Around the Internet, various web-sites are offering some last-minute advice for more healthful holiday eating and celebrating.
Cooking Light offers healthful recipes and advice about the dos and don'ts of holiday foods. Their advice: say yes to sweet potatoes, green beans, hot cocoa, cranberries and turkey, but skip holiday dips, creamy soups, mashed potatoes, eggnog and pecan pie.
In its “Eat This, Not That” series, Men's Health offers its own list of “Best and Worst Holiday Foods”. The site also takes eggnog to task (350 calories in a small serving), as well as crab cakes, gin and tonics, and a popular choice for a holiday buffet, hot spinach and artichoke dip. Better foods include light beers, champagne, melon balls wrapped in prosciutto and shrimp cocktail.
Spark People has tips for the seemingly impossible task of losing weight over the holidays. Among the suggestions: when someone gives you a gift of chocolate or another treat, re-gift it, preferably to someone who isn't struggling with their weight. The site's Christmas Survival Guide advises bringing healthful foods you like to eat to holiday parties and suggests embracing winter activities that burn lots of extra calories in a short time.
Weight Watchers also offers a holiday survival guide, recommending that women become “holiday divas,” indulging in luxury and pampering rather than food. Among the suggestions are champagne bubble baths, spa treatments such as facials and pedicures and bold, high-gloss red lipstick. Chow offers an interview with the “Clean Food” author Terry Walters, who notes that the sweetness of winter squash can often satisfy a holiday sweet tooth with fewer calories and more nutrition.
Serious Eats offers solutions to the “Winter Vegetable Blues,” citing the limited selection of fresh produce this time of year. The round-up of various Web links includes an enticing version of colcannon, an Irish dish for the winter solstice that tops off a plate of warm cabbage, leeks, kale and potatoes with a runny egg.
And The Atlantic shifts the emphasis away from a decadent dinnertime and focuses on an elegant Christmas breakfast. The writer Regina Charboneau sets the morning table the night before with china, silverware, champagne flutes, flowers and tiny wrapped gifts. Breakfast includes easy blender-made popover pancakes filled with raspberry jam. She says it is all part of a larger scheme to help ensure that her sons will always be home for the holidays.
