Thanks for stopping by for a little holiday cheer. Are you ready to start your ovens? The holidays are here and it’s time to cook. Let’s talk about easy tips for healthy holiday cooking that let you enjoy the feast and festivities and not increase your dress or pant size. I love to eat and I look forward to my favorite comfort foods this special time of year. Don’t you? My grandmother and my mother both made this festive yeast bread called Christmas Stollen. It’s a German recipe filled with pecans, cinnamon, dried cherries, apricots and raisins. I can almost smell it coming out of the oven. I’ve learned to make it with a few little tweaks of my own so I carry on their tradition of a spicy cinnamon, buttery yeast bread but with a healthier spin. Small changes in recipes yield big rewards when it comes to cutting calories and fat without sacrificing flavor.

So, tip number one to keep the flavor and perk up the health benefits in your holiday cooking:

1.      Switch from candied fruit such as lemon, orange and cherries that are typically used in fruit cake to dried fruit such as plums, blueberries, apricots, and cherries. Easy switch… big flavor. I did this in my Mom’s Christmas Stollen recipe and it gives the bread an updated appeal with the health benefit of the antioxidants from the dried fruit.

2.      Nutrition is about making smart choices, not about deprivation such as you feel when you’re on a diet. It’s about real, delicious food made with healthful ingredients. Kick up the nutrition in your recipes by adding vegetables, fruit and nuts. For example, add nuts to pumpkin, banana or zucchini breads; diced green pepper, carrots, onions and garlic to pasta sauce; your favorite chopped vegetables to omelets or scrambled eggs; dried plums or blueberries to yogurt, oatmeal or cereal. All of these efforts add up and make it easy to fit more fruit and vegetables into your busy day.

3.      Mom’s Christmas Stollen recipe also called for 1 cup of whole milk. Replace whole milk with 1% or skim milk. For most recipes, you won’t notice a taste difference and you still get the protein, calcium and vitamin D but your hips and heart will notice the drop in total fat and saturated fat. Cut the fat and saturated fat with all your diary choices. For example, when I make dark chocolate fondue and the recipe calls for evaporated milk, I use skimmed evaporated milk. For a key lime pie, I use fat free sweetened condensed milk. For mac and cheese, try reduced fat sharp cheddar cheese (not fat free) and use part-skim ricotta for manicotti and lasagna. The reduction in total fat and saturated fat adds up quickly without you feeling deprived of anything.

By the way, do you have guests spending the night and want to impress them for breakfast?  Mix up pumpkin pancakes. The recipe is posted at the WDBO.com Nutrition & Health Center along with others we’ll talk about today. You can make the pancake batter up the night before. Just make sure you have the ingredients on hand. If you’ve never made pancakes, they’re much easier than you think. The point to remember is to flip them only once on the griddle or skillet. Wait until you see bubbles around the edges and then flip and cook the other side. The recipe includes canned pumpkin, cinnamon and vanilla yogurt. Pumpkin is a source of vitamin A for healthy eyes and contains fiber which most of us need a lot more of. The bright orange color tells you that pumpkin naturally contains alpha and beta carotene and other carotenoids tied to good health. I use skim milk instead of 1% and add raisins to my batter instead of making the topping. These pancakes are a winner at my house.

4.      Focus on the fat. Did you know that one tablespoon of regular butter contains 11 grams of fat with seven of them being saturated fat? Saturated fat is the least healthy type of fat and known for clogging arteries. Light butter with added oil such as olive or canola brings down the saturated fat content and is a better choice along with light spreads made from heart healthy oils such as soybean, canola, and olive. Light spreads are typically even lower in saturated fat than light butters. Both light spreads and light butter work well on toast, muffins, corn on the cob and vegetables but remember that light butter and light spreads are not the best choice for baking. The water content affects the outcome of the recipe.

5.      Consider baking with a spread. There are many choices in the spread aisle and the lingo can be confusing. Be a label sleuth. Here’s the bottom line you need to know. You want a spread that is made with healthy oils such as canola, olive and soybean, contains no added trans fat (aka partially hydrogenated oil), and has the least amount of saturated fat. I’m talking 2 grams or less of saturated fat per tablespoon. That will cull down the selection pretty quickly. Yesterday I was doing an interview for a magazine and one of the questions asked was if you can substitute spreads for butter when baking. The writer had an apple crisp recipe that called for a stick of butter and she was concerned for her father had a heart attack recently. Yes, regular spreads bake cakes, cookies and fruit crumbles or crisps beautifully without all the artery-clogging saturated fat.

I’ve posted a number of recipes on the WDBO.com Nutrition & Health Center for you to try this holiday season that use spreads low in saturated fat and free of trans fat including Promise and I Can’t believe It’s Not Butter! Try the oven-baked harvest apples, banana, date & walnut muffins, honey & orange mini cakes, and chewy oatmeal raisin cookies (yes, I add chocolate chips to the batter). The parmesan-crusted sweet potato fries make a tasty side for your leftover turkey sandwiches. Let me know which recipes are your favorites and have fun in the kitchen with your family and friends.

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