Holiday Presentation Tips

Popular Holiday Messages:Caroline Apovian, MD, Director of Weight Management, and Julie Freeman, MA, RD, CDE, Nutritionist,  Spence Center for Women’s Health, give participants a quiz in their healthy holiday eating workshops. Questions are habits that lead to weight gain, including skipping meals, unconscious eating, diet mentality, excess alcohol, and inactivity; this raises individual awareness and is a good lead?in for weight loss tips, new recipes with tastings and recipe modification.Ricki McMillan, RD, The Heart Institute at St. Elizabeth Hospital, gives a holiday gift to her cardiac rehab patients: a cookbook featuring holiday recipes and survival tips. They prepare about 15 of the recipes and treat their  patients and staff to a tasting luncheon and recipe modification program. Sort of Pecan Pie uses 60% Grapenuts and 40% pecans for the filling and a graham crust; it has only 8 grams of fat and 245 calories versus 27 grams of fat and 503 calories like traditional pecan pie.Sandra Parker, RD, Zeeland Community Hospital, is the queen of cooking demos, often preparing elaborate buffets that we would love to attend. This year she is doing classes on healthy holiday food gifts. As she talks about the food items and recipes, she creatively wraps each item for giving. She will put the pumpkin nut bread in a brand new baking tin and wrap with colorful cellophane. The oat bran baking mix will go in a holiday gift bag with recipes attached. The dried fruit truffles in a candy dish, etc... Following the presentation, a buffet is set up for sampling all the items and she has a drawing for the gifts. This is a fun way to hook ‘em in and give lots of great nutrition and lowfat cooking tips!Carol Schlitt, University of Illinois, Cooperative Extension Service, teaches hosting the holidays with nutritious, delicious bounty. The emphasis is preparing foods from the bottom of the Pyramid, altering recipes for less fat, sugar and sodium, how to increase fruits, vegetables and fiber in holiday meals with a little food safety thrown in for good measure.Carol Coughlin, RD, Private Consultant, recommends doing cookie exchanges so you don’t bake so many varieties of cookies. She also has the most creative cookie alternative we have ever seen. She provides clients with a cinnamon dough recipe for decorating instead of eating. This gives you family moments in the kitchen that do not involve baking or pounds of butter. She has kindly shared the recipe with us:2 cups baking soda     1 cup cornstarch    1 Tbsp oil11/3 cups cold water    ½ cup cinnamonCombine baking soda, corn starch and cinnamon in a medium saucepan. Add water and oil. Cook, stirring constantly over medium heat until it reaches the consistency of moist mashed potatoes. Turn out onto a plate until cool enough to handle. Then knead until smooth. Store in sealed container until ready to use. To make decorations, roll and cut as you would for cookies. Make a hole in the top of your cutout. Allow to dry. Feed a ribbon or string through the hole to hang your ornament. FMI call 800-338-8831 for a free brochure on cornstarch play dough.Lisa Fieber, MS, RD, LD, Tasting Cooking School,  has a cooking demo that requires no cooking on her part! She invites a guest chef from the community who presents a program on how to create easy and elegant holiday dishes which will leave your waist intact. She provides a recipe booklet of all recipes demonstrated along with tastes of the dishes.Rosie Allen, Area EFNEP coordinator in Northern Kentucky produces a newsletter where she includes recipes. Her theme is gifts from the kitchen where she gives clients low cost food gift ideas.Hope Bilyk, MS, RD, Clinical Instructor, Chicago Medical School, sets up a mock mini buffet and shows the difference between plates filled with lowfat choices versus plates filled with higher fat choices. People are always surprised to see the difference in calories when the plates both have the same volume of food. This is a lead-in to supply recipes for lower fat choices.Rose Hoenig, RD, LD, Private Practice, Marshalltown, Iowa, uses overheads for discussion in her lighten up your holidays class. She begins by raising the consciousness level of where all the extra calories come from. For example, if you have 1 cup of eggnog and 2 ounces peanut brittle before lunch and 1 cup punch, 2 Xmas cookies and 1 piece of fudge in the afternoon, you add 1010 calories to your day. This adds up to 7070 calories for a week or 2 pounds per week times 6 weeks equals 12 pounds gained during the holidays.Need a lowfat eggnog recipe? The Almost No Fat Holiday Cookbook: Festive Vegetarian Recipes, by Bryanna Clark Grogan, Book Publishing Co., 1995 & 1997, has an innovative recipe using silken tofu blended with sugar, skim milk, water, rum and vanilla and topped with nutmeg, at only 130 calories and 1 g fat per serving.Indulging Without BulgingAlice Henneman, MS, RD, LMNT, Extension Educator, University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension in Lancaster County, has easy guidelines for Indulging Without Bulging in her electronic newsletter, Foodtalk. Here are our favorites:Put less on your plate. Less can mean smaller amounts. Less can mean fewer foods. The latter is sometimes a more successful strategy. For example, if you only make two dips for a party, you’ll probably do less sampling during preparation and at the party. At a restaurant, if you order just the entree without the rolls, salad, etc., there will be fewer foods to “just taste.” And if you bake holiday cookies, the more types you bake, the more cookies you’ll likely eat!Change your calorie fate. Include weight-lifting to turn your body into a better calorie-burner by increasing your muscle tone.