Bariatric Foodie Play with your food
~~posted by Jen
It’s almost Turkey Day! What better time for the boys to decide we need to remodel my kitchen? I got home from Baltimore on Monday night to find the whole house in utter chaos. My camera is nowhere to be found, and I haven’t been able to get in my kitchen to cook all. week. long. This does NOT make for a happy Jen, so I have been kinda crabby all week.
Appropriately, I did buy myself a “Don’t bother me, I’m crabby!” t-shirt while in Maryland, so at least I have the wardrobe essentials to warn people. S’anyway, it’s been a crazy week, and I know yours has probably been hectic as well with getting all the holiday details ironed out.
Nik has our back and planned out the perfect strategy for dealing with the food fest that is Thanksgiving in the BF Survival Guide posted earlier this week. Now I want to go back over some Thanksgiving menu-planning and recipes to make your holiday cooking as stress-free as possible.
First, if you’ve never roasted a turkey, or are concerned yours won’t come out perfect, we’ve got you covered! Jen’s Perfect Roast Chicken gives step by step instructions on how to do it, just adjust your cooking time based on the weight of your bird. It comes out perfect every time, I promise!
Since odds are that most of your guests will be non-ops, you need lots of options to fill them up without wrecking your plan. I usually serve my Roasted Butternut Squash Soup as a starter and it’s always a hit.
Need some delicious, WLS-friendly side dish ideas? Green Bean Casserole is always popular, or you can roast some veggies. For Thanksgiving, I love to roast brussels sprouts and broccoli together and serve as a yummy side. Spritz it with lots of fresh lemon juice, maybe sprinkle in some sesame seeds or nuts to add extra crunch, and it tastes like delicious decadence when it’s actually a green vegetable! Go figure!
Of course it’s not Thanksgiving without the stuffing. Try Nik’s Lower Carb Cornbread to get your stuffing started off on the right foot. I use it in my Momma’s recipe and no one ever notices the difference.
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| Pic from Google, due to lack of camera. |
Last but not least, we need some cranberry sauce! This is how my sister makes hers, I just tweaked it a bit to make it sugar free. Don’t care for whole berry kind? Fear not! Tomorrow I’ll post a different “Jellied” version for you purists out there! Here’s how to do it:
Sugar Free Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce
Ingredients:
2 (8-ounce) packages fresh whole cranberries (or frozen if fresh aren’t available)
1 small orange, zested and juiced**
1/2 cup Splenda
1 cinnamon stick
Directions:
Rinse your cranberries in a colander and pick through them, removing any stems or wilted berries. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and simmer over medium heat for about 15 to 20 minutes, until the cranberries burst. Serve at room temperature or cool and refrigerate. (Remove cinnamon stick before serving.)
**NOTE: If fruit juice makes you dump, omit the fresh orange juice, increase the Splenda to 3/4 of a cup, and add either 1-2 tsp of Orange Extract or Davinci SF Orange Syrup.
***Update: Our Sugar Free Holiday Desserts are posted under Dessert Week, you can find them here.****
Trying these for the first time next week!
Thank you for this post. I was actually searching for recipes on sugar free sauces for my wife who is diabetic when I saw this post. I will definitely do this come Thanksgiving Day. Please keep on sharing such blogs!