The site's recipee that I am trying is from SkinnyMs. Generally speaking, they are full of ideas and a great resource to have, especially if you need help trying to figure out how to have flavorful meals when you can no longer eat like a waste disposal.
A lot of flavor is in fats, salts, sugars, and starches. Fortunately, for me, I am only looking to cut out the worst of the sugars and starches from my overall diet becauae I am tired of living in pain. Unfortunately, I didn't do that when modifying this recipe (as you will see later), but it was within reason.
The claim is for Chicken and Mushroom Stroganoff is "under 300", which often means restricting the portion size. If you are doing shakes, for most meals, you want more than a scant 8 oz. of partially liquid food, for your one "real meal" a day. So to use this site, you will have to modify to add volume to this dish, and likely some of their others as well, (and still keep the same serving count).
Which means you got to either know precisely what you are doing, or be a crazy Cajun who thinks recipees are a joke.
So, modifications I did:
8 boneless thighs, since:
A. Thighs are cheaper
B. Thighs taste better
But: they take more work, since there's fat to trim off them, and yes, more calories per pound because you ain't getting it all off.
But trying to gague how much calories you are dealing with is nearly impossible:
Most the time, a skinless chicken thigh is counted with the fatty lobes still on it because that's how it comes from the store. This one has the ratio of 58% protein to 42% fat calories. Some have the fat as high as 48%. Sanderson farms puts the calories at 130 per serving (4 oz), with 40 from fat, a ratio of 30.7%. But at best, you get rid of about 35 calories by trimming each thigh, which puts it at 95 calories per thigh. I had to custom enter information to get Lose It! to accept that I was eating half the calories it thought I was.
2 lbs portabellos, and sliced them myself, extremely thin (close to 3 slices per normal processor's slice). Only see it cut this way in Asian cooking, really.
Commercially bought chicken stock, not broth, which thickens in cooling (some folks don't count them as different, but you want bone-in boiled broth because that is a thickening agent, AND there's nutrients you miss out on, without that), Which is needed, since I doubled the mushrooms.
Upped the Balsamic vinegar (they mean the cheap one, cream woukd likely ruin the artesianal one ....and here is the sugar) up to 1/3 a cup. The volume increase in other ingredients requires more so the flavor isn't dissipated, but not doubled because the fluid volume was going to be too high.
I wanted to do spaghetti squash, but didn't find any, in the stores this grocery trip. Wound up boiling some of the Chickpea rotini, which thickens up what it's boiled in, quite nicely. (But upon reflection, the squash would have added to the water volume without thickening it, for all that it would have been a lower calorie count. So, without a thickener, this will become a soup.)
Did not use full fat Greek yogurt. Which is fine. It would have been more a comfort food, with the higher fat, though.
Did half a teaspoon of Tony's instead of straight salt, but wound up putting in a 3rd of a tsp of garlic salt to make up what was lacking in salt, so I find the salt is necessaary to make this dish. Partially the fault of getting a stock, and not broth, so there really wasn't a need to cut the salt.
What I changed in the cooking methods:
1.Browned onion, first, with a tablespoon of butter. But you can brown without fats.
2. Set garlic, onion, mushrooms, and chicken to soak in the balsamic vinegar and stock overnight. Which may have been why I had to add an extra cap (tsp.) of the balsamic vinegar--too much flavor stuck in the mushrooms.
3. Pulled a full cup of resulting juice from the pot, to cut down the thinness of the sauce.
4. Turned off the crockpot and let it cool down for roughly half an hour before adding the yogurt. The whole point of adding milk products to the end of a the cooking process, at lower heat, is to preserve the character of the milk product. This, I didn't learn from being a Cajun. I learned this from being in prep. at Olive Garden, making butter sauce for the Shimp Scampi, well over a decade ago. You ruins it, Precious!
What this dish does not have is the extreme fattyness and starchiness that I am used to from a boxed kit. Stroganoff is a cheap comfort food, of mild flavor, and people eat it like they do Mac-and-cheese. You think up all these grand ideas about what to add, like the original recipee, or my additions, spend time dreaming of it, but in the end you wind up eating 2 pounds of the boxed mix while watching your favorite Netflix show. And your waistline thanks you for it later. (Thank Terry Pratchett for this set-up.)
So, to make up for this, instead of boiling the noodles in 32 oz of water, I should have pulled as much broth as possible out of the dish, once cooked (I am guessing at about 3 cups, and just add 1 cup of broth or water), so you could keep the thickening from the pasta. (Yes, even beany pasta has that thickening.)
But, oh, the thiness of the mushrooms! I must do that again.
That, and maybe some hotsauce...no? This isn't a southern food? Ok.
But, without having tried following the recipe strictly, from the way that this dish adjusts well to the changes, I would say that this is a really good dish to make--my way or their way. Timeless recipes withstand a little bending of the rules, and come out looking like a champ.
Even with the additions, it cooked down to about 9-9.5 cups, with noodles in, so the original would have been really light, and based on the calories, possibly excluded the noodles. I realistically ate about a serving and a half, or around 528 calories, by best recipee estimation. If I messed up on the chicken's calories, it would bump it up tp about 650.
Now, where did I put the Tabasco...
Let's eat!
No comments:
Post a Comment