Healthy Thanksgiving Roundup

Ready to start planning for the big day? It's less than a week away . . .

Hungry Girl offers a list of must-have holiday ingredients to slim down your festivities. Some are the usual branded, processed goods, but you'll also find out the benefits of plain puréed pumpkin and natural butternut squash. One surprise for me: Campbell's 98% Fat Free Cream of Celery soup has fewer calories than either the Mushroom or Chicken varieties.

Also on offer from Hungry Girl is today's holiday hit list - and I don't mean the Top 10 kind. She offers suggestions for cutting calories from the worst Thanksgiving table offenders. Sure to make hesitant holiday cooks sing with joy is the advice to go ahead and use gravy mix. You'll save loads of calories and fat while being guaranteed no lumps on the big day.

Health Magazine put together a collection of recipes for a healthier Thanksgiving. The cornbread stuffing, cipollini onions, and apple galette all look especially attractive to me. You can read more about the holiday fun at Health at my post on Fit Fare. Go try your hand at that Thanksgiving foods quiz and see if you fared any better than I did!

While you're at Fit Fare, you can keep on the lookout for more healthy holiday eating advice. Right now, you can find a recipe for vegan Pumpkin Tofu "Ricotta" to help you through the upcoming office parties. I know when I was teaching in Las Vegas that the mini-quiches were my downfall at our holiday teachers' lounge parties. At least I won't have the temptation this year!

Good Housekeeping also went the healthy route with its Thanksgiving recipes this year. Check out the healthy variations from the November issue using the links below.

• Roast Turkey with Roasted-Garlic Gravy (scroll to the bottom for healthy-variation instructions)


• Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes


• Ginger and Pear Cranberry Sauce


• Whole-Grain Apple-Fennel Stuffing (scroll to the bottom for healthy-variation instructions)


• Green Beans with Garlic (scroll to the bottom for healthy-variation instructions)


• Squash Soup with Curried Pear (scroll to the bottom for healthy-variation instructions)


• Ginger-Almond Sweet Potatoes (scroll to the bottom for healthy-variation instructions)


• Brussels Sprouts with Lemon and Chives (scroll to the bottom for healthy-variation instructions)

The New York Times' Recipes for Health series has focused on a classic holiday food, sweet potatoes, this week. You can check out recipes for Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Soup and Sweet Potato Purée with Apples, as well as an article on their nutritional wonders.

If you follow the South Beach way of eating, Kalyn's Kitchen has an ever-expanding list of low-glycemic Thanksgiving recipes to keep you on track through the holidays.

Is it stress more than meal planning that gets you down during the holidays? The Beauty Eats blog by the people behind the Real Age site offers a top-five list of foods to keep you happy at this time of year.

Hungry Girl sneaks back into the roundup on her Yahoo! Food blog with a list of 7 Ways to Avoid Thanksgiving Weight Gain. Check out some of the recipes linked on this page to follow her advice and bring your own guilt-free contribution!

Finally, if you still can't find just what you were looking for, check out Cheap Healthy Good's exhaustive list of more than a hundred Thanksgiving links. It wears me out just looking at it!

Have a delicious holiday (prep) weekend!