Episode 10
Finding Healthy Food Ideas for the Holidays
Happy holidays, and welcome to episode 10 of the Beyond Nourished Podcast - the place to become a better, more efficient health-focused cook in just 10 minutes or less.
I'm your host Rachelle Girardin, coming to you today from sunny Mexico! And when I'm not on vacation, I'm working as a holistic private chef in Vancouver, Canada. I'm the owner of Beyond Nourished and a lover of all things holiday food-related.
So while I might not be having a traditional holiday this year, I wanted to make sure that you guys had some wonderfully delicious health-conscious holiday meals and ideas to be inspired by it.
Over the years, my family has transitioned, thank God, more to health-focused recipes. It had to do with me and my nutrition background, studying as a holistic nutritionist, and then also with my sister having been diagnosed with an auto-immune disease called Hashimotos.
My entire family over the years has done a complete overhaul of how we eat. We all love traditional food and holiday time so much, but we wanted to find ways to maintain tradition, but also to be in alignment with our health goals.
So if this sounds like something that you are interested in doing, and maybe this is the first year that you’ve been doing this, hopefully, these ideas start to spark some interest for you. Maybe you've been doing this over the years, but you've got a little bit stagnant with what you've been offering your family, so I wanted to give you guys a glimpse of what works for me and my family.
For us, just so you know, this typically meant cleaning up our diets, cleaning up the gluten and the dairy - with some exceptions, we use grasped butter - but truly, it was about subbing out some more of the traditional ingredients and just adding in a lot more ingredients that had packed nutritional value.
The truth is that in traditional holiday meals, there is just a lot of white, brown and pale colours, and so the first thing that was really easy to focus on was just adding in more colour. How this can look and how it's looked for us over the years was subbing regular potatoes for a sweet potato mash or cauliflower mash or - my personal favourite - a mix of any of the above. I love to take a little bit of the regular potatoes and mix them in with a cauliflower mash. I love to mix in a little bit of a potato mash with a little bit of cauliflower mash - I love the fusion of mash with pretty much anything, to be completely honest - but the sweet potato adds really beautiful colour to your holiday table. So that's one way that you can go about it.
Other ways to add in more colour would be just making sure that you have two or three more side dishes than you typically would have. So again, taking what we learned from the last episode, moving away from meat being the center of attention on a holiday table, and moving more into the “condimeat” concept where sure, we might have meat available, but we also have tons of veggie sides and veggie dishes to choose from.
Many items that you'll find on our typical holiday healthy menu would be a delicious kale salad with a pecan parmesan crumble or maple dijon dressing. It might be topped with something really festive, like pomegranate seeds - they just seem to scream holiday dish. I love putting them on any type of holiday salad that I might be serving.
You can sub out your boring old brussel sprout dish and do a shaved brussels sprout salad with a creamy garlic dressing. Try a pear and radicchio salad with a white wine vinaigrette or red wine vinaigrette. Radicchio is such a beautiful colour and just brings in so many nutrients into a relatively regular, boring old salad dish.
You can try a butternut squash, quinoa and spinach salad or a citrus fennel salad. This is something that I love to do because it combines grapefruit and oranges. You need to use blood oranges, they are very common that time of year, and mandarin oranges and then kind of an uncommon ingredient like fennel, bringing something new to the table and then making it with maybe some dairy-free cheese or some mozzarella - it's very bright and it's so delicious.
You could perhaps go more plant-based in your holiday menu this year, swapping out a traditional turkey and rather bringing in a nut loaf which is extremely simple to prepare. It’s essentially made from ground nuts and seeds that have a little bit of herbs and flavourings - and then paired with something very savoury, like a sauce, full flavour, and it's simply packed down and baked for quite a long time until it firms up and you can cut it and slice it. It really is very savoury and satisfying because it's really dense and you can top it with miso or mushroom-style gravy if you don't have a traditional turkey to be making the gravy off of. There are many veggie substitutes in order to make your gravy still, and maybe you’d like to try swapping the white flour butter buns for a grain-free biscuit that might be made with almond or coconut flour.
There are so many ways to incorporate more healthy ingredients into the dishes of the holiday season without losing a lot of those traditional flavours!
I'm challenging you this holiday season to pick at least one healthy substitution or a new recipe to try. It's an opportunity for you to impress somebody at your holiday dinner, and it's an opportunity for you to remember or for maybe you to teach somebody how good healthy food can taste, how good it can look, and also how it can help make you feel better over the holiday season.
I hope you guys have enjoyed today's holiday episode! Please share this episode and visit us on Instagram where you can find a lot of the recipes that I am chatting to you about today. I've posted some of our favourite recipes over the last couple of weeks that you can start to prepare for your holiday feast.
Thanks again for tuning in, please feel free to share this podcast with anyone that you think might enjoy it, and as always, I hope you tune in to the next episode.