Thanksgiving: Side Dishes and Calories - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats.

Thanksgiving - Side Dishes and Calories: Nutrition

The side dishes that are going to be higher in calories than the typical Thanksgiving meal - The first one is going to be gravy. That's not actually a side dish, it goes on top, but it's definitely going to be one of your high-calorie Thanksgiving items. So, to make gravy lower in calories, you want to change what it's made from. The traditional gravy is made from the turkey drippings, which have a lot of the fat that drips off of the turkey while it's cooking. One thing you can do is to instead make it with low-sodium, fat free chicken broth. If you really want to use the turkey drippings, because they have a good flavor, you could use maybe half chicken broth, and half of the turkey drippings. Or, you could actually put some ice cubes in the dripping pan, put the pan in the freezer for ten minutes, and then you're actually able to spoon out the hardened fat, and then you have just the lower fat drippings left behind, and then go ahead and make your gravy recipe from there.

The next side dish that would be high in fat at a Thanksgiving meal would be the mashed potatoes, because they usually have butter, cream, or a lot of added salt in them. They are high in carbohydrates and calories. So, one thing that you can do is use a light butter as a substitute. You could also reserve the starchy cooking liquid that you use to boil the potatoes, and whip up the potatoes with that. That would make them pretty creamy. For more flavor you might use fat free sour cream, or low fat cream cheese whip up the potatoes, or skim milk, or evaporated skim milk, and make sure and season them with plenty or herbs, spices, black pepper, garlic.

Another good alternative to cut back calories is to use mashed cauliflower. A lot of people are doing that. That's becoming really popular because the cauliflower, when it's blended up with the same seasonings, it will have the same flavor as mashed potatoes, but be so much lower in calories and carbohydrates.

The next side dish that would be high in calories would be the cranberry relish. That's going to be very high in sugar, and therefore very high in calories. So, instead of a commercialized cranberry relish, or cranberry sauce, you might just make one from scratch with cranberries, fresh fruit, dried fruit, sweetened maybe with apple sauce, and that way you can cut back on a lot of the sugar.