Showing posts with label cucumber. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cucumber. Show all posts

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Thai Inspired Gingery Peanut Noodles

Who doesn't love Pad Thai?  I went out to Thai food for lunch last Friday with some friends from work.  I am a big sucker for some delicious Thai food.  So after the lunch, I decided I had to make some Thai food at home.

Table
The recipe I used is not so much pure Thai food as it is "Thai inspired."  It's a simple take on a Chicken Pad Thai.  The recipe (similar to many of the recipes I use) is from Real Simple.  The actual recipe can be found here: Gingery Peanut Noodles with Chicken

There's a little prep work with chopping the vegetables up and making the peanut sauce, but overall, this recipe was super easy to make - and it mostly felt like it was just throwing everything together.


A couple days prior to making the dinner, I slow cooked 2 chicken breasts - about 5 hours on the high heat setting of the slow cooker.  I used one of the chicken breasts for another recipe, and the other chicken breast for this recipe.  They were pretty big breasts - after I shredded it, it was about 1 1/2 cups. If you didn't want to spend the time slow cooking a chicken breast, you could just buy a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket deli and shred it up.

For the peanut sauce, I used my trustee Blendtec.  It made the awesome sauce in no time flat.  Peanut butter, rice vinegar, soy sauce, & ginger all magically blended up.


Rather than using normal Pad Thai rice noodles, this recipe just used spaghetti - hence the "Thai inspired" rather than actually Thai.  I thought it still ended up tasting really good.


And here's everything right before throwing it all together.


The vegetables in this recipe are fresh and are not cooked.  If you put the meal together right after cooking the spaghetti, the heat from the spaghetti makes the overall meal warm.  And I kind of like the crunch from the peanut garnish and the fresh peppers.

How's this for a healthy colorful meal??  So delicious!



Tube
The recipe makes 4 servings.  For the blenderized version, I just took one of those servings (or 1/4 of the whole meal - a big heaping bowl full) and added it to the blender.


Because the recipe uses 1/2 cup of peanut butter, the meal already has a good amount of fat in it, but to help boost the calories, I did add 2  additional tablespoons of peanut butter.

I was a little worried about how thick this blend would be, since it had a lot of noodles in it.  It took a little bit of help at the beginning, but actually it blended up really well.

Here's my G-Tube blenderized version

Whole Milk 1 cup
Flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat 1/2 cup
Pineapple Juice 1/2 cup
Frozen Mango chunks 1 cup
Gingery Peanut Noodles with Chicken 1 serving
Peanut Butter 2 T
Children's Multivitamin 1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement 1/2 chew
Volume (oz) 35
Cal/oz 29.7
Cal/cc 1.0
% Fat 23%
% Carbohydrates 53%
% Protein
24%

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Grilled Lamb Kebabs & Tzatziki


Table
We have a meat share through a local farm coop, and they often give some lamb in the share.  This month we got lamb "stew meat", which is actually just pre-cut in chunks, making it perfect for kebabs & grilling (all I want to do in the summer is grill).  I wanted to try something fun, fresh, lemony and totally Greek.

A quick search found this Ina Garten recipe and some blogs (Smitten Kitchen, The Delish Dish) using the recipe.  It sounded totally delicious, and I thought it would also be a great conversion to a tube recipe.

The yogurt marinade was kind of messy, but the end result was delicious!

Tube
Here's the dinner converted to a g-tube blended diet.  I made the blend to be the lamb kebabs, tzatziki, and an apricot-grape fruit salad.  We used the lamb, peppers, and onions straight from the grill.

Notes on the lamb-
1.  We cooked the lamb to about medium well.  We had marinated it for about 24 hours, so it was still pretty tender.
2.  This lamb had some fat on it that didn't blend so well, even though I tried to pick the least fatty pieces.  I had some slight stoppage when I plunged the blend in, so I put the remaining blend through a strainer, and that seemed to help.


Whole Milk 1 cup
plain yogurt, whole milk 1/2 cup
lemonade 1/2 cup
pitas whole wheat (large) 1 pita
apricot, canned extra light syrup 1/2 cup
grapes 1/2 cup
honey 1 T
cucumber 1/2 cup
peppers 1/3 med pepper
onions slice, 1/4" thick
lamb 2 oz
olive oil 3 T
Children's Multivitamin 1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement 1/2 chew
Volume (oz) 38
Cal/oz 30.8
Cal/cc 1.0