Volume cooking for volume eating! 6 huge portions of pasta at 590 cal each 🥕🫘🧅
Listen I love a bowl of protein kibble. Something about eating like a dog makes me feel like I'm actually making progress towards my health and fitness goals. The more my food resembles orbeez, the happier I am and honestly this might be some of my finest work.
These portions are actually huge. I know those bowls don't look very big but they are, I was so full after eating this. They're 585 grams each so they're hefty, and only 590 calories. I got 6 of these portions out of the pot because that's what works with my weight loss goal but you could easily make this less portions and have them be even bigger if that's what you want. My partner and I had 2 portions for dinner last night, and then we had 4 leftover portions for him to take to work for lunch this week.
I loosely followed this recipe for cottage cheese hamburger helper with a few changes made! I substituted ground beef for ground chicken, used protein macaroni instead of regular, blended the cottage cheese, and removed the peas entirely because I just personally hate them. Instead, I added an entire can of white kidneys beans which I have been absolutely obsessed with putting in all my pastas ever since I tried it one time at an Italian restaurant and got hooked. The texture of the beans is just really nice when paired with a creamier sauce, and it's a good way to add volume and fibre and stretch my box of pasta to more servings! It also adds A LOT to the orbeezification of the meal, which is what really matters here.
I used google sheets to do the calorie and macro math for the first time, usually I write it all out and then manually add it all up but this was MUCH easier, idk why I didn't think of this sooner. Hopefully it's pretty straightforward and easy to understand. I did my usual method where I'll portion everything out by eye and weigh each of them, add up the total and dump it all back into the pot and properly portion it out by weight. They're not all perfect, but they're all somewhere between 580 and 585 grams.
Couple things to note, the garlic I used is minced garlic in a little jar with oil which is why it's a little higher calorie. Also I got my calories and macros just on google for things like the veg so they may not be 100% accurate. I used the entire can of sauce and beans, but I wrote it in mL so it would be easier for me to do the math with the nutrition label on them. Also didn't write down how much water I used for the broth but it was 6 cups total. I logged this in my tracker app by creating a new food and adding all the macros + fibre which is really all I care about, and logged it at 600 cal because I'm worried about under-tracking and would rather slightly overshoot.
But anyway in conclusion, if you too enjoy eating like a dog then I definitely recommend trying this one or something similar. And if you only take one thing away from this it'd better to be to add the white kidney beans to your pastas. Trust.
Bonus aftermath and after-aftermath pics because it was a lot of work and I'm proud of myself 😊🩷