Food Items for My No Chew Diet

We are still playing indoor games since the outside temps have gone crazy.  Our patio thermometer read 86 when we were eating breakfast at 5 this morning and 102 when we were eating lunch at 11:30.  Yes, both times the thermometer was in the shade.  The forecast for today at DFW is 108.  I am not sure what to expect, since the forecasts have been running on the conservative side.  
 
In addition to an excessive heat warning, we are also under the threat of elevated fire danger and under an ozone action alert.  Gotta appreciate those original folks that settled this area without air-conditioning.  I don't know how they did it.

Thankfully for us a "cool wave" is forecast for next week.

Soft cuisine.  Fortunately, finding indoor activities to keep busy has not been a problem.  One of the major indoor things for me, besides writing blogs of course, has been cooking.  Starting with my oral surgery at the end of May, I was focused on preparing things I could eat with little or no chewing.  My ability to chew is now much improved (although not yet back to normal), but I am still using some of the items on my "soft cuisine" diet.  The things I have been having most fun with are made either with the Instant Pot pressure cooker or the Vitamix blender.

Instant Pot.  I really love my Instant Pot and have been using it for a variety of foods.  Making homemade yogurt has become a weekly event.  A batch from a half gallon of milk makes seven half-pint mason jars of Greek yogurt, i.e. a week's supply.  I also regularly use the Instant Pot to make hard-boiled eggs which works really well for egg salad for lunch.  The Instant Pot also makes risotto an easy dinner side dish. 

I probably don't use the Instant Pot as much as I should for actual meals, but still fix beef and broccoli, pot roast, or other such meals regularly. 

Vitamix.  Immediately after surgery I could chew very little and could definitely not eat something like a lettuce salad.   In an attempt to get more fruits and vegetables into my diet, I experimented with several different smoothies.  Fortunately that was at exactly the time I had huge amounts of kale and lettuce in the garden.  That worked out well for two reasons:  1.  I had a large supply of these greens.  2. Mixing the greens in with other things such as fruit allowed me to use lettuce that was bolting and likely too bitter if used alone in a salad. 

I ended up making two different green smoothies fairly regularly, blackberry lettuce smoothie and pineapple banana kale smoothie.

Blackberry lettuce smoothie.  This was my initial no-chew replacement for the bananas and berries that I previously put on my breakfast oatmeal. 

Washing the lettuce from the garden.  The frozen bananas, blueberries, and blackberries are in the background.

 

I spun the lettuce "dry" so I could control how much liquid was being added, but didn't get too concerned about getting rid of all of the water.

The water followed by the lettuce always goes in first and gets pre-ground.  Otherwise there might not be room for the other ingredients.

  

Blending the lettuce and water.

 

Blackberries, blueberries, and bananas ready to go into the lettuce mixture for blending.

Although the recipe says two servings, I considered it to make three (each about 3/4 of a pint).  They seemed to keep fine in the refrigerator for the several days until they were used.

 

Final product in pint jars

Based on a serving of hot oatmeal (or more commonly hot oat bran), one of these jars of lettuce/fruit smoothie, and coffee, I was good to go for breakfast even though I could not chew.  

Date smoothies.  Although I really liked these smoothies, the lettuce from the garden was bolting and getting awfully bitter.  I still wanted something with bananas since the extra potassium seemed to help me avoid leg cramps.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do when I ran across some medjool dates next to the bananas at the grocery.  I knew very little about them, but remembered seeing them listed when I was originally looking at smoothie recipes.  The package said they had one and a half times the amount of potassium as that in bananas, so that sounded like a plus.

I brought them home and found a smoothie recipe that sounded like a reasonable possibility, although the reviews indicated it was very sweet.   Therefore I used a smaller proportion of dates. 

It was still awfully sweet, but I put one of my "double batches" into four half-pint jars (ignore the "3 servings" in my notes).  One of those one cup servings, despite being too sweet as a stand alone item, goes well with the plainness of the oatmeal.

Even though I can chew better now, I am having these date/banana smoothies many mornings.

Pineapple banana kale smoothie.  What about lunch?  I initially had things like cream of tomato soup, but that has an awful lot of salt and I really wanted more fruits and veggies.  I had lots of kale in the garden, so I tried to find something using kale that might give me a no-chew alternative.  Although I like kale, I was afraid the warm weather would be making my kale bitter so I looked for recipes with ingredients that made major contributions to the taste.

My "bunch" of kale as picked from the garden

 

Kale in the spinner after removing from the stems

 

All of the kale in the pictures above stuffed into a two cup measuring cup after spinning.  It was my understanding that 2 cups of kale meant packed.  The chia seeds, bananas, pineapple, and lemon juice are in the background.

 

The two cups of kale after being dumped into the blender on top of the two cups of water.

 

After everything is blended together.

  

The final product in pint jars

As with the first smoothie above, I put this into pint jars.  For me, this recipe made four servings of about 3/4 of a pint each.  It may not look all that appetizing, but it was actually quite good.  I don't think I could taste the kale.  The predominant taste was pineapple and lemon even though I drained off and did not use most of the juice in the can of pineapple chunks.

Initially one of these jars and some pudding or cottage cheese was more than enough for me for lunch.  

Cucumbers finally start to produce.  I was using up the kale in the garden faster than it was growing back, so I did not stay with the kale smoothies forever.  The kale supply began to get low just about the time that I could tolerate some chewing.  With almost perfect timing, I started to get cucumbers in the garden.  . 

I had planted cucumber seeds months ago, but they were very slow to come along and even slower to produce cucumbers.  They apparently really love the hot weather.  Starting about a month ago I finally got my first cucumbers. 

Preparing to make bread and butter pickles

They have come along steadily since then and have really picked up the pace as of late.  I now have more bread and butter pickles and cucumber and tomato salad than I can eat.  If I am going to use more of the cucumbers it looks like I need to do some real pickling.