At last I experiment with hot chocolate from North Italy

The Protein Chef has alerted me to this one. I guess he modified the Italian recipe.

Here it is, modified by me

1 cup milk (I used skim milk)
1/2 tbl of smooth Peanut butter
1-1.5 tbl cocoa powder
1/4 xanthum gum (I got mine online from the Gluten Free Shop)

Directions. In a pot put milk, gum, cocoa and peanut butter. Heat while whisking hard. Take it off the heat when it gets hot but not boiling.  It thickens as it heats because of the gum, but will curdle if you heat too long.

Top it with whipped cream made from low fat ricotta with a little milk. Pipe onto hot chocolate.

I discovered you can make this with almond milk as well. No sugar, but oh so delicious.

And of course if you were keen to add protein powder you could do this too.

Crumbed fish, quinoa and veges for dinner

I guess to get a lot of protein into an elderly man who is short of it, I have had to cook a lot of fish. So last time it was crumbed fish. Dip fish into flour, then egg and then into breadcrumbs, seaweed flakes and seasoning. Fry lightly.

These days I am cooking quinoa instead of potato every second meal. Here we also have mashed kumera, the New Zealand sweet potato. And asparagus and tomato.

Chocolate and beetroot cake with no sugar has a good serving of protein

Who would have believed my husband is eating chocolate cake? And a very rich one too. I went through all the chocolate and beetroot cake recipes I could find, settled on one by Nigel Slater and then left out the sugar. It was fine. We actually took it to a pot luck luncheon and it went down a treat with strawberries and yoghurt, but here it is without the trimmings. It has nearly a cake of 70% chocolate in it.

This recipe has 5 eggs in it as well as all the chocolate.

Here is Nigel Slaters extremely moist chocolate cake and as I say, I left out the sugar and it was fine.

Tomatoes with beans make for good protein for seniors

So this is lunch and a satisfying one too. Just fry up some onions and add cut up tomatoes and put in the cooked beans. Season to taste.

Beans have 22g of protein in 100 grams of beans, quite a respectable ratio. Older people who need more protein because they absorb less could have beans in a variety of ways













And of course the next day you can use up beans by making fritters. You will need to keep them moist with a bit of oil, then whizz up, add fried onions, 2tbl flour, grated vegetable of your choice, 2-3 eggs, 1 tsp baking powder and seasonings. Drop into pan and fry lightly. Serve with salad.

Shrimps went down well and plenty of protein for the elderly there

This was a great success and I weighed the shrimps that he ate. It was 200gm. That is half the day's protein. I just fried them in coconut oil with onions and mushrooms and added lemon juice. Delicious. And the dried peas before they were transformed into a tasty smooth mush the next day. Broccoli contains some protein too. Altogether a good protein meal for an older person.

Leftovers and egg for lunch, together with the concoction made from dried peas and peanut butter, good protein here

This lunch has a surprising amount of protein it. The egg has 6gm, the quinoa has some and so does the avocado. Then there is the slop on the left. Well, I had some dried yellow peas which I had cooked. They were dry, so I put them in the whizzer with a bit of the juice from when I boiled them and added peanut butter (protein) and a bit of olive oil and a chunk of blue vein cheese for flavour. He loved it.

Here is the picture of how it looks

Dinner with chickpeas, left over mussel fritters, feta cheese, walnuts and broad beans

This wasn't a complete success. I decided the carrots were too hard for my husband's teeth, so I lightly fried them in oil. I should have cooled them before adding chopped up feta cheese. It would have looked nicer because the warmth of the carrots made the feta cheese melt into them. I had broad beans in the freezer and a couple of left over mussel fritters from lunch. The walnuts are good.

Nonetheless he loved it. He did remark that chickpeas are better when served as hummus, so I made a mental note to find other ways of serving chickpeas. The hummus is finished.

There would only be about 40 gm of mussels plus 1/2 egg in the two fritters. At26gm per 100 gm this only gives 10gm protein and 6gm in the egg. Total 16gm.

Here is nearly a cup of walnuts freshly shelled. There is about 15 gm protein in a whole cup so this one would be 13 gm. Rarely would a person eat more than 8-10 gms per serving.

Now compare the protein content of the above meal with this one. It is a slow cooked shank of lamb, thickened. Although it is a small serving of meat, nonetheless the protein in lamb is around 36gm/100 so even 50 gm of meat gives you 18gm of protein, slightly more than the two mussel fritters.