Renal Diet Podcast 079 - Easy To Make Casseroles Kidney Disease

Easy To Make Casseroles For Kidney Disease

Podcast #79 Released on February 3, 2018

Making casseroles is really easy to put together and freeze ahead of time. Casseroles that you can then take out and put in the oven to make for an hour or so and you've got a full meal because you have a starch or a pasta and your vegetables and your meat and it's all put together in one dish so you just add a salad or add a soup next to it and you're good to go.

I want to talk about how you can of make your own casserole recipes because I think it's fun to use you use the ones we can find but I also think what if you have five or six things in your refrigerator and you're like "I'd like to make a casserole!" I know that just never occurs really usually.

You're able to eat based on how much your kidney disease is so you're able to eat a certain amount protein. That's where you probably want to be the most concerned depending on if you have a phosphorus or potassium restriction but pre-dialysis, you're going to try to go for like a half gram of protein per kilo so if you weight 75 kilos which about 160 lbs then 75 kilos you're going for about 35 to 45 grams of protein a day so you are going to get just one or two ounces of meat per serving.

Think of your casserole dish and depending on how big it is, how big is your portion that you're going to want to have because your biggest concern is protein. If you're going to say for example, you got a 9x9 casserole dish and you're going to cut it into fourths, so, you're going for about 2 ounces of protein per section at 2 x 4 is 8 ounces of protein, 8 ounces ground beef, eight ounces of beef or chicken shredded or beans counted as protein as well. That's your biggest part of the recipe you're concerned about.

Get that out of the way. Figure out how much meat you're gonna put into it and then the next step is to add chopped vegetables so you're thinking about low potassium, high potassium or not. If you're not on a potassium or phosphorus restriction, you putt tomatoes in there if you want, you put citrus if you feel like it, if you are then you watch and you're trying for green beans, or peas or trying to think like zucchini, peppers onions - those types of things.

Put those in there. You're going to put in starchy rice or like noodles, whole grain pasta, you can even use biscuits if you'd like to just put biscuits on top. Biscuits can be kind of salty so you got to watch that. You're putting your meat in there, your vegetables and your pasta, some sort of liquid.

You can make Vegetarian Lasagna. You just look in your fridge and you found peppers and onions and zucchini and broccoli and have some beans, some rice. You put that all together, add a little bit of vegetable broth and you're off to the races and mix it up and bake it for about 30 to 45 minutes at about 350 degrees.

Obviously with noodles or ice, you are going to pre-cook them, they're going to absorb some more of that vegetable broth or whatever you put in there so you can undercook them slightly so they continue to absorb that and not get like really soggy.

I want to give you a quick guide to do in like your casserole. Obviously, this is how most casseroles are made. A lot of people just add things together so if you're doing like a Mexican type casserole, you could add some cumin, a little bit of cayenne, a little bit of garlic powder, onion powder and a little bit of maybe Fajita meat and need and you can layer it with tortillas. Add a little of liquid in there so you could do a little bit of the broth or juice to kind of give it some sogginess together to kind of make it mash. You can use rice. Rice is excellent in Mexican or that type of meal but just do that. Try it out.

If you make a casserole with that small 9x9 pan, you can cut it into 4 portions. If it's just you and one other person, then you take that other half and you either eat it the next day or you freeze it so you can freeze that dish.

What I like to do is put like a layer of plastic in there in the dish, freeze it in the dish and then you can pop it out of the dish with plastic and stick it in a little container Ziploc bag then when it's time to cook it, you pop out, take the plastic wrap off and you're ready to go, put it in the dish and cook it.

Try those types of things. Other things that you can do is have some dishes like plasticware that's about the same size as your casserole dish and freeze in that. Do the same thing and pop it out, make sure you do a little bit of pan spray on that plastic wrap so it's easy to get off because you don't want to cook plastic. It doesn't taste very good.

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