potatoes	1/2 lb
celery	4 stalks
yellow onions	1 med
parsnips	2 med
olive oil	1 T
chicken broth	5 cups
orange juice	1/2 cup

As you can see, this soup uses a lot of starchy root vegetables, which alone would probably really thicken up a blended dinner.  So cutting them with the chicken broth helps keep the blend not too thick.

If you're making up the melted sandwiches and have leftovers, you could probably just put 2 of the open sandwiches in the blend.  I didn't make extras up, so my recipe has measured quantities of the ingredients.

If I made this again, I might substitute one of the cups of vegetable soup with some fruit.  As is, this blend had the largest volume of any blend I've made, and it turned out lower on the calorie scale than most of my blends.  So substituting some fruit would probably help bring it up.

Here's the blenderized g-tube recipe:

Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
orange juice	1/2 cup
Roasted Vegetable Soup	2 cups
Dill	1 teaspoon
Country Bread (TJ's Tuscan Pane)	2 slices
chicken breast	2 oz
red onion	thin slice
Cheddar Cheese	1/4 cup (28 g)
olive oil	3 T
maple syrup	1 T
dijon mustard	1 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	46
Cal/oz	30.5
Cal/cc	1.0
% Fat	19%
% Carbohydrates	49%
% Protein	32%

Mediterranean Stuffed Zucchini

Morty got his tube changed out this past week.  He is now a proud owner of the Mic Key button.  We have been waiting for this for a long time and we are so happy to finally have it.  It's taking a bit of getting used to... just to get into the new routine of filling the syringe/tube and administering.  It's just a slightly new system.   At the hospital, my husband requested that they give my son the same size Mic Key as the PEG tube.  Apparently they didn't listen to him, and we're now running a size smaller - 14 french now vs the previous 16 french.  We'll see if that has much of an effect.  I am blending the mix a little longer to make sure everything is smooth.

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Summer brings zucchini, and this week we bought a bunch of it at the farmer's market to make this stuffed zucchini dish.  Compared to a lot of stuffed recipes (stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers, etc), this one is not tomato sauce based, so it's a little dry.  But it still has a variety of flavors with the cheese and pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes , so it's pretty good.

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After I made the zucchini, my husband and I ate a serving each, and I just put the other 2 servings in the blenderized g-tube version.  It included zucchini stuffed with the sausage, asiago cheese, pine nuts, sundried tomatoes, and scallion mixture.  I also actually threw in some of the zucchini that was hollowed out - seemed a waste to throw it out.   I added some cooked bulgur wheat for grains.  Side note: my dad used to make a cracked wheat breakfast cereal when I was growing up, that he called simply "mush".  It pretty much looks the same as cooked bulgur.

Here's the blenderized g-tube recipe:

Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
orange juice	1/2 cup
bulgur wheat	1/4 cup dry, cooked
stuffed zucchini (1/4 lb sausage)	2 serving
Sunflower Seed Oil	2 T
Dole cherry mixed fruit cup	1 container
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	40
Cal/oz	31.3
Cal/cc	1.0
% Fat	33%
% Carbohydrates	50%
% Protein	17%

Beef Tacos with Roasted Red Peppers

When I was young, one of my sisters would only eat a couple different meals, one of which was tacos, so needless to say, we ate a lot of tacos growing up.  Mexican food is definitely a favorite in my family.  And I think my all time favorite flavor is cilantro + lime.  So this blend definitely includes cilantro!  Morty might not taste it, but I can't help myself.  Plus, there is a farmer at our farmer's market that sells a bunch of cilantro for $1.  What a deal - and I can't let it go to waste.

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The recipe for this dinner came from the June 2012 Real Simple magazine.  I would link the recipe here, but I don't think it's been added to their website yet.  Basically, it's a beef/onions/corn base with all the appropriate spices, and garlicky red peppers roasted in the oven on the side (we actually just ate these laid on top of the meat, a la the picture above).  Then you add all the regular taco toppings - salsa, grated cheese, avocado...  It looks like a lot of ingredients, but it really wasn't anything particularly fancy.  I did make my own salsa this week, with some tomatoes that a neighbor was kind enough to give me.  (another great use for the BlendTec)  And you can bet that I added plenty of cilantro & lime to that salsa.  I also have a jalapeno in the salsa...  It didn't seem to bother Morty.  You can definitely leave it out if the blenderized diet you're making needs to be less spicy.

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For this g-tube blend, I pretty much made an extra taco and threw it in the blender.  I added an extra shell for carbs/calories and more peppers for the vitamins.  I also put in mango & bananas because they seem like appropriate complement!  With the previous success of adding a small amount of cheese to the blend, I kept that in here too.  The avocado also added some nice calories and fat.  It also made the blend real "smooth".  This was such a great smelling blend!  That may stem from my love of all Mexican food.

Here's the blenderized g-tube recipe:

Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
orange juice	1/2 cup
wheat tortillas, fajita style	2
ground beef taco mix	2.5 oz
red pepper, oven roasted	1/2 pepper
salsa, fresh	2 T
cilantro	2 T
avocado	1/4 fruit
grated Mexican cheese blend	2T
banana	1/2 small
mango	140 g
corn oil	2 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	36
Cal/oz	37.3
Cal/cc	1.2
% Fat	23%
% Carbohydrates	57%
% Protein	20%

Grilled Hawaiian-Style Pizza

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One of my favorite ways to make pizza is on the grill.  Yes, we grilled again tonight!  It is summer, after all...  I can buy pre-made pizza dough at a couple of my regular grocery stores.  Trader Joe's even regularly stocks a whole wheat version, so that's what we started with tonight.  I follow the basic directions from Allrecipes.com found here.  It's really quite fast and easy - the hardest part is stretching and managing the dough before it goes on the grill, but I've found if I put the stretched dough on some cornmeal, it really helps avoid some disasters.

Instead of sauce, I used canned diced tomatoes.  And for toppings tonight, I made a sort of Hawaiian pizza with ham and pineapple.  I also added some green peppers for extra veggies.

The picture above already has the pizza cut up and ready to go.  We've been bringing these quick, homemade pizzas to the Concerts on the Common.  If there was one thing I could change for the "table" version, it would be to figure out a way to cook the toppings a little more - it cooks so fast on the grill that the toppings don't have much of a chance to get all crispy.

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I was totally excited to make a blenderized version of this recipe for my little guy's g-tube.  When Morty was eating easily by mouth, pizza was one of his favorite meals.  Yes, I fed my little guy pizza.

I saved about 1/3 of the dough for the blend, spread it out, and basically just cooked it on the grill with the other pizzas.

The test for this blend is how well the mozzarella cheese would blend.  I'm keeping the volume to 2 tablespoons to see how it goes...  I'm worried it will be soft when I blend it up, but then it will get solid and thicken everything up in the fridge.  I don't mind pushing a thick blend through a syringe, but the potential for blow-outs is higher.

Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
Welch's Grape Juice	1/2 cup
Whole wheat pizza dough	5 g
banana	1/2 small
pineapple tidbits	1/2 cup
Italian style diced tomatoes	1/2 cup
green pepper	4 oz
ham	2 oz
part-skim mozzarella cheese	2 T
olive oil	2 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	36
Cal/oz	31.3
Cal/cc	1.0
% Fat	15%
% Carbohydrates	66%
% Protein	19%