I know everyone is super exited to go home for Thanksgiving. You can have your mom do your laundry, shower without shoes on, and, most importantly, you can eat food that wasn’t prepared in mass at the Pit. Nothing beats a home-cooked meal; however just because you haven’t had mom’s signature dish in four months does not mean you need to get carried away. After all, no one wants to fight that food hangover the next morning.
Trust me, I am well aware of that paralyzing indecision of what to get when you look at that overloaded Thanksgiving Day dinner table. It’s hard to restrict yourself from toppling everything on to your plate! Unfortunately, collegiettes, the answer is not to gobble everything up. I’m here to help provide some insight into making those tough choices when it comes to Turkey Day dinner.
Lets start off with the turkey itself: Yes, it is a lean protein; so yes, it is fairly healthy. But watch out – the dark meat has four more grams of fat and 45 more calories per ounce than the white meat.
On to stuffing: It’s made from breadcrumbs and some (usually not many) chopped vegetables. These breadcrumbs are then flavored with the juice runoff from the turkey, which is why it’s so delicious! Be careful, though; eat this delicious dish in moderation, as it can be dense and not very healthy. A lighter choice – believe it or not – is to go for a bread role with a dab of butter!
Moving on down the table… Casserole is delicious, and sweet potatoes are healthy, right? But watch out, the casseroles can get really dense really fast. A lighter and healthier pick would be the green bean casserole – which, with its mushroom gravy and fried onions, is still delicious!
A fundamental part of Thanksgiving is cranberry sauce and gravy. You can’t have a proper Thanksgiving meal without these staples. Be warned: gravy is, essentially, fat and flour beaten together. Moreover, cranberry sauce has, you guessed it, cranberries and lots and lots of sugar. But believe it or not, calorically, choosing gravy is better than the cranberry sauce – per 1/4 a cup of gravy only delivers about 30 calories in comparison with cranberry sauce which delivers nearly 110. When you’re topping off your turkey, keep these calorie statistics in mind.
Finally, we arrive at the pies. I assume most people have the same pie struggle: apple or pumpkin? Well, this time, face the challenge with the insight that pumpkin pie, per 1/8 of a 9” pie, saves you about 100 calories, plus the added bonus that the whipped cream on top has less fat than the ice cream that is often served with the apple pie.
This Thanksgiving, go home and enjoy some home-cooked meals! But approach the table armed with this knowledge, and hopefully it’ll help make some of those difficult choices a little bit easier.