Soup and Muffins

Yesterday’s culinary escapades involved making soup and muffins. Carrots are one veg that I do actually like and am tolerating, but at the moment, I have to have them pulverised over-cooked cooked very soft or pureed.

So I decided to make carrot soup for lunch.

I chopped up a big carrot and put it in a pot with about a tsp of olive oil. I let them soften a bit, then added some onion powder and salt, then a cup of homemade chicken stock (hoping this will sneak more protein in!). I brought it to a boil, then turned the heat down and left it to simmer for 20 minutes.

When I took the lid off, I had this -

Ugh!

Baby food. Not enough liquid. So I made some more stock with part of a stock cube and then pureed it with my hand blender. I added a bit of ginger to make it more interesting. It was tasty, and surprisingly filling. I may add a potato next time to bulk it out more. And more stock!

That's more like it!

I also baked muffins. One of the things that I have struggled to figure out on this diet is what I can have as “on-the-go” food as snacks and such, as a lot of the “go” foods are for meals, not snacks. And I need to be eating more snacks to get my weight back up. Lots of them. And not the snacks that I want (chocolate, pringles, nachos - although those will definitely help to put weight back on, they won’t help a Crohn’s flare-up!). Snacks that are high in carbohydrates and ideally protein, but low in fat and most importantly, easy to digest.

I had bananas going off that I needed to use up. As the dietitian recommenced keeping fat to a minimum, I looked around for some low-fat recipes and found this one which replaces the fat with apple sauce - http://www.food.com/recipe/no-fat-banana-applesauce-muffins-321760
These are seriously scrummy! And really really moist! I pretty much stuck to the recipe on this one, although I got 16 muffins out of the mix rather than 12. So I put a bunch in the freezer for later and have more out to munch!

Tasty snacks!