Lettuce Wraps

Holy moly, are these lettuce wraps good! Both nutritious and delicious, loaded with plant foods, and bursting with flavor, you can’t go wrong  with these babies. The sauces are just a tad on the spicy side, so you may want to skip them for any tubies with sensitive tummies. However, the meat mixture blended with some romaine lettuce and a bit of brown rice can make for a wonderful blended meal.

This recipe definitely require a food processor or, at an absolute minimum, a chopper. Otherwise, you’re going to have a lot of needed chopping on your hands. With a food processor, you can whip these up pretty quickly.

Ingredients run through a food processor:

• 1 lb bag baby carrots
• 1 8-oz can bamboo shoots
• 1 8-oz package mushrooms
• 7 garlic cloves (run through the processor with the mushrooms)
• 1 large bunch green onions (with only the little “hairy” end cut off before processing)

Other ingredients:

• 2 lbs ground turkey
• 1 8-oz can diced water chestnuts
• 2-inch piece ginger, grated
• 3/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1 Tbsp Thai chili sauce (found in Asian section at the supermarket)
• 4 Tbsp peanut butter
• 1 Tbsp honey or agave nectar
• Romaine Lettuce
• Brown rice
• Spicy Lime Ginger sauce (see recipe below)
• Pineapple chili sauce (see recipe below)

Brown the turkey in a large skillet. When it is thoroughly cooked, drain the grease and add the ingredients that were run through the food processor. Then, add the water chestnuts, ginger, soy sauce, orange juice, chili sauce, peanut butter and honey/agave nectar. Let it simmer uncovered for 5-10 minutes until the veggies are tender. If there is still too much juice, let it cook for a little while longer.

Serve this filling with the lettuce leaves. On the side, serve brown rice to add to the wrap and the spicy lime ginger sauce and pineapple chili sauce to top the filling (inside the wrap) or to be used as a dip for the wrap. I like to top my lettuce wraps with both sauces. You can also serve these with chopped cilantro, chopped peanuts, chili sauce, peanut sauce…or make a concoction of your own!

To make the ginger lime sauce, stir the following ingredients into a bowl:

• 1/2 jalapeno pepper, minced
• 2 inch piece ginger, peeled, grated
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• Juice squeezed from 3 key limes

Don’t get lazy and use store bought bottled lime juice for this recipe. You will pay for it in taste. Use freshly squeezed lime juice and your taste buds will thank you! Chop some limes in half and give them a good squeeze.

To make the pineapple ginger sauce, put the following ingredients into a blender:

• 3/4 cup rice vinegar
• 1/2 cup water
• 3 Tbsp fish sauce (found in the Asian section of the supermarket)
• 5 garlic cloves
• 1 Tbsp dried crushed chili
• 1 cup fresh, chopped pineapple (substitute with canned, if needed)

Blend all this together for 1-2 minutes, pour into a serving bowl and it is ready to go.

The volume this results in will really depend on how well the veggies are chopped and how long you cook the mixture. So, I can’t give a per cup nutritional analysis of this recipe. However, below, you can find the nutritional information for the full recipe of the meat mixture. Simply measure how much volume it produces and divide the information below by the number of cups to determine the nutritional information per cup. I recommend blending about 1/2 cup of the mixture with 1 romaine lettuce leaf, 1/4 cup brown rice and a liquid of your choice.

• Calories: 2,270
• Carbohydrates: 137
• Fat: 103
• Protein: 210

Enjoy!!!