Superbowl Chili

We're in the middle of a deep freeze here in New England.  With the cold and the Superbowl approaching - even though our Patriots didn't make it this year :(  -  I decided to make a chili recipe using this recipe from Real Simple.  It's a black bean and zucchini chili.  I like it because it has some extra veggies thrown in to help make it a more balanced meal and it's so delicious and comforting.  If you're planning a Superbowl party, I think this is a great recipe to use - for everyone, even the Tubie in the house!

Table
This is a slow cooker recipe, but unfortunately, the night I decided to make it, it was too late to use the slow cooker.  No problem, though.  It's easy enough to just make on the stove top too.

I sauteed the onions in a deep pan for a while and then added the zucchini

In a separate pan, I cooked up the ground beef.  Then you really just add the hamburger and all the rest of the ingredients into the zucchini-onion mixture.

My son helped carry the canned goods from the pantry to the countertop.  If the pan wasn't already hot, he probably would have helped dump them in...  By the way, I can't believe how relatively full his face looks now - much different from the super-skinny boy of a year ago.

And this is the resulting colorful mixture:

Tube
To make the blenderized version of this recipe, I used 2 cups of the chili, but that actually turned out to be too much volume of a blend and required some batching of the remaining ingredients, so for the write up, I've taken the chili down to 1 1/2 cups.  I also used 2 slices of a big round multigrain sourdough bread (at about 150 calories a piece).  If I were to make this again, I might substitute one of those big slices with some whole grain (oatmeal, bulger, cereal, etc) - just to make this blend a little more fibrous, if you know what I mean. ahem.

After the Shepard's Pie blend, I was a little nervous that the tomato paste and ground beef combination might cause more red, greasy film on the extension tubes and syringes.  But this blend was actually really clean.   (The real culprit must have been the ketchup - lesson learned)

At 0.9 calories per cc, the calorie density is on the lower side of my typical blends, but still pretty decent and fairly comparable to a lot of formulas.  Of course if you wanted to bump that up, I'd probably add whole grain - in addition to the 2 slices of bread.

And here's the G-tube blenderized recipe:

Black Bean & Zucchini Chili
Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
Sliced Peaches (canned with light syrup)	7.5 oz
Black Bean & Zucchini Chili	1 1/2 cup
Trader Joes Multigrain Sourdough	2 slices
Sunflower Seed Oil	3 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	39
Cal/oz	27.7
Cal/cc	0.9
% Fat	25%
% Carbohydrates	57%
% Protein	18%

Tangy Pork Chops

I like the ease of cooking with a slow cooker, so this week I went searching for new slow cooker recipes for  some pork chops I had on hand.  I looked on Pinterest and found this recipe from Taste of Home.  It's kind of a stewed vegetable sauce to go with the pork chops.  It was pretty good.

Table

The one thing I changed from the recipe was adding more peppers.  I cut up a green pepper, a red pepper, and a yellow pepper, instead of just one.  Just a little way to add some more veggies.  Otherwise, I followed the recipe pretty closely.

Morty even helped out a little bit and we mixed the sauce up together.  (Shortly after I took this picture, he tried to shove his right fist into the sauce, which was precariously perched on his lap, so this is the only picture I got)

The table version of this meal turned out great.  I love how you do all the work for a slow cooker meal ahead of time - I started this in the early afternoon - so that by the time dinner rolls by, everything is already done.

Tube
To make the blenderized version of this meal, I used 2 oz of one of the pork chops and about a cup of the veggie sauce - i.e. the rest of the recipe ingredients.  I tried to make sure that I scooped up a bunch of the peppers and tomatoes in my measuring cup to put in the blender.

I planned to make this with 1 1/2 cups of brown rice, leftover from our meal, but unfortunately, we only had a little over a cup, and I wasn't going to cook more rice, so I ended up substituting a slice of bread in our mix.  Oh well.

Even though I list Trader Joe's Omega-3 Carrot Orange Juice, you could really use whatever juice you have on hand.  I just happened to have purchased this juice on a recent grocery shopping trip.  I think I thought I was just getting carrot juice when I put it in the cart, but noticed later that it contains sardines, anchovies, and tilapia!  Sound gross?  Yeah, maybe.  But I can't taste any of the fish.  And it does have the good Omega-3's that the nutritionist wants us to get.  She suggests fish 2 times a week - even for Morty's blends.  We don't quite get to that yet - but I'm trying to do more fish.

I also list applesauce, but we actually put a homemade low-sugar apple butter in our mix.  It came from a recent apple picking adventure that resulted in far too many apples than I knew what to do with.  I've been adding apple butter to a lot of his mixes lately.  I'm actually not even sure what the difference is between apple sauce and apple butter - maybe apple butter has more of the liquid cooked out of it?

Now, even though I didn't exactly follow it, here's my planned g-tube recipe:

Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
TJ's Omega-3 Carrot Orange Juice	1/2 cup
brown rice	1 1/2 cup
applesauce	1 cup
Tangy Pork Chop Veggie Sauce	1 cup
pork chops	2 oz
Canola Oil	3 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	40
Cal/oz	33.9
Cal/cc	1.1
% Fat	23%
% Carbohydrates	65%
% Protein	13%

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.

Table

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!

Tube

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%