I'm a bit behind in posting recipes, so here's a quick one we just had for dinner.
I've never cooked with butternut squash, but my Mom does it all the time and raves about it. And it's loaded with vitamins. One cup has almost 150% of your RDA of vitamin A, in the form of beta carotene (hello, antioxidants!). It's also a great source of vitamin C, potassium, dietary fiber, and folic acid.
For any squash-challenged readers, here is what the butternut version looks like:
Anyway, I keep seeing it at the grocery store lately, so I decided that I'd try incorporating it into chili. Might sound kinda crazy...but I'm constantly looking for basic recipes I can jazz up with extra veggies (a.k.a. extra vitamins). Spinach is a favorite for adding to recipes. I also wanted to incorporate garbanzo beans, as I recently read some research about their effects on LDL cholesterol.
So I took an old chili recipe (click here for a low-cal chili recipe I posted last year), eliminated the cans of beans and the bag of cabbage called for in this recipe, and then added:
1 large butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cubed
2 bags of spinach (10 oz. per bag)
2 cups of diced carrots
1 can of low sodium sweet corn
1 can of low sodium garbanzo beans
Put all ingredients in the slow cooker, and cook on low for 8 hours.
The finished product was both colorful and tasty. And while my meat-and-potatoes-loving husband initially raised his eyebrow at this, he loved it too! We topped it with some fat free cheese and a little hot sauce, and it was de-lish. Russ even commented that I could (brace yourselves) eliminate the ground turkey and make a vegetarian version! All the veggies really take on the flavor of the chili seasoning, so you still think you're eating chili, not some vegetable soup. This will serve 8+.
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