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%

Heaven's Mexican Chicken Vegetable Soup

The past week and a half have been rough for Morty.  He got a cold - not a particularly bad cold - but one that does make him cough quite a bit.  And the little guy has problems managing all the phlegm.   We had been going on several weeks of really good non-puk-i-ness.  But the coughing and the phlegm have made it too hard for him, and he just hasn't been able to hold his food down - especially at night.  To be honest, it's been a bit of a nightmare.  We did go to his pediatrician and have him checked out to make sure that his lungs were still clear (they were).  And from a couple of different doctors' advice, we've totally altered his feeding to try and make things a little bit easier.

• First, we are giving smaller feeds more often.  So he's now having 4 oz every 2 hours until he goes to bed
• Second, we started Morty's humidifier/air purifier up in his room
• Third, I stopped giving him his morning feed until he's pretty much cleared the junkies out of his system (for Morty, that's around 10 am)
• Fourth, I suction the mucus out of his belly in the morning.  I do this by flushing a couple ounces of water in through the tube, and pulling it back out with the syringe.  If he's got mucus, you'll see it and know.  It floats to the top of the water level in the syringe, and then you can push most of the water back into his belly, and dispose of the mucus.
• Fifth, I took the dairy out of his mix.  Only for a while.  It may not be quite the same as when someone orally drinks milk and gets really thick mucus, but it can't hurt to help thin things out.
• Sixth, as we learned quickly, if he pukes late at night in bed, don't bother trying to give him replacement food, as it will also come up soon after.

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In desperation and fatigue from late night coughs/pukes/cleanups, last night I decided to make a special soup for Morty.  It's a soup that comes from a woman in my mother's church.  The legend behind this soup is that while you are making the soup, you say a special prayer to help those who are sick who eat the soup, and they will feel better.  Totally worth a try.  Really, after a week and a half of 1 - 4 pukes a day, it's ALL worth a try.  The soup is named "Heaven's Mexican Chicken Vegetable Soup" and is slightly adapted from a recipe by Connie Reyes.  I don't have a link to this recipe online, as the copy I have is typed and photocopied!  Here it is:

Stock:
1 split chicken breast
3 large onions
Tops of a stalk of celery
4 qts water

Soup:
4 large carrots, finely diced
3 large celery stalks, finely diced
3 large potatoes, finely diced
16 oz diced tomatoes
1 tsp minced garlic
1/2 tsp cumin (I probably put in more than this)
1/4 tsp celery seed
chili pepper, to taste (I use lots)
1 hand full small thin noodles (I used 8 oz of angel hair)

1.  Boil the chicken breast in water with celery tops and onions for 40 minutes.  Remove celery and onions and discard.
2.  Remove the chicken and dice when cool enough to handle.
3.  Strain broth and cook remainder vegetables with the spices until vegetables are tender.
4.  Bring soup to a boil and add noodles and diced chicken.  Cover and turn off heat.  Noodles will cook in hot broth in about 15 minutes.
5.  While soup is cooking say a prayer asking to bless the soup that it will heal all the sick who partake of it.


If you were in a rush, you could make this recipe with store-bought broth and rotisserie chicken.  Although there is something nice on a crisp fall evening about having a boiling pot on the stove.  The steam from the boiling pot might also help clear things up a bit.

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The blenderized g-tube version of this recipe basically takes 3 cups of the soup and blends it with a few other things.  I used 1/2 cup orange juice for the vitamin C.  I also added some honey because it's supposed to be a natural expectorant.

The blenderized mix comes out fairly low calorie, even with the extra noodles, bread, and oil.  But most people don't eat a ton when they're feeling sick anyway.

I blended this up while the soup was still pretty warm, so it flowed pretty well.  I did notice the next morning, however, that the blend had gotten quite thick - not unexpected as the pasta probably soaked up a lot of the broth, and the potatoes have a lot of starch.  To give it the "comfort food" factor, I'd probably heat it up before putting it through the tube anyway!  (I have an adult friend with a g-tube who tells me that while she doesn't taste the food that goes in through her tube, she definitely can feel if the formula or food is hot or cold.)

If the thickness is unmanageable, you could alter the soup/juice ratio.  When I made the second day of this with the leftovers, I used 2 cups of soup and 1 1/2 cups of orange juice, and it was thinner.

Here's the blenderized recipe:

orange juice	1/2 cup
Heaven's Mexican Chicken Soup	3 cups
Arnold 12 Grain Bread	2 slices
Canola Oil	3 T
honey	1 T
banana	1/2 small
diced pears in light syrup	4 oz
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	40
Cal/oz	24.4
Cal/cc	0.8
% Fat	24%
% Carbohydrates	65%
% Protein	11%

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%

Carolina BBQ style Chicken

The first time I went to North Carolina was for work.  Of course we ate BBQ.  Later I went to North Carolina for a good friend's wedding.  Of course we ate BBQ.  A few years later my sister moved to North Carolina, and I have since made several more trips down there and of course since eaten a lot more BBQ.  I love vinegar, so I love Carolina BBQ!

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Carolina BBQ chicken sandwiches
Creamy Coleslaw
Cornbread
Plums

We get our meat from a meat co-op, and just didn't have pork left this month, but we did have some chicken, so I decided to make a chicken version of it.  I use this recipe on Allrecipes.com for my BBQ.  I slow cook the meat in apple cider vinegar for around 10 hours on low and it is totally falling off the bone.

Side note - I have read that many people who tube feed use apple cider vinegar to help calm tummies.  I don't personally have direct experience with this for my son, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

We made this a slightly healthier version by using big whole wheat buns for the sandwiches.

Many times I purchase coleslaw from the deli counter and use that to top the meat, but today I decided to make my own and see how that went.  I used this recipe from Allrecipes.com.  It wasn't too hard, and I upped the normal amount of carrots - about a pound of cabbage and a 1/2 pound of carrots.

I made cornbread from a Trader Joe's mix that I had around the house.

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To make the blenderized g-tube version, basically after the basic liquid base, I just threw a serving of all the meal into the blender - everything that is on the plate in the picture.  A bun with 3 oz of meat, 3 - 4 oz of coleslaw, a serving of the cornbread (use an 8x8 pan and cut a tic-tac-toe design into it - one of those squares is a serving).

I did use the fully spicy sauce - with the Trappey's hot sauce and crushed red peppers.  My son hasn't had a problem with spice in his mix, but if you're feeding to someone with spice sensitivities, you could set aside some of the meat right after it's done cooking and before the spicy sauce is added.

If you don't have a Trader Joe's close by for the cornbread, I'm sure you could use any cornbread mix, but might need to add some extra oil to the blenderized version to make up the fat calories if your cornbread mix is a light version... a single serving of this is 290 calories and contains almost a tablespoon of oil.  In fact, if you're trying to add extra calories, you might want to add a pat of butter to the mix - just as someone might add butter to their cornbread!

Here's the tube recipe:

Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
apple juice	1/2 cup
wheat bun	1 roll
BBQ chicken	3 oz
creamy cole slaw	1 serving (3-4 oz)
corn bread	1 serving (1/9 of 8x8 pan)
plums	4 small (5 oz)
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	36
Cal/oz	35.5
Cal/cc	1.2
% Fat	24%
% Carbohydrates	57%
% Protein	19%