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% |
I have a question but can't find a way to send you an email/message. So I thought I'd start with posting a comment. How do you wash/clean your connector tubing and bolus syringe? Do you have a special brush that you use?
ReplyDeleteHi - I'll send you an email listed on your blog and also answer here.
ReplyDeleteAs for washing the extension tube, honestly all I do is rinse it out with hot water under the faucet. My insurance covers them, so we change them out every month or so. Using a blended diet, they will almost surely get discolored/stained from the food. I've never really considered that too big of a deal. I did make a shepherd's pie with ketchup that really got the tube filmy and yucky - I did use some dish soap after that, but didn't use a brush - just put a drop in the tube and ran hot water through it.
The bolus syringes are a little different. (I should put a page up about the syringes). Our insurance covers us for the rubber tipped syringes (We get Kendall Monoject through Apria). They last about a day or two before the rubber starts to expand/break down and it gets really tough to plunge unless you coat it with oil. After reading other people's experiences, I bought 10 "squirrel syringes" (called squirrel because a squirrel rehabilitation site called "Squirrel Store" sells them). These use an O-ring in the seal, rather than a rubber tip. We actually prefer these to the insurance provided ones because they last SOOOO much longer. As in several months versus a day or two. We've literally only gone through 2 of them in the year that he's had his tube.
Again, most of the time for the syringes, I just run hot water through, and for me, that does the job. If that really grosses you out, I'm sure you could try dish soap and a baby bottle/nipple brush or something.
Here's the address for the Squirrel syringes:
http://www.squirrelstore.com/product/62-1668