It didn’t feel right calling this a chicken pot pie when I cooked mine in a pan. A sauce pan for part of it and a cast-iron skillet for the baking part. So yea. But whatever you want to call it, this turned out rather well I think.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of “pot pies”. I’m really just not a huge fan of pastry type crusts in general. So I have no idea where the urge to make this dish came from. But what I did know is that it wouldn’t be a traditional type. I’ve seen similar dishes where instead of a top crust, you use drop-biscuits or dumplings of some sort. But alas, I’m not a huge biscuit fan either.. and I’ve never made dumplings (which aren’t they just “boiled” biscuits anyways?) So what to do?

Well, I asked for ideas on Twitter… and someone suggested corn bread (which I do love), or the “cheesy pizza crust” I was talking about a couple weeks back. Ding! I think we have something there. It’s such an easy recipe too… 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, 1 egg, and a 3oz block of cream cheese. And I knew I had all the stuff on hand. So we had a topping. But then what about the filling?

I had the chicken, the reason for this whole idea in the first place. I always have a few certain vegetables on hand… carrots, frozen peas, onion. That would work. When getting out the carrot I found some sweet potato left over from another meal. I had some celery too but option to skip that for this dish. Another thing I keep on hand is a can or two of evaporated milk. I use this in place of cream in making sauces to get a bit more depth than just milk (especially since my milk is soy milk), without as much of the fat. Oh! There’s also a can of mushrooms. Yea, I know… they’re slimly lil suckers, I would never use them on a burger or to top a steak, but I keep a couple small cans on hand just for occasions like this where they go in to something and offer just a bit of that mushroomy flavor.

Like I said, I’ve never made this sort of dish before, but I know that it’s basically the chicken and veges in a thick cream sauce. So I started out by basing this on my stroganoff recipe, in particular using a roux as the thickener. I did a video of this for BTV about a year ago. I chopped up some onion and lightly cooked it before adding the butter and flour. I used a small can of evaporated milk and about 1/2 cup of the chicken broth I had from cooking up the chicken. The veges I added were a medium carrot and some sweet potato about the same size as the carrot that were shredded and about a cup of frozen peas. I shredded the carrot and potato instead of dicing because I figured they would cook faster that way. In hindsight, I had some roasted squash and beets in the fridge that I forgot about and would have loved to add some of those in there.

I had two of the chicken breasts left, both just over 7 ounces, so I chopped one of them up, leaving me with just enough chicken left for my last two meals in this experiment. Then after I got the veges in, it was still a bit thinner than I wanted, especially since I wasn’t going to use a bottom crust, so I mixed in 3 tablespoons of ground flaxseed. So this not only added some fiber and some omega 3s, the flaxseed sucks up moisture and helped thicken the whole thing up a bit more. I seasoned mine with liberal amounts of garlic powder and fresh ground black pepper and a few pinches of kosher salt.

I poured this in to my 9inch cast iron skillet and dropped spoonfuls of the “pizza crust” batter on top. I didn’t do the greatest job when it comes to even distribution, but you get the idea. The whole thing went in to a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes, till the topping was lightly browned. Scroll back up to the top here to see what it looked like coming out of the oven. When I went to plate it, it held together very nicely. I don’t know if it was because of or in spite of the addition of the flax… but no matter the reason, it worked great.

It plated up wonderfully, I didn’t need a soup bowl to serve it in. The cheesy topping added a nice touch of sweetness overall… and it was very filling. I was figuring I’d get two servings out of this, but I think for a post-op, you’ll easily get three or four servings. I recently wrote a piece for my nutrition blog about being flexible in the kitchen, and this is a great example of that I think. It would be a great way to use some some left over vegetables. You could use various kinds of meats in here… season it to your own tastes, savory or spicy. And there’s many different ways you could top this, biscuits, corn bread, potato dumplings, etc.

So yea… it was a success. I got a dinner a lunch and an additional side dish out of this for me…. and I could see doing similar versions of this in the future. Also, you could easily double this and bake it in a larger pan.

I wasn’t sure what I was in the mood for to have for dinner tonight… I kinda wanted pancakes, and I do really like my oatmeal pancake recipe… which I’ll get around to posting on here at some point… but I wanted something a bit different.

Enter, the baked pancke.

This was super easy… and it’s set up for a single serving. I used about a 4-5 inch corningware dish. Use whatever oven-safe container you have…. even a cast-iron skillet, especially if you want to do multiple servings. The recipe below is based on larger recipes that I modified down.

What you need:

1 egg
1/4 cup milk
pinch salt
pinch ground nutmeg
1 Tablespoon vanilla flavored protein powder
1/4 cup pancake or all-purpose baking mix (what I used)
1 teaspoon butter

mix the egg, milk, salt and nutmeg (use fresh ground if you have it!) really well. I used my Magic Bullet for this. Then stir in the protein powder and baking mix. If you don’t have a mix, use 1/4 teaspoon baking powder and 1/4 flour of your choice. You can skip the protein powder if you want, or if you use unflavored, put in a dash of vanilla extract, or if you want a bit of sweetness some SF vanilla flavored syrup.

Let this rest while you crank of the oven to 450 degrees (I used my toaster oven). Put your baking dish in the oven while it heats.  After about 10-15 minutes, take it out (carefully) and put in the butter. I splurged here, you could just use a no-stick spray too, but use butter flavored or plain, not something like the olive oil ones. Then pour the batter in to the baking dish.

Pop this in the oven for about 15 minutes. If your doing 2-3 servings, go for about 18 minutes, if you do a large batch (you could multiply this out by six to get up to 8 servings and cook in a 9×12 pan) go for 20-22 minutes.

The picture up top shows you what it looks like coming out of the oven. For my single serving, I scooped it out of the dish and put it on a plate.

You could do all sorts of toppings for this… originally I was going to do a mix of maple syrup and blueberry jam… but wanted something not so sweet. I took about a tablespoon of yogurt, mixed in about a teaspoon of low-fat cream cheese and about a teaspoon of black cherry preservers. Stirred this up really good and poured over the top.

I will be making this again… next time I may try putting fruit on the bottom of the baking dish, or inside the batter… we’ll see.

Oh, and I suppose I may even try it for breakfast some time…

So the other day I wrote up how to make a nice, WLS friendly, yellow cake. This all started with a recent BTV episode where they made a 35-second chocolate cake. You can get the original recipe in their forums, but me being me, I had to tweek it to my own needs. And it turned out rather well if I do say so myself, and this one is easy peasy. While the yellow cake calls for complicated baking procedures like “creaming”, if you can make chocolate milk and microwave popcorn, you can make this cake.

Here’s what you need:

2 rounded Tablespoons of multi-purpose baking mix (what I used)
1 Tablespoon vanilla protein powder
2 Tablespoons Sugar-Free NesQuik
2 Tablespoons + 1 teaspoon milk
1 teaspoon olive oil
pinch of salt

Here’s what you do:

In a small bowl mix the baking mix, protein powder and salt.

In a small cup, pour in the milk and add the NesQuik, stirring to disolve. I found doing it this way makes sure the Quik disolves rather than being all lumpy in the cake.

Pour the chocolate milk in to the bowl with the dry stuff, add the olive oil and stir till smooth.

Spray a coffee cup, ceramic bowl, ramakin or a couple silicone muffin cups with no-stick spray. I found a silicone mini bundt pan at the dollar store, and pick that up for this sort of stuff.

Put in the microwave and set for 35 seconds. If you have an average 800 watt oven, this should be fine. If you have a larger oven, go for 30 seconds or it may end up too dried out.

After cooking, take the cake out of the microwave, let it set for a minute or so before popping out on to a plate to cool… or eat while warm.

I made this using the new silicone bundt pan (one of those ring like pans with the hole in the middle) for my mom’s bday dinner I cooked her tonight, topped it with some SF Cool Whip and a drizzle of SF Hershey’s syrup and we split it. was perfect portions for us.

Next weekend I’m going to make one in a coffee mug, slice in to layers and try making a couple of “ice cream” sandwiches by freezing a couple slices of cake with a dollop of the SF Cool Whip between them.

The original recipe on BTV has just a few more ingredients, but this version I added the protein powder and substituted some things that I think would be more at home in the typical dudes kitchen… and are things that will likely see more use for a former fat dude that some of the original ingredients. But if you want, try them both out and see which works best for you!

In a recent episode of BariatricTV titled Food Porn they made 35-second chocolate cake. I tried a variation of it last night and it was very good… but when it comes to cake, my favorite is yellow cake. So after consulting with my favorite cook (Alton Brown and a Good Eats! episode) I came up with the following..

This is a bit more involved than the chocolate cake, yellow cake is a butter cake so the first thing you need is butter. I don’t use a lot of butter these days, but I keep some on hand for stuff like this, and I keep unsalted around, cause it’s better for baking and such. Keep the bulk of it in the freezer and it will keep longer. So take 1 Tablespoon and let it soften to room temp, then cream it in a bowl with 1 Tablespoon of Splenda. If you’ve never baked… and well… most dudes haven’t, cream just means stir the sweetener in to the butter until it’s all mixed really  well. You’ll know it’s there when it turns from a buttery yellow to more white colored. Kinda like this…

Then add the yolk from one egg, this is going to add back in the yellow color. Once you get that stirred in good, take a minute to mix the 2 Tablespoons of baking mix and 1 Tablespoon of protein powder together in a small bowl. If you don’t have baking mix, use 2 Tablespoons of flour and 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder with the protein powder. Now add 1 Tablespoon of the milk to the butter mix and stir that in, followed by about half of the flour mix, stir till all mixed in.

Then mix in the other 1 Tablespoon of milk and the rest of the flour mix. Once you get it all smoothed out, pour in to a small bowl that you’ve given a shot of no-stick spray. Ideally you want something with straight sides. Or use a large, straight sided coffee mug.

Pop this in the microwave for about 45 seconds. If you have a smaller, 800W or less go for 50. When you first open the microwave it is going to be rather puffed up, then quickly “fall” again. That’s ok. It should also shrink down and pull away from the sides of the bowl a bit.

It’s going to look a bit … well, like a damp sponge. It should not be wet, but you will see some lingering moisture on it. Flip the whole thing over on to a plate and let it sit for a couple minutes.

You can eat it warm, or try frosting it… I just whipped together about 2 Tablespoons of SF Cool Whip with about 2 teaspoons of SF Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup and spread it on the top. I’ll work on a better chocolate frosting for next time.

While I can eat the whole thing… you should probably share it, or split it over a couple desserts. The butter and egg do up the calories (about 280) and fat (about 17g), but on the plus side, you should get about 10-12g of protein from the whole thing, depending on the protein powder you use.

Here’s the full ingredient list:

1 Tablespoon unsalted butter – softened
1 Tablespoon Splenda (or equivalent)
1 egg yolk
2 Tablespoons multi-purpose baking mix
1 Tablespoon vanilla (or un-flavored) protein mix

Check out my personal site for the background on this “swavory” dessert (maybe even breakfast?) dish. There is a link there to the site where I got the original recipe in case you want to make a larger version of this.

Strawberry-Peach Flognarde, straight from the oven…

Here’s what you need:

2 Tablespoons whole wheat flour
3 Tablespoons Splenda
1/3 Cup milk (I use soy milk almost exclusively)
1 large egg
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon thyme flakes
a couple grinds of fresh pepper
a tiny pinch of salt
2 large strawberries, sliced
3/4 of a fresh peach, sliced thin

Take a 2-cup capacity baking dish, anything similar to the one in the picture up there, and spray it with butter flavored cooking spray, then layer the strawberry and peach slices in it. It should be bit over half-full.

Put the rest of the ingredients  in a small mixing bowl and stir to make the batter. Pour this over the fruit and pop into an oven pre-heated to 350. I did sprinkle a very tiny amount of sugar (yea, real sugar) on top to see if it would maybe caramelize or anything on top, but I didn’t notice anything, so will likely leave it out next time. YMMV.

I use my toaster oven for small stuff like this. Bake it for about 35 minutes, then check it. It should be set, and springy to the touch with no liquid still lingering. If it’s not done, bake for another 5 minutes and check again. It shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes max.

After it comes out of the oven you can run a knife around the edges and turn it out on to a plate, then flip it on to a serving/eating plate. For me, this will be about four different portions, but for someone further along it could be a nice dessert for two, top with some fat-free whip cream maybe? Or how about using some more strawberries to make a strawberry sauce?

You could easily use other fruits in here too… strawberries are in season, and I thought they would go well with peaches. Let me know in comments if you try other fruit combinations… but remember, if you go with cherries, it’s not longer a flognarde, then it’s a clafoutis.