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%

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.

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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.

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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%

Beef Tacos with Roasted Red Peppers

When I was young, one of my sisters would only eat a couple different meals, one of which was tacos, so needless to say, we ate a lot of tacos growing up.  Mexican food is definitely a favorite in my family.  And I think my all time favorite flavor is cilantro + lime.  So this blend definitely includes cilantro!  Morty might not taste it, but I can't help myself.  Plus, there is a farmer at our farmer's market that sells a bunch of cilantro for $1.  What a deal - and I can't let it go to waste.

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The recipe for this dinner came from the June 2012 Real Simple magazine.  I would link the recipe here, but I don't think it's been added to their website yet.  Basically, it's a beef/onions/corn base with all the appropriate spices, and garlicky red peppers roasted in the oven on the side (we actually just ate these laid on top of the meat, a la the picture above).  Then you add all the regular taco toppings - salsa, grated cheese, avocado...  It looks like a lot of ingredients, but it really wasn't anything particularly fancy.  I did make my own salsa this week, with some tomatoes that a neighbor was kind enough to give me.  (another great use for the BlendTec)  And you can bet that I added plenty of cilantro & lime to that salsa.  I also have a jalapeno in the salsa...  It didn't seem to bother Morty.  You can definitely leave it out if the blenderized diet you're making needs to be less spicy.

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For this g-tube blend, I pretty much made an extra taco and threw it in the blender.  I added an extra shell for carbs/calories and more peppers for the vitamins.  I also put in mango & bananas because they seem like appropriate complement!  With the previous success of adding a small amount of cheese to the blend, I kept that in here too.  The avocado also added some nice calories and fat.  It also made the blend real "smooth".  This was such a great smelling blend!  That may stem from my love of all Mexican food.

Here's the blenderized g-tube recipe:

Whole Milk	1 cup
flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
orange juice	1/2 cup
wheat tortillas, fajita style	2
ground beef taco mix	2.5 oz
red pepper, oven roasted	1/2 pepper
salsa, fresh	2 T
cilantro	2 T
avocado	1/4 fruit
grated Mexican cheese blend	2T
banana	1/2 small
mango	140 g
corn oil	2 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	36
Cal/oz	37.3
Cal/cc	1.2
% Fat	23%
% Carbohydrates	57%
% Protein	20%