Some TED food preparation ideas

TED food preparation ideas:

• Turkey cutlets cooked on the stove in olive oil w/salt, pepper. Cook with diced potatoes and then add sliced squash/zucchini towards the end. Add a little water and cover to add some moisture also.
• Turkey drumsticks in the crockpot with sweet and white potatoes and water (save for gravy or use to make soup).
• Turkey drumsticks coated with a little rice flour, salt/pepper and browned on the stove. Then cover and put in oven with some sweet potatoes and roast till done.
• Ground turkey browned but still with some moisture in the frying pan. Add the cooked meat (and the moisture) to a pot of rice when early in the cooking process. The rice gets a little extra flavor and the ground turkey doesn’t get too dry. Throw in some cut up squash and zucchini and let them cook at the same time, if desired.
• Turkey burgers – Jennie-O premade frozen patties have just turkey and rosemary in them. Easier than getting messy making burgers sometimes.
• Turkey soup – the drippings from the roasted turkey and the liquid from the crock pot, pieces of turkey, rice pasta, possibly cooked pieces of potato. While simmering, add thick chunks of zucchini and yellow squash. (Also you can boil the bones as part of the broth-making process to get the flavor, nutrition, and anti-inflammatory benefits of a bone broth.)
• Turkey nuggets – bits of turkey coated with rice flour, dipped in rice milk, and rolled in crushed Crispy Brown Rice cereal, then deep fat fried in canola oil.
• Baked Turkey in Foil – My grandmother always did this with chicken and veggies like tomatoes, peppers and onions, but works well for TED foods too. Here’s the modified recipe: “On a large piece of heavy foil place 3-4 T rice (she said Minute Rice works best), 1 T oil poured over rice, veggies (squash/zucchini), a piece of turkey (breast, thigh, etc.), a bit of liquid (water or pear juice maybe since you don’t get the liquid from the tomatoes), salt/pepper/1 T. oil over top. “Freezer wrap” the foil to seal to seal top and ends tightly. Bake on a cookie sheet 1½ hours at 350° F. Be careful opening foil; steam is extremely hot.” When I made this recently, I didn’t add any other liquid and found the rice to be too crispy and dry in places. I also didn’t add enough salt and pepper to the rice itself and it was rather bland – especially since the veggies are also rather bland. The advantage of this recipe is that you are making foil packets that can be customized for each family member yet you are all having the same dinner. Some family members might want chicken instead of turkey with the original veggies (tomato, green pepper, onion) and maybe the kids would do better with green beans or peas as their veggies. The original recipe also called for fresh or canned mushrooms and green pepper strips to be a decoration on top of the meat before closing the packet.
• Lamb chops – Per “Joy of Cooking” cookbook: “Sear the chops in a hot dry skillet. Reduce the heat and cook slowly until done. Allow for well-done 2-inch chops about 20 minutes, for 1 ½ inch chops about 16 minutes. Pour off the fat as it accumulates in the pan. Season the chops with salt and freshly ground pepper. Serve very hot.”
• Steak fries, potato chips, shoestring potatoes – white potatoes deep fat fried in canola oil (or some other oil).
• Oven fries – Another mom shared this recipe: “Cut 6-8 white potatoes (I use russets) in half, then cut each half into quarters to make wedges. Toss wedges in 3 T of olive oil, 1 t salt, a dash of pepper and I add a couple dashes of cumin. Bake at 450 or 475° F for about 30 minutes.”
• Pan fried potatoes – My husband made these for me the other day and they were such a nice change of pace and good flavor. If I understood him right, he heated olive oil in the cast iron pan and got it very hot, then placed in thick slices of potatoes and fried them till they got a nice crispy edge. He turned them over and fried the other side. Then I guess he turned down the temperature a bit and let them cook through. At the end, he actually added bits of turkey cutlet and zucchini/squash at that time to sauté them all together. I think the potatoes would have turned out a little better if we would have boiled them for a few minutes first.
• Sweet potato fries – deep fried – YUM! Recipe found on: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_ 23982,00.html?rsrc=search. I have been using the brown sugar, cinnamon and salt coating (but I haven’t added the cayenne since I don’t like it anyway). I would think you wouldn’t even have to use any coating if you didn’t want to deviate from TED.
• Sweet potato chips – baked – (From another mom): “I thinly slice sweet potatoes or yams and put them in a ziploc bag- pour in some olive oil and shake to coat. spread evenly on a baking sheet and bake at 425 until crisp.”
• Veggies – steam them, sauté them in olive oil, bake them or (I haven’t tried this yet) deep fry the zucchini substituting rice flour for all-purpose flour per this recipe: http://pizzatoday.com/makeline_articles.shtml?article=NTY5MX N1cGVyNTY4OHNlY3JldDU2OTU= , other ideas at http://www.ortizranch.com/recipes/Squash.htm.

  If you don’t like the texture or taste of the squash or zucchini, you could cut them really thin (like matchsticks) and then “bread” them with the rice flour before frying them. Then you would taste the coating and oil more than the flavor of the veggies AND the texture of the veggies would not be such an issue.

• To get the value of the vitamins from the squash or zucchini without the texture (if you can’t stomach the veggies any other way), you could boil them and then use that water for making rice.
• Pumpkin Seeds – Here’s a recipe for roasting pumpkin seeds (if you are including pumpkin). You’d have to substitute oil for the butter. http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Roasted-Pumpkin-Seeds/Detail.as px
• Fried Rice – I diced up some zucchini and squash, cooked them in some oil in a large skillet, then added lots of cooked rice and some diced up turkey, and then fried it all till the rice got brown. It turned out tasting pretty good – the rice got kind of nutty and crunchy.
• Zucchini Boats – You could modify the recipe found at Cooks.com using cubed turkey or ground turkey for the beef and leaving out seasonings that you aren’t using on the TED. You could make this for the whole family or make two batches of fillings (one for TED and one for full menu). http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1850,137181-226200,00.html.
• Rice Pudding – I saw a blurb on TV about it and tried it…YUM! In a saucepan put 1 part rice to 3 parts (rice) milk, 1 tablespoon sugar for each cup of rice, add cinnamon or other spices if you want and simmer until thickened. (It took quite a while to simmer, so plan ahead.) It was nice to have a warm sweet dessert – and my husband fondly remembers eating his mom’s rice pudding cold, too.
• Pear Crisp – Another mom shared this suggestion for apple crisp. I would think it could be done with Pears, but I haven’t personally tried it yet. “Apple crisp – slice & layer apples, drizzle oil & sugar, scrinch up together sugar, a little oil, and some rice flour or I’d think sweet rice flour might be better, dump topping on and bake.”

I try to always keep baked sweet potatoes in the refrigerator since I like them hot or cold. I don’t personally eat too many cooked white potatoes, as I don’t like them without butter all over them (although I have been eating more of the little red potatoes lately as they microwave in just 3 or 4 minutes). I use sea salt on the veggies and meats and the soup to “liven” up the flavor.