Who you callin a turkey?

Okay, dorky title aside, one of my goals this year was to post a healthier recipe every week for people to try. This week's is a Patrick family favorite, turkey burgers.

I use to love frozen turkey burgers from the store. They tasted....okay...and they were healthier...right? When I was diagnosed with GERD, it forced me to actually look at labels. Those healthy turkey burgers actually had 11 grams of fat per dry tasteless burger. I decided I needed to try to make my own. This is an extremely simple recipe, but I love it.

Turkey burgers:
1 lb 99% fat free ground turkey
1 serving of egg whites
1/4 cup panko breadcrumbs

Mix all ingredients together. Form into 5-6 patties, depending on size preference. Spray a pan with non stick spray and cook until cooked all the way through on both sides. To keep it from drying out, I usually cook until both sides are browned and then add some water to the pan to let the turkey continue to cook withoit drying out. For seasoning, I use salt on mine, and my husband prefers a smoke apple wood rub, salt, and pepper on his.

That's it. It's a short and simple recipe, but it works for a quick weeknight meal. We eat ours on sweet Hawaiian buns because they have less fat than some of the other ones that I found (Reminder, all of my meals are 3g of fat or less total due to gerd). I like slapping a slice of Borden's fat free cheese on mine.

The picture has nothing to do with the recipe, but I was the Avs teacher of the month in November and am currently in the running for the NHL teacher of the month. If you don't mind, please vote for me at www.nhl.com/mvt. You can vote once a day through January 31st.

Ginger All The Way!

Christmas season has just ended, but gingerbread lives year round! (okay, maybe I just made that one up) Last Christmas, I was pretty much sticking to five foods that I knew were safe because I was in my first two weeks of trying to get my body out of pain. This Christmas, I wasn't sure how I was going to navigate all the deliciousness that is Christmas in Louisiana without having GERD symptoms. I'll admit that it was intimidating. I took a bite of a few things like shrimp dip, Rouses chicken salad (y'all, I just closed my eyes for a second and had a moment of respect for that one. C'est bon!), and crabs. These were all things I was looking forward to for a Cajun Christmas.

What was my husband looking forward to? Gingerbread! One of my aunts makes gingerbread every year, and it is his favorite. I've been hearing about this gingerbread for the last two years because we didn't go down to Louisiana last year.  I decided to ask my aunt for her recipe so that I could make some this year ( and to check it out to see if I could have it) The good news was that the original recipe only had 2 grams of fat and was okay for me to eat. Here's the problem. I didn't want just one cookie. I wanted to eat something that tasted like Christmas without only having one bite of it. So, I changed the recipe to make it more GERD friendly. You will be happy to know that it passed the taste test with my husband, some friends, and my maw maw. Y'all, everyone knows that passing the taste test of a Cajun maw maw is important so I was pretty happy.

Gingerbread Cookies:

Ingredients:

-3/4 cup mashed bananas ( I normally use applesauce to replace butter, but I didn't have any so I just used mashed bananas. You can sub applesauce if you don't like bananas.)

-1 cup brown sugar

-1 serving of liquid egg whites

-3/4 cup molasses

-4 cups of flour (I used white flour because I didn't have any wheat flour. Wheat flour would have upped the fiber content)

-2 tsp ground ginger

-1.5 tsp baking soda

-1.5 tsp ground cinnamon

.75 tsp ground cloves

.25 tsp salt

Directions:

Mash the bananas well. Mix the mashed bananas and brown sugar in a large bowl. Add egg and molasses and mix again. In a separate bowl,( I know, I hate dirtying two bowls too.) mix the flour, ginger, baking soda, ground cinnamon, cloves, and salt. Add the dry mixture to your wet mixture a little at a time and mix together. Cover and refrigerate for a while, depending on how hard you need the mixture to be. I just dropped by spoonfulls so I only refrigerated the cookie dough for about an hour to make it easier to work with. If you want to use cookie cutters, I would recommend refrigerating the cookie dough for a few hours. 

Drop by spoonfulls onto your cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. My first batch was fine at 10 minutes and my second one burned a little.

Nutrition: I made 58 cookies, so you will get about dozen with this recipe. For one cookie: Calories-61, Carbs-14g, Fat-0.2g, Protein-1g, Fiber-0.3g, Sugar-7.2g

Changes for next time: I want to use wheat flour to up the fiber content next time. 

So, get to baking because these cookies are delicious year round!