Healthy Turkey Dinner and Gravy for the Thanksgiving and Christmas!
Drinks lots of water throughout the day. It will make you feel full sooner when you finally do sit down to dig into that Thanksgiving feast. If you do opt for a soda or alcoholic beverage, try to limit yourself to just one or two before switching to water. Think of wine, mixed drinks and soft drinks as desserts, because nutritionally that’s essentially what they are.
Don’t skip meals. Doing so will only make you more likely to overeat at Eating is a BIG part of Thanksgiving and Christmas. It could be tasty, fun and good for you too!
It’s tempting to skip breakfast and even lunch in anticipation of the feast to come! But it will make you feel so much better if you take the time to eat a healthy, sensible breakfast and lunch. They could be light meals, and high in fiber and ideally include some fruit and vegetables. This accomplishes several important funtions:
a. You need nutrients if you are busy in the morning after many hours without food. Some people are more sensitive than others if they go for many hours without a little protein. But a light breakfast, maybe some fruit and yogurt or cereal with low fat milk will put just enough protein and fiber into the mix to help you feel better energized to get the day started.
I have discovered this trick and use it at many of my meals. I use it for my young kids. Bring out the vegetables first. It’s amazing how good the vegetables taste while you’re smelling the turkey or ham cooking in the oven. So you’ll eat more than usual of things that are better for you. When the meats are brought to the table, you won’t be swallowing chuncks whole! at vegetables first. When you sit down to your plate, make sure you down some of the vegetables first. This will help fill you up with the “good stuff” instead of the less healthy options floating around the table.
People say: “Eat slowly.” “Chew your food for a long time.” But it’s like the father who takes a puff on his cigarette and tells his kid: “Son, if I ever catch you smoking I’ll break every bone in your body!” Advice is cheap. But making advice stick mans making it pleasurable and easy. Changing the order of what to eat first will have the effect of making you eat the turkey or the ham slower and probably eat less of it as well — giving you a better balanced and easier-to-digest meal too. You will also find yourself realizing you are full without swallowing as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. As Darwinian creatures we were designed to binge and stock up ASAP for lean times to come. Changing this reality id nearly impossible emotionally speaking, making healthy alternatives available first is a real-world solution that is painless and works!
Watch what you put on your plate. Some tasty things are better for you than others. Lot’s of fatty turkey skin will give you a lot more bad fat than a lean steak, so go lighter on the dark meat and fatty parts of the skin. Don’t eliminate them, just balance them and eat more lean white meat.
Talk to the gravy master! Gravy is sometimes all fat. It depends upon who makes it and how. It’s tempting to include all the fat and drippings in your turkey gravy! Here is a basic way to make a low-fat tasty turkey gravy:
Put an onion in the cavity of the turkey. It makes the dripping very gravy-ready. Then, when the turkey is all done, keep the pan and get re=id of the pure fat portion of the drippings. Letting the drippings sit in the pan (still) for a while helps it to separate better. Then skim off as much fat as you can. (the clear oil portion) Estimate how much liquid is in the pan and prepare water to add that one cup less than is twice the amount of the dripping liquid, set aside but don’t add the water yet. Heat the dripping pan with drippings on the stove top and stir with a wooden spoon to get all the tasty flavors into the liquid. When it comes to a boil, (Options: I like to add mushrooms here. Stems work well chopped for flavor if you like the teste. A splash of pale dry white sherry at this point helps a bit. The white wine adds some richness that will compensate for the lower fat well.) Add your salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, garlic powder if you like that flavor and your personal preferences. Taste and add… Taste and add… It’s better to add too little and adjust than the other way around. Thickener: Make one cup of cornstarch mixture or flour and water mixture… Generally cornstarch has twice the thickening power of flour, but the traditional flavor of gravy uses flour, not cornstarch. Both work fine. Cornstarch produces a more translucent gravy than gravy thickened with flour. Add about 3 teaspoons of cornstarch or 6 teaspoons of flour per cup of gravy and pre-mix it with room temperature water to a smooth paste to avoid lumps.
The final test: When you are all done eating, try standing up. And ideally, try a walk. If it doesn’t hurt, you did something right and now have one more thing to be thankful for!
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