All too often, when people think of the word “diet,†they tend to associate it with deprivation. With the Mediterranean Diet, this is not the case. With this diet, rather than spending all of your time focused on the things you cannot have, you focus on what you can have.
This type of diet is all about eating the best, freshest, and healthiest foods. This even includes healthy fats like nuts and olive oil. There are some very positive ways to incorporate the Mediterranean Diet into your Thanksgiving Feast this year.
You will enjoy the meal as much as you ever have but will walk away knowing that you have served a healthier style Thanksgiving Dinner to your family.
Let us start by taking a look at the traditional turkey and stuffing. One of the most basic ways to save calories and fat is to bake the stuffing separately. If you want to make it extra moist, as if it was in the bird, you can add a little more chicken broth or water to the recipe.
If you make the stuffing from scratch, versus buying a box of stuffing, you can start with healthier, whole-wheat bread. Add your flavor by using apples, water chestnuts and sweet, natural cranberries. You will save on the tons of sodium that is added to pre-packaged food and, since it will not be cooked inside of the bird, it will not absorb all of the extra fat and calories from the grease of the turkey.
To make a healthier version of your famous turkey gravy, try laying this year’s turkey on a bed of vegetables. The roasted vegetables will add an excellent, savory flavor to the drippings in the pan, in turn helping you to create gravy that is low in fat and in sodium.
One easy way to remove the fat from the pan drippings, prior to making your gravy, add a large handful of ice cubes to the liquid and place it into your freezer for about 10 minutes. Then, when you pull it out of the freezer, you should be able to remove all of the hard fat with a spoon before you make your gravy.
Thanksgiving Dinner would not be complete without glazed sweet potatoes. Instead of using canned sweet potatoes that come already sweetened in heavy syrup, use fresh sweet potatoes and make a lighter coating out of brown sugar, honey and olive oil. This lighter coating will bring out the natural sweetness of the potatoes and save a whole bunch of calories compared to the traditional canned variety.
By avoiding processed foods and unhealthy fats this holiday season, you will feel better about yourself and the food choices you have made. Your family will enjoy the changes so much that they will not even realize that you have replaced the traditional recipes this Thanksgiving with a Mediterranean Menu.
By consuming fewer unhealthy fats, everyone will be more energetic and less interested in that long nap while you do all of the cleaning up.
