One of my brothers is visiting from Arizona for ten days. He is moving up here for his first young professional job in about six weeks. We are excited to have him back in the North Country for good. The other night, we decided to work on a recipe for another healthy lunch option after recently posting about the Rob Special–another cheap, macro-rockin’ lunch option.

We made an updated, healthier version of my main chili recipe. We called this version: Lean Muscle Chili.

The name Lean Muscle Chili is a rip-off from my real chili recipe. In 2014, I won a chili cook-off (so what if there were only about ten entrants?) using my original Muscle Chili recipe. The real recipe contains copious amounts of ground beef and some venison. Right now, I have no venison (I passed on my one good shot at a buck in 2017, wahh!), and ground beef is so calorie dense that I’ve started using ground turkey as a replacement. More than just calories, I’ve been making a concerted effort to limit red meat these past few year because my blood pressure gets high sometimes. Limiting red meat, sodium, and alcohol has really helped my blood pressure normalize. Replacing ground beef with ground turkey is easy and, here’s the key, sacrifices very little taste in most recipes. Notice I said most recipes. If I am going to have a burger or steak, I’m not searching for tofu burgers or tuna steaks. No, for those meals I want the real thing because the meat is the meal. With chili, the sauce is the main part of the meal, so using turkey is a no-brainer. Not to mention anytime you eat a lot of chili you’ll almost surely have too much sodium in your diet, so cutting out the read meat stops the bad-for-your-blood-pressure hemorrhaging chili normally brings with it.

Like the Rob Special, Lean Muscle Chili is a simple recipe. I have two (living) brothers. In an earlier post, I described one of them as “cooking-challenged.” Here, I’ll call the other brother “cooking-curious.” He likes to eat good food and is a capable griller, but he tends to lean too much on prepackaged “meals.” He cares about his food, so he’s the type of guy to enjoy cooking simple, healthy meals. He was excited to make Lean Muscle Chili with me. I mean, eight near-perfect-macro meals for just $1.73 per meal? How could he resist?

Alright, here’s how to make the meal:

First, you’ll need three pounds of ground turkey, two garlic cloves, a red onion, one can each of black beans and kidney beans, a big can of diced tomatoes, a big can of whole tomatoes, and two packets of chili seasoning. Normally, I chop up habenero, jalepeno, and dried adobo peppers to really make the chili spicy. Most North Country residents have no palate for spicy food, but with training anyone can learn to love heat in their food. My wife and I try to eat really spicy food (she’s a bit tougher than me on this point), and by this point we crave the heat in or meals. For this batch, I did not make the chili spicy because we planned to share the meal with all of my siblings. I normally add on lime juice, hot sauce, cheese, cilantro, and sour cream for “fixings”–but you can spruce it up however you want.

Now, melt some butter in the pot you’ll use. Chop an onion and dice some garlic. Throw the onion and garlic into the heated butter:

Do not overcook the onions and garlic or they will be ruined. When the onions begin to be translucent, toss the ground turkey in:

Brown the turkey. For this recipe, I do not drain the fat. The turkey is already lean, and I wanted the fat for the extra taste it brings. When I cook my normally chili recipe, I will drain most of the ground beef fat unless I am making the batch for taste alone–then I won’t drain any fat. Back to the recipe. Next, add the can of black beans, kidney beans, and tomatoes into the pot:

Stir in the chili seasoning (I added ground ghost pepper here too). One important consideration: I used canned beans here. That’s not optimal, but I did not have time enough to soak uncooked beans. In a normal recipe, we’d soak the beans and cook the whole conglomeration for eight hours in a slow cooker. My college room mate, Nick, often made chili, but never allowed himself enough time to use uncooked beans. His trick was to use canned beans and, once everything was in the pot, cover it and boil it for 30 minutes or so. That’s what I did here.

After letting the whole thing cool, we added sour cream, cheese, and cilantro. This yields you eight meals. Here’s what you get:

Total macronutrients per meal* (before sprucing it up with “fixings”):

• Calories: 519
• Protein: 39 grams
• Carbohydrates: 35 grams
• Fat: 27 grams

The optimal macronutrient ratio is 40-40-20, meaning we want 40% of the calories to be protein, 40% carbohydrates, and 20% fat. Here the ratios we roughly 39-35-26%. That’s slightly out of whack, but totally okay from my perspective.

**note that I did not include the nutritional content for the onion, butter, and garlic so these macros should be considered approximate. I am guessing the fat content would be slightly higher. We use about one tablespoon of butter in the recipe, so that’s about 100 grams of calories of (mostly) fat. I would just add roughly 15 calories and two grams of fat per meal. If your diet is that strict and exact, please send me photos of the gold medals you win at the next Olympics, otherwise this is too small to care about**

Total cost per meal:

• 6 oz. 90% lean ground turkey: $0.75 (three pounds of ground turkey usually costs $10, but I got it on sale for $5.99 here)
• Red onion: $0.07
• Garlic: $0.02
• Lime juice: $0.04
• Whole tomatoes: $0.26
• Crushed tomatoes: $0.26
• Black beans: $0.13
• Kidney beans: $0.13
• Hot sauce: 0.07

Total: $1.73 per meal. And it tastes great.

This recipe costs just over $13 ($17 if you cannot find the turkey on sale) and nets you eight meals. That’s 4,155 calories of near perfect macros costing you less than two Chipotle lunches. Coming in at just over 500 calories, one of these meals (plus some sour cream and cheese) is the perfect size for a busy professional. It’s wholesome enough to warm you up on a winter day in the North Country. And it has enough protein to solidify your workouts at the gym. Yet it won’t make you feel lethargic after lunch like a burger and fries. You’ll feel re-energized and ready to tackle the afternoon and evening ahead. Not to mention that if you aim for a 2000 calorie diet, this leaves you almost 1500 calories to enjoy before bed (remember I owe a post on why I recommend skipping breakfast).

There you have it. Another great-tasting, hearty North County recipe that will help you stay energized through a hard day at work. Lean Muscle Chili will take you about ten minutes to prepare and 30 minutes to cook. Forty minutes for almost two work week’s worth of inexpensive, macro-friendly lunches? Count me in.