Meal Planner Series: Crafting a Tasty, Healthy Holiday Meal

Registered Sports Dietician Bianca de la Rosa joins Coach Crystal to help you find the balance for a great holiday meal that everyone can enjoy!

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The Foundation: Building a Metabolically-Sound Holiday Meal

Prioritizing Nutrient-Dense Foods

Crystal: I am very excited to have you here. I think we should start with some basics. So, what kind of nutrition factors do we need to keep in mind as we prepare this meal?

Bianca: Yeah, absolutely. So, I always like to think about, “How can we make these meals as nutritious as possible?” And veggies are definitely a big one. You know that there’s going to be some good complex carbohydrates in there. Things that are rich in complex carbohydrates such as root vegetables, like sweet potatoes, that are high in fiber, parsnips beets, carrots, things like that.

That’s a really good veggie, to have, leafy vegetables like kale or spinach, collard greens, things like that. And then also thinking about like different ways of how we can make the actual ingredients in food more nutritious as well. One thing I like to think about is how can we make some of those swaps, which is a nutrition factor of, okay, if we’re going to be making chicken or turkey, can we somehow add like a bone broth in there and get more protein?

Oh, if you’re doing like mashed potatoes, can you add some yogurt in there to get more nutrition and more protein too? So little things like that. Um, swaps, veggies. All good stuff.

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Smart Swaps: Enhancing Nutrition Without Sacrificing Taste

The Greek Yogurt Hack for Creamier, Protein-Packed Mashed Potatoes

Crystal: All right. Now, I can hear the skeptics at home. Now when we add things like that. The bone broth, I feel like there’s probably not too much of a taste difference, but that yogurt and that mashed potatoes, are you sure we’re not going to taste too much of a difference?

Bianca: As someone that has actually tried this before? And I love my mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and everything else. I’m here to tell you that Greek yogurts, non-fat, non-flavored, you cannot taste it in mashed potatoes.

Wow. Um, now, I mean, of course you can add a little bit of butter, but actually, believe it or not, the Greek yogurt makes these mashed potatoes more creamy and more whipped, which gives it a nice consistency.

So, it’s one of those things that you would never think to add to something, but it really does work. The same thing with like creamy sauces or dressing, salad dressing, stuff like that. You can do easy swaps of adding in like yogurts, apple cider vinegar, things like that that just kind of like make it healthier and more nutritious.

Crystal: Okay. Is there any kind of like rule of thumb, as far as like how much you would put in instead of milk or something like that?

Bianca: So, for mashed potatoes, say that you were making like two or three pounds of mashed potatoes, I would probably put like about half a cup of Greek yogurt in there.

Um, anything more than that might taste a little bit different, but half a cup would probably be pretty good.