Black Bean and Lentil Chili

In light of my husband's gall bladder removal surgery, I have been busy hunting for some no or low fat main course meals, and since he's still not supposed to lift more than 10 pounds (and our five month old is double that) I need them to be meals that can cook themselves, because I don't have a lot of time or extra free hands to be cooking with. Just when I thought I would never be able to make the needed adjustments, who should come to my rescue, but THRIVE!

I had an idea for some chili, and threw a whole bunch of my THRIVE ingredients into our big pot.

 I added water, and let it simmer by itself while I dealt with my kids and other household obligations. When it was done, I dished up a bowl for my hubby, he said, "Wow. That's really good." I don't know why he always has a surprised tone to his voice, he should know by now that if I'm making it with THRIVE, it's going to be good. I forgot to ask him to rate it, but since he's been depressed about his restricted diet, and he actually smiled and complimented this dish, I'd say it rates pretty high up there. We put a little fat free sour cream on top, but the flavor was so nice, we didn't even really miss the shredded cheese that normally dons our meals.

Personally, I'd rate this recipe an 8.5 for taste, a 10 for nutrition, and a 10 for ease. Dump it all in a pot, add water, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 50-60 minutes. And done. It doesn't get much easier then that. And as far as health goes, a 1 cup serving of this has only 200 calories, less than 1.5 grams of fat, over 14 grams of fiber, and more than 15 grams of protein. It is also completely vegetarian, thanks to the TVP.  So it is quite a good-for-you dish as well. You might want a little extra salt - I know a lot of people are trying to watch their sodium, so I always err on the side of not enough salt in my recipes, and let people add more to their individual bowls if they want.

Anyway, here's what I put in it. This yielded about 10 cups of chili, so feel free to halve it if you need:

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups lentils (THRIVE sells lentils, but I needed to use up some others I still had, which is why they're not pictured below)
• 2 cups THRIVE Instant black beans
• 3 tbsp THRIVE  Mixed Bell Peppers
• 1/3 cup THRIVE Freeze-Dried Chopped Onions
• 3/4 cup THRIVE Freeze-Dried Sweet Corn
• 1/2 cup THRIVE Taco TVP
• 1/3 cup THRIVE Tomato Powder
• 1 tsp Ground Cumin
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1/4 tsp Chili Powder
• 11-12 cups Water

There you have it. Dump the ingredients in the pot. Add your water (start with the 11 cups, and add 1 more at the end if you don't want your chili as thick). Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 50-60 minutes (that's how long it takes the lentils to cook). It's important to use THRIVE's INSTANT Black Beans, not the regular black beans. Regular Black Beans will take hours to soak and cook. The Instant Black beans have been par-boiled, which eliminates the need to soak them, cut cooking time down to 20-30 minutes, and yet still preserves the shelf life at 25 years. My kind of beans. :-) And just so you know, these are whole beans, not bean flakes that only turned into refried beans. Here's what they look like.

For those wanting the full nutritional value, I plugged my recipe into livestrong.com's recipe creator (I'm using their daily plate feature to count calories and try and lose weight). Here's the breakdown:

This recipe is also the first, of what I hope will be many, of my "Freezerless Meals". I've got a friend who makes some great freezer meals to have on hand, and I've enjoyed going to her classes and making those meals. But I don't have room in my freezer to store anymore ready made meals. I do have room in my pantry though. Because everything gets added to the water at the same time and cooks together, this a meal you can make ahead of time, throw in a ziploc bag, write the water and cooking instructions on the outside, and leave in the pantry for future need. It takes just as long to cook it as thawing and baking a freezer meal (if not less time), and you could also halve the recipe, put it in a tall mason jar with some decorative ribbon, and now you've got a great gift for just about any occasion (who doesn't love food?) 

To order your THRIVE foods for this great recipe, just contact me at ThriveWithHemsath@gmail.com or call me at 714-683-7562.

Ham and Pineapple Pizza

We had the chance to have dinner with some old friends last night, and decided to do pizza. My friend provided the crust and cheese, and told her I'd bring all the sauce and toppings using my THRIVE ingredients. I know I've already done a review on pizza before, but being on vacation, I don't have too much time for lots of new recipes. And we did a different combination this time: Ham and Pineapple!

So the Ham TVP was easily rehydrated - pour some hot water on (not too much, to prevent losing flavor in drain off water) put on a lid, let it sit for for 3-5 minutes, add a little more hot water if its too chewy, and when all the water is absorbed, it's done. 

Hydrating the pineapple is a little more tricky. I used cold water, but after 5-10 minutes, the big chunks of pineapple were still far from being hydrated. 15 minutes - still not enough. Thankfully, in a can on FD pineapple, there are large chunks, and small crumb type bits. Those small bits rehydrated beautifully, and this was the perfect way to use up the smaller pieces, saving the bigger pieces for snacking on (FD Pineapple is the yummiest snack straight from the can!) So I used the smaller bits on the pizza and left the larger pieces in their rehydrating container and stuck them in the fridge. This morning, they were rehydrated wonderfully.

So with pineapple, small pieces will rehydrate in cold water in 5-10 minutes. The large chunks are best left in cold water to rehydrate in the fridge overnight.

As for the pizza, my friends said the sauce was great (tomato powder reconstituted with water to desired consistency, then seasoned with garlic salt and italian seasoning). The toppings were pretty good. As an every day replacement of ham and pineapple pizza, they gave it a 5. But as an emergency food, they said it was easily an 8 or 9.

Sausage and Bell Pepper Pizza

Pizza recipes are a little tricky, because everyone has different preferences when it comes to pizza -- how thick the crust should be, how much sauce, how much cheese, what kinds of toppings, etc. But if you want a good food storage pizza recipe to try out and then tweak according to your preference, try this one I made a few days ago.

I was bringing pizza to a party I was doing, and wanted to have enough for my family as well. So I doubled the crust recipe and did a long rectangle pizza and a round pizza, which is why you'll see both shapes in the photos. What you won't see in the photos is the crust in the making - I forgot to take some, sorry! Hopefully it will be easy enough to explain.

I'll review and explain the dough, the sauce, the cheese, and the toppings, all separately, so we'll start with the dough. This crust recipe is one I have used before from my Aunt Bev. I substituted the regular milk, eggs and shortening with their THRIVE components and didn't notice a difference at all. Here's the recipe I used for a single batch:

Pizza Dough

1 tbsp yeast + 1/2 c warm (but not too hot) water

1 Tbsp sugar

2 Tbsp THRIVE shortening powder + 1/2 Tbsp water 

1 tsp salt

2 1/4 Tbsp THRIVE powdered milk (non-Instant) + 3/4 c water

1 Tbsp THRIVE whole egg powder + 2 Tbsp water

2 ½ - 3 c flour

THRIVE Corn meal

1. In a small bowl, dissolve yeast in ½ c warm water. Add sugar.

2.In a saucepan, combine 3/4 cup + 1/2 Tbsp water with shortening powder, salt, and milk powder. Scald.

3.Cool and add yeast mixture.

4.Beat in 1 Tbsp egg powder and 2 Tbsp water.

5.Add flour. Mix well and knead.

6.Let rise for 15 min. great 18 x 12” pan and sprinkle with cornmeal. Stretch dough to cover pan.

7. Bake at 400-425 for 10 min.

8. Add sauce and toppings. Bake another 10 min or until done.

*Notes:

1. In the original recipe, you can use shortening or butter, so if you don't have shortening powder on hand, try making it with butter powder instead.

2. Since the shortening is in powder form and doesn't need to melt, I'm thinking it might be possible to skip the whole scalding and cooling phase, and just combine the shortening, milk, and egg powders, with their appropriate water amounts, straight into the yeast mixture. I will try omitting this step next time I make it and let you know how it turns out.

3. This makes for a pretty thick crust. If you like a thinner crust, really hone your dough stretching skills, and you can get a small personal pizza on the side in addition to your 8"x12".

Okay, now on to the sauce and toppings. I used THRIVE Tomato powder, Bell Peppers, TVP Sausage and Freeze Dried Mozzarella Cheese. (See below)

For the sauce, I used 1/4 c Tomato powder, and 3/4 cup water. Then I added 1/4 tsp salt, 3/4 tsp pizza seasoning, and an additional dash of garlic salt. But you can season yours according to your preference. And if you like a thicker or runnier sauce, simply adjust the amount of water you add. That's the beauty. I did a double batch of this sauce and it was more than enough for my double batch of dough.

Then it was time to reconstitute the toppings. Reconstitution is a fine art. It's not too hard, but it does take a little practice to get the hang of it. That's why I like THRIVE foods to much. They taste so good, I don't mind incorporating them into my every day diet, which means I get practice on how to use them in my every day recipes. I'd hate for an emergency to come up and not know how to use the food I had stored up.

My Ham Fried Rice experience taught me about the loss of TVP flavor in excess water. So this time I did 1/2 cup of Sausage TVP in small bowl, and added 1/4 c hot water on top. I put the lid on and let it sit for about 5 minutes. I noticed it needed a little more water, so I added another 2 Tbsp. That was just the right amount. There was no excess water to drain off, so the full flavor was left in my sausage pieces. 

The bell peppers were a ration of 1 part pepper, 2 parts hot water. Cover and let them soak (preferably with a lid on) for a few minutes until tender.  Drain the excess water. (there was a bit of excess water to drain,  but I didn't think it drained away the flavor of the peppers at all).

Here's a close up picture of the TVP and peppers once reconstituted.

Then it came time for the cheese. However much cheese you want, place it in a bowl with a lid, and add enough cold water to cover it. Let it sit for 3-5 minutes. Once rehydrated, drain off the excess water. Now that's the tricky part. Getting all the excess water out. I had heard a tip that once the bulk was drained, you should use a paper towel or cheese cloth, put you newly hydrated cheese in there and give it a light squeeze to get out some of the extra water. So I tried that. Only problem is that by squeezing it, I had mushed the cheese into a ball. And when i tried to separate them into individual shreds again, it didn't work.  So as you can see in the picture below, my cheese didn't look very pretty.

 I had to put it on the pizza in little clumps, rather than evenly dispersed shreds. This is what it looked like before I added the toppings:

It might have looked funny before, but guess what? You couldn't tell a difference once it was baked! The cheese melted together beautifully and spread out evenly over the pizza. I had some leftover mozzarella in the fridge we needed to use up, so I did the below pizza half regular shredded and half reconstituted clumps. And when it came out of the over, it looked uniform. You couldn't tell a difference.

Not only could we not see a difference, but we couldn't taste a difference either. We tried a slice of the regular cheese and a slice of the THRIVE cheese, and they tasted the same. So if your first attempt at reconstituting the cheese turns out to be not so perfect in appearance, don't fret. It will still melt and taste just like real cheese (because it IS real cheese).

Now, on that note, let me just say that I have seen and tasted perfectly reconstituted THRIVE cheese before, moist, but not clumpy, individual shreds separated, the kind you could sprinkle on top of a salad or taco. After this attempt at reconstituting the cheese myself, I've spoken with other consultants to get their tips, and next time I'm sure it will be better. I'll do a future blog specifically on how to reconstitute cheese once I fine tune my methods.

But to summarize the whole pizza -- Dustin (my hubby) gave it a 7 or 8 as an every day meal, and an 8 as emergency food, mainly because there was too much crust for his liking.  I don't know how long this recipe took me to make. I had family over and kept starting and stopping between stages to deal with other things.  Some things to improve on for next time, but all in all a great little comfort food made possible by THRIVE.