Ginger Scallion Salmon Burgers

Ah, Memorial Day...  the unofficial start of summer!  which means, along with the fantastic weather, we start grilling regularly again - yay!

The latest issue of Real Simple has the entire recipe section dedicated to summer grilling - they have some really fantastic looking burgers and sides - and not just ground beef burgers, but also pork burgers, lamb burgers, turkey burgers, mushroom burgers, and salmon burgers.  I'll admit that we've already tried the pork burgers (we sometimes get ground pork with our meat co-op, but often have a hard time figuring out what to make with it.  We also sometimes get ground lamb - same story - not sure what to do with it besides a shepherd's pie)  So I'm pretty excited to try a few more.  Besides the burgers, this issue also has 10 ideas for barbecue sides.  For tonight, I chose salmon burgers and a side of marinated zucchini.

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I think because this recipe is still new, it's not yet listed on the Real Simple website.  It is in the June 2013 issue and will probably be posted there in the near future.  I must be on an Asian kick, because I just recently did a blended Thai Gingery Peanut Noodles recipe, and this salmon burger has a decidedly Asian flavor.  But the burgers also do kind of remind me of crab cakes, and the jalapeno in the carrot slaw certainly gives it a nice kick. (of course you can skip the pepper, if you prefer, but why would you???)

Here's the ingredients for the burgers:
1 1/4 pounds skinless salmon fillet, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 T finely grated fresh ginger
2 scallions, chopped
1/2 cup panko bread crumbs
1 large egg
salt & pepper

Basically, you put all that in a bowl, and mix it together with your hands - kinda like making meat loaf.

Then you form it into patties, refrigerate, and then grill.  (makes 4 patties) and add to some big buns (we chose whole wheat).

On top of the burger is a carrot slaw.  Here are the ingredients for the slaw:
2 medium carrots, grated
1/2 jalapeno pepper, chopped
2 t rice vinegar
1 t canola oil
salt & pepper

Just combine all those ingredients together and refrigerate for a while.

So here are my thoughts on making this recipe:

Salmon: Try and get an already deboned salmon.  The fillet I got was not deboned, so I spent a lot of time picking out the little bones... I was trying to be thrifty and save a couple bucks... not worth it.  Surely 10 minutes of my time is worth $2, right?

Panko bread crumbs: I was able to find these in a whole wheat version.  Adds some whole grains to the mix

Carrots: I was a little smart with these and bought the pre-grated carrots.  I'm not sure if there's much of a price difference, but at least I didn't have to peel and grate.

Side Dish: The marinated raw zucchini dish is really good and tastes a lot like seaweed salad from a sushi restaurant.  However, to prepare the dish, I used a vegetable peeler to thinly slice the zucchini.  This makes a really pretty salad, but gets a little hard when you get to the end of the zucchini.  Rather than try to slice the whole zucchini up, I just sliced a little more than half of it for the salad and threw the parts I couldn't peel without slicing my fingers off into the blender.

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The blenderized version of this recipe is pretty easy.  I just threw a whole made up burger (salmon, carrot slaw, and bun) into the blender with the juice, fruit, and zucchini bits.  Then added the oil, calcium and vitamins.  As usual, I suggest mixing those ingredients up before adding the milk and kefir to avoid getting too foamy of a mix.  By the way, I doubled this recipe when I made it, thanks to my giant Wildside pitcher for the Blentec.

To be honest, I spilled some of the blend on the counter as I was pouring it into the carafe we use to store the blend in our refrigerator, so I'm not 100% sure on the total volume, but it was at least 32 oz, plus a little more.  What can I say, I'm a little bit of a mess sometimes.

The blend came out a nice thin consistency, so it will be really easy to bolus plunge.  It also came out with a little bit different nutrition content than my typical blends - lower carb content, and higher protein content than usual.  But the calories per unit volume still came out at pretty much my typical 1.2 cal/cc.

Here's the g-tube blenderized recipe:

Whole Milk	1 cup
Flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
Apple cranberry juice	1/2 cup
diced pears in light syrup	4 oz
Ginger scallion salmon burger	1 serving
zucchini	3 oz
Canola Oil	3 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	35
Cal/oz	36.1
Cal/cc	1.2
% Fat	24%
% Carbohydrates	48%
% Protein	28%

As a side note, Morty has been doing a lot better at oral feeding.  Of course, he doesn't get a whole lot of calories in, but he's enjoying it a lot more, and gagging a LOT less.  I got him some of those yogurts packaged in tubes, and he loves the novelty of eating out of the tube!

Bland Blend for Stomach Flu Vomitorium

Morty caught a nasty stomach flu virus.  It started out with a little extra vomiting (he vomits a lot anyway - about once a day lately), a temperature, and some general grumpiness.  By day 3 and 4, the temperature was down, but the vomiting had gone out of control - as in every time I tried to put anything in his tube - even just an ounce or two.  Sometimes when a non verbal little one gets sick, it's hard to figure things out.  And when they're tube fed, it can be hard to know how you should make adjustments.  When I thought about it, when most people get sick, they often eat very little because their stomach hurts.  But when you're plunging food right into someone else's stomach, disaster can happen... and what is just vomiting for some kids, can be a violent mess for a tube fed, mostly non-verbal spastic quadriplegic kid.

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So after 2 days of keeping absolutely nothing down, we decided we needed to get him hydrated.  I followed the directions on giving water from this site.  Here's another good one (I tend to trust the hospital websites on this type of thing more than message boards...)  By the way, "vomitorium" comes from that article - it's quite fitting.  When we started adding back in some solids, I mixed 1 oz blend with 3 oz water every 30 minutes.  The recommendation is to start with bland foods - rice, bananas, dry toast, etc.  For this post, we'll call that "Table".

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So for the mix, bland food is what I made up for his blend.  The first blend was basically rice, pears, and some juice.  When that worked for a day, I made up this blend.

It's quite different from my basic recipe in that there's no fats, so I was surprised when I worked out the numbers and found that it was pretty close to my goal calorie content.

Bland Post Stomach Flu Blend
Grape Juice	1 cup
banana	1 medium
white rice	2 cup
canned sliced peaches (with juice)	15 oz can
eggs, scrambled	2 eggs
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
Volume (oz)	40
Cal/oz	26.7
Cal/cc	0.9
% Fat	6%
% Carbohydrates	84%
% Protein	11%

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.

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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!

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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%

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!

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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:

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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%

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.