My Twelfth recipe - Shrimp Scampi -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

My Twelfth recipe for the new cookbook - Shrimp Scampi

1 Shrimp Scampi

or

1 unit. cooked shrimp
1/2 unit pasta
1/2 unit broccoli
garlic
lots and lots of butter
Heavy cream
dash of white wine
too much olive oil
lemon squeeze
use pasta water to thin out the meal



This recipe is dedicated to New Orleans. 

So I'm watching the New NCIS New Orleans show, when I realized I did not have shrimp on the menu.  Shrimp Scampi is perfect for puree.  Great garlic flavor, extra heavy cream for putting on weight.  Also found out that the non-mint toothpaste does not kill the smell of the garlic.


SHRIMP
OK, so I'm a fan of Gulf of Mexico shrimp.  My mom use to buy it from the fish-lady who would come around in New Orleans.  But I'm not against Maine shrimp either.  The point is - when you puree it doesn't matter what the shrimp looked like in the first place.  Shrimp does get swallowed up in the flavors of a pureed shrimp scampi.  With the main dish, you get to bite a shrimp tail with a little sauce.  Add extra shrimp to the puree.

PASTA
Any pasta will do - but I still think if you are making it yourself, use angel hair pasta.  There is something magical about angel hair.  Other pastas have the look of "my kids' pasta".  Our family has also been experimenting with rice pastas which are great for survivors with gluten issues.  When I switched the pasta on the kids, they didn't even notice.

BROCCOLI
Except maybe peppers, broccoli has always been my favorite vegetable to go with garlic and pasta.  Just blanch the broccoli, or even cook it in the pasta water.  You are going to use the pasta water to thin it out anyway.  I use florets, if you are going to use stalks, I recommend over-cooking them.

Last night I substituted zucchini, which purees beautifully.

SPICES AND CREAM
Lots of Butter!  Lots of Garlic! Lots of Cream!  The more cream you add the longer the puree stays warm.  When the dish gets cold, it is not as much fun.  Perfectly fine to re-microwave.  I do not recommend letting this dish refrigerate for a meal the next day.   Something about shrimp scampi two days in a row loses the charm.  Not to mention your co-workers will appreciate your breathe.

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My Eleventh recipe - Swordfish Dijonnaise -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

My Eleventh recipe for the new cookbook - Swordfish Dijonnaise

This recipe is dedicated everyone that ever worked at the Versailles Restaurant in Lexington, MA. 

Although the Versailles restaurant was sold to Bertucci's more than a decade ago, most of the recipes are still locked in my head.  Before I started working there, I was pretty much a yellow mustard-kind-of-guy.  Working in a french restaurant, gave me a chance to taste different kinds of mustards.  

I was a waiter there while in college.  The cooking area was quite accessible by the waitstaff, so I often watched the Chef's prepare the food.  The chef's used to joke that I was a chef-wannabe.

One of the most common employee meals was chicken dijonnaise with saffron rice and julienne vegetables.  Lucky for us today, Whole Foods had a sale on fresh swordfish, so I made a seafood variation.  Swordfish is very easy to puree, and I have had great success with a regular blender. (Before I got my Vitamix)

This is the first recipe that I would drop in the category of SPECIAL DINNER.  Most of the recipes so far have been comfort foods,  one of the big losses for eating pureed food is not being able to eat "fancy" foods for celebrations like anniversaries.

1 Swordfish Dijonnaise

or

1 unit. grilled swordfish or chicken

1 unit turmeric rice

1 unit sauteed vegetables

Dijon Mustard

Heavy cream

dash of white wine

too much olive oil

SWORDFISH

Nearly any white fish will work - haddock, cod, flounder, etc.   I recommend buying fresh fish instead of frozen, as it is easier to puree.  No need to season the fish before you grill it.  You will add the mustard to the blender.

MUSTARD

Mustard is one of the spices that most oral cancer survivors can still taste during treatment.  Remember to start "Light", because you can always add more mustard later.  Warning, It might also burn open mouth sores.

TURMERIC RICE

Cook the rice with some mild onion, turmeric, and salt and pepper.  Pretty simple recipe really.  If you can afford Saffron, add it.  Saffron is one of the most expensive spices in the world.  The nice thing about turmeric rice, is it makes the puree a bright yellow,  which is far better than the typical grey meals of the other recipes.

VEGETABLE

You don't have to get fancy and julienne the vegetables, unless you have two people eating and one wants a plate of food, while the other has a bowl.  Typically, I use root vegetables like carrots, rutabaga, turnip, etc.  Although the Versailles would blanch the vegetable first,  for this recipe, I typically cut up the vegetables and toss them into the rice while it is cooking. Keep it simple!

PUREE

Place the swordfish, rice, vegetables in the blender.  Add mustard, heavy cream, and additional water.  Although Swordfish Dijonnaise sounds fancy, it is really a simple recipe.  Hence, the reason the chefs often made it as the employee meal of the shift.

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My Tenth recipe - Chicken and Dumplings -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

My Tenth recipe for the new cookbook - Chicken and Dumplings

This recipe is dedicated to Rosie, a caregiver, I met on-line that is at her wits end to get her father to eat.  I told her what I was doing, and asked her what his favorite recipes are and she said "Thank you! He's a steak-and-potato and chicken and dumpling guy."

My Tenth recipe - Chicken and Dumplings -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

IMPORTANCE OF CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS

Normally, I would lump Chicken and Dumplings in the soup category and say "It's not really a meal." and be done with it.  But Chicken and Dumplings is more than a meal.   It is one of the most important foods that refreshes the soul.

I grew up in a Coast Guard Family with seven brothers and sisters.  This couldn't be done today.  My mom had to make one dinner that everyone loved - or they were allowed to not eat for the night.  Well, not really, but everyone knew dinnertime was dinnertime.  My mom's recipe included Bisquick(TM) dumplings.  To this day, I love Bisquick(TM) Dumplings.  I pray for the day that Betty Crocker starts to sell organic Bisquick, so I can bring them back into my organic household.  My favorite memories are those days in the Fall, when the hard frost is on the ground but the snow hasn't fallen yet, and there I looked out the window at the bird feeder while dining on dumplings.

Fast forward to 2014.  Now most friends know, I grew up on D&D, and have enjoyed Live-Action Role-playing with a Group out of Massachusetts called Legends, and have staffed for almost 20 years.  Last Spring, I was afraid that my second cancer might end my LARPing career.  All the players knew this.

Now typically on a Saturday evening, there is a lull in the game, and the players gather around a fire and share a dinner that they cooked themselves.  I was dressed as the Governor of the town, when I was invited to join the villagers for dinner.  Now at this point in my radiation treatment, there was not much that I could eat.  I really needed to have little spice, and be a semi-solid food, with a large glass of water to help wash it down. "Governor, we have Chicken and Dumplings, care to join us?"  I almost cried.  Not only was the soup soft, but the dumpling were like mom-used-to-make.  There is something magical about the way the dumpling holds the warmth of love as it slides down the throat.   I'm just pleased that the players didn't ask the Governor for any special privileges, because I would have granted them in an instant.

ETHNIC VARIATIONS

Every ethnic group has a variation of stone soup.  Dump the vegetables: boil them in a slow cooker; and add a touch of seasoning.  With my daughter being a vegetarian, my wife's Matzo ball soup has gone chicken-less the last couple of years.  Which is quite alright, because she used to only make it with white meat, and I'm a dark meat kind of guy.  However, the Matzo balls are to die-for.  No wonder it is called Jewish penicillin.

SLOW COOKING

The most important part about chicken and dumpling is slow cooking.  Before I was married, I lived with my friend, Bill Kenerson, and I still remember the day he slow cooked a whole chicken for at least 4 hours.  The most important part about a good chicken soup, is the smell that fills the whole house.  When you walk through the front door that smell makes you an elementary student again.

CHICKEN BROTH

My sister-in-law, Dorothy, is a champion at making chicken broth.  I can only bow to her expertise.  Going through this past cancer treatment, she specifically made me a batch of chicken broth.  You know it is a great batch when the chicken fat has congealed in the top of the container.  It is SO IMPORTANT to cook the chicken - bone and all.  There is a magical ingredient that can only be found in chicken bones.

PUREE ISSUES

Yea, there is not much to pureeing chicken and dumplings.  However, there are two main issues in pureeing this soup.

The biggest issue is making sure the soup isn't too hot.  Unlike most soups, everyone wants to take a bigger bite of this soup.  So, blowing on the soup, doesn't really cool off spoon full of soup.  I really recommend not using a spoon for this meal.

Secondarily, white meat does not puree well.  There always seems to be some chalky bits of chicken and get stuck in the throat or in the teeth.  If you are not going to boil us a whole bird, I recommend using thigh meat with the skin still attached.  The skin and bone are very easy to remove after cooking, and before pureeing.

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Spoon, sip, or chug -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

HOW SHOULD YOU EAT PUREED MEALS?
How should you treat a pureed meal.  Is it a soup?  Is it a drink? Is it a smoothie?  The simple answer is yes.  It really depends on where you are in your treatment process.

When I was going through treatment and my mouth was full of sores. I couldn't eat a thing without my magic mouthwash.   Numb the whole mouth and then eat.  I generally had about fifteen minutes to eat.  Most of the time I was the zombie eating very slowly.  Caregivers know that you try so hard to get the patient to eat, and watching them take 15 minute it eat just a little amount of food is frustrating.

Just today, I was online when a daughter/caregiver was at her wits end begging for a better way to get food into her father.

Spoons are for people you want to eat and feed themselves.   When you are not at that point, it is clear that using the spoon was an effort in futility.  To much work and pain for the amount of food I was getting into the belly.  Each small amount of food, required a huge effort on swallowing too.

The other day, I went out to lunch with my sister-in-law at Panera Bread, it was the first time I used a spoon in months.  Mostly, because I cannot open my mouth wide enough to get the spoon in.  I recommend giving up the spoon and treat the meal more like a drink.

Remember, for the survivor, food is no longer fun.  It hurts to eat.  Many have lost the sense of taste.  The food choices suck (but I'm working on that).  And worst of all, the people you love the most are berating you to eat.  After a while, I stopped listening to my wife, because I didn't want to hear it from her.  Luckily, my son stepped up and said "Dad, you have to eat."

Now my son wrote an essay about DON'T POKE THE BEAR.  At our lowest point during treatment all we want to do is sleep and growl.  We get pretty good at both.  When my son woke me up from napping he never knew what he would find - happy dad or grumpy bear.  Which to be depended mostly on whether I slept through taking my next dose of pain-killer. . . 

So, I'm a big fan of chugging food.  Chugging allows a mouthwash pain killer to work, and then just pass the food down the gullet as quickly as possible. The major factor in deciding whether you should sip or chug is how hot the food is.  Cold food gives a throat freeze which can be very painful.  Hot food can easily burn the lining of the mouth.  So what is the right temperature?  Think a baby bottle.

Use the same techniques that you use to test if a baby bottle is too hot.  I always did the put a little on my forearm.  A baby will chug down the bottle if they are hungry.  Unlike a baby, the cancer survivor eat their food very slowly.

However, this all sounds good, but you have to be able to have the throat control to be able to swallow, and not choke on it.  So if they cannot chug without aspirating, don't even attempt it. 

My family would make me lukewarm cups of soup, after about 1/2 hour, they would swap out the cup for a different lukewarm cup of soup.  They would never make a comment about how much I ate, they just kept a fresh cup near me..  They realized that eating, for me, was an hour long process.  

Unless there are other people sitting at the dining-room table, I never ate there.  Nothing more lonely than sitting alone at the dinner table. 

I often would sit in front of the TV and watch AMERICAN CHOPPER (mostly because I didn't have to worry about keeping track of the plot) and they would place the food next to me.  Every once in a while, I would be inspired to take a gulp.  Sure the magic mouth wash had worn off, but I wouldn't realize that until after I swallowed.

COMMENTS
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Chemo treatment at Dana Farber

My Ninth recipe - Chicken Cacciatore -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

My Ninth recipe for the new cookbook - Chicken Cacciatore

1 Chicken Cacciatore with pasta

or

1 unit. breaded and cooked cooked chicken
1 unit roasted red pepper
1 unit un-spiced tomato sauce
pesto, capers, oregano, and garlic to taste
dash of white wine
too much olive oil
Parmesan cheese to taste (I put cheese on everything)
thin with chicken broth
EXTRAS:
1 unit vegetable like spinach or zucchini


This recipe is dedicated to the military wives who put together a recipe book of favorites that my mom used for years, and started me on the road to being a foodie. 

Chicken Cacciatore is a classic what do I have on hand to make a dressy simple meal.  In my house, I am more likely to have a large jar of roasted red peppers on hand rather then fresh peppers in the vegetable bin.  I also recommend it because pepper skins can prove problematic for survivors with swallowing issues.

VEGETARIAN
Yes, Zucchini Cacciatore is excellent.  Ratatouille is not far down the path, and I recommend it too. I'm talking the food not the movie.

PASTA
Since everything is pureed it doesn't matter what the original pasta looked like.  However, after all that we have gone through, I recommend fresh pasta.  First, it taste so much better.  Second, pureeing fresh pasta is a lot easier.  I will often use a cheese ravioli or a tortellini - yes, because it has cheese in it.

VEGETABLE
The ladies in my life would be very mad at me if I didn't include vegetables in this dish.  And they are right.  These are meals, not dishes.  It is hard enough getting one cup of food down the throat.  The more goodness we can combine into one bowl the better.  Fall is a great time to add seasonal vegetables like summer squash and zucchini.  In the winter, I am likely to add frozen spinach or frozen kale.

NEXT DAY'S LUNCH
This meal travels to work well.  Unlike the sole florentine.  It is wonderful when my co-workers are jealous of the smell coming out of the microwave.   They are not jealous of the smell of sole florentine.  Today, I brought my Moussaka to work, only to find out I grabbed my container of blueberry smoothie instead.  Imagine my disappointment, it was a cool New England day, and I was going to have a nice not cup of moussaka . . .

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My Eighth recipe - Moussaka -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

My Eighth  recipe for the new cookbook - Moussaka

1 Moussaka

or

1 unit. cooked lamb (since you are going to puree the dish, Stew lamb works well too)
1 unit cooked potato
1/2 unit eggplant sauteed in olive oil
1/4 tomato paste
Ras el hanout (a mixed blend of spices)
Parmesan cheese to taste
enough mint tea to puree (thickness is a personal preference)
EXTRAS:
unflavored yogurt
unflavored protein powder (great with vege-protein)
liquid vitamins


This recipe is dedicated to Chef Issac Dray, who used to own the Versailles Restaurant in Lexington, and mentored me on the art of french cooking. 

Over the last couple of weeks I have had several visits to this blog from Countries around the Mediterranean particularly Turkey.  Since Moussaka and Shepard's Pie are nearly pureed already, I thought it would make a great addition to the book.  Not to mention I have been craving Moussaka.

VEGETARIAN
I am a fan of lamb,  but making a meatless moussaka is extremely common.  Remember that eggplant soaks up oil and spices.

RAS EL HANOUT
Every family that eats moussaka has their own blend of spices.  My ingredients include allspice, coriander, cumin, paprika, garlic, and turmeric. If you look up moussaka online no two recipes will have the same spices combination, so feel free to experiment, or ask your grandmother.  It seems that grandma's recipe is always better than moms recipe for this dish.  Because moussaka is powerly spiced dish, you can add a lot of healthy extra ingredients.
A neat little fact I learned on Wikipedia:  In the past, ras el hanout sometimes included cantharides in its ingredients, for its aphrodisiac properties, but the sale of cantharides was banned in Morocco in the 1990s.

POTATO
I am discovering that potatoes are the most friendly puree ingredient.  It is so easy to cook the potato in the microwave, slice it, and drop it in the blender.  The only issue with this recipe is after you microwave the potato, slice it, and add it to the sauteing eggplant to brown them a little.

COOKING
For simplification I saute all the ingredients in olive oil . . .  a generous amount of olive oil.

EXTRAS
OK, I hope I don't mean to offend grandma, but you can add a lot of extras here.  I've a listed a couple of my favorites above.  Talk to your nutritionist about what they recommend you add to your diet.

COMMENTS
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Steak and Potatoes -100 Meals You Never Thought You Would Eat Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer patients

My First recipe for the new cookbook - Steak and Potatoes

4 oz. cooked steak (pot roast works well)
1 cooked potato
8 oz. beef stock or pot roast juice
some chive
two scoops sour cream
3 pats of butter (or more)
dash of steak sauce or Blue Cheese
enough water to puree (about 2-3 cups) thickness is a personal preference


This recipe is dedicated to my niece Antonia Hoyland, who after I first posted the recipe, suggested that blue cheese would go fabulously with steak and potatoes. 

The ingredients are designed to be standard items that you would have on hand for steak and potato night.  This is literally a dump the ingredients in the blender and puree recipe.  When blending the ingredient you will need to monitor how much water you are adding.  It is hard to judge how much water the potato is going to need, as different potatoes are different sizes and have “dried out in the pantry” differently.

This recipe is a basic design, so if you have special dietary requirements, be sure to modify as needed. For example, I know a number of people with dairy restrictions.  I have tried the recipe with and without sour cream and butter – still taste great.

POTATO FIXINGS
How do you eat your potato? Sour Cream? Chives? Only add what you normally love on a potato.

BLENDERS
I have two blenders at home a Vitamix 500 and a Waring Model 51BL26.   The Vitamix has a “SOUP” setting that will puree the food right down to a liquefied drink.  The Waring even after 10 minutes will puree the food down to having very small but perceptible pulp.  If you are a friend of someone going through head or neck cancer I recommend joining with friends and purchase the survivor a Vitamix.  They are not cheap; however, they are a Godsend for the patient and the caregiver.
COMMENTS
Please add your comments and suggestions to my blog.  Nice to see people from around the globe reading my blog.  Please follow you want the latest recipes.

FACEBOOK

I have created a companion page on Facebook called: 100 Meals Pureed - Recipes for Head and Neck Cancer Survivors.  Sometimes it is easier to share a FB page than send a blog address.