| Your (Aspiring) Chef-Approved Holiday Meal By: Tala Al-Husry With the holidays coming up it might seem inevitable that people will run around with bloated stomachs. Holidays mean family, friends and food. Students at the Culinary Institute of America, Karmah Tabbaa and Emily Chellew, give us a way to combine all three. They walk Athena through healthy holiday recipes that you can make at home. Cooking is always more fun when you help. The girls suggested recipes for the holidays that include a salad, a side dish, a turkey with stuffing and dessert. Here’s a beet and goat cheese salad to get the dinner started: 1 bag of baby spinach 5 big red beets 1 lemon 1 orange 2 ounces of white vinegar 1 cup of walnuts Olive oil Aged goat cheese Boil the beets (with the skin) in water with 2 ounces of white vinegar. Boiling them takes 45 minutes to an hour. To check if they’re done, stick a fork in the beets. If the fork slides in and out easily, they’re boiled. Rub them with a paper towel to remove the skin. Cut the beets in wedges. Toast the walnuts in a pan with a tiny bit of olive oil. Crush the walnuts or leave them whole after you toast them. Cut one orange into segments. Juice the lemon. Crumble the goat cheese. Put the baby spinach in a plate, then lay the beets down and add lemon juice, olive oil and salt and toss them. Cut up segments of orange and scatter the goat cheese, walnuts and orange segments around the plate. No holiday dinner is complete without sweet potatoes, Karmah and Emily suggested making a mashed sweet potato that is much lower in fat then most mashed potato recipes. This recipe doesn’t use any cream: 7 sweet potatoes 1 head of garlic 3 sprigs of thyme 1 cup of low fat milk Roast sweet potatoes with olive oil: Coat the sweet potatoes with olive oil. Cut the head of garlic in half and some thyme then place them into the roasting pan. Put them in the oven for about half an hour. Check to make sure the potatoes are evenly coated with olive oil. Take them out of the oven, mash them and pour the hot cup of low fat milk over them and mash a little more. Season with salt and pepper. Emily and Karmah suggest a low calorie stuffing for the turkey. It’s healthier than most turkey recipes because there is no oil or butter in this recipe. Just make sure to preheat the oven to 325 degrees F before you start making the stuffing so that the oven is ready for the turkey. 1 whole stale white baguettes 2 tsp dried sage ½ cup of celery 1 cup of chopped up onions 1 cup of raisins 1-2 cups of hot chicken stock Cut up the bread, celery and onions and put them in a in a bowl, add the sage and raisins and pour 1-2 cups of hot chicken stock in the bowl. The turkey: Then get a clean turkey. Remove the neck and the inside of the turkey- get rid of the bag. Dry it out with a paper towel and put the stuffing inside. Put the turkey in a roasting pan. Line it with tin foil. Put the turkey inside the oven and put tin foil on top of it and make sure that its not touching the turkey. (Take a long piece of foil and put it as the lining under the pan and then let it extend to the top) It creates steam that cooks the turkey. The amount of turkey needed varies but an average sized turkey is about 12 lbs. Preheat the oven for the time it takes to do everything else. It should take 3 hours to 3 hours and 45 minutes for the turkey to be cooked. Every half an hour pull out the pan and get a deep spoon and pour the juices that are coming out over the turkey. This is called basting. (Open up tin foil, baste and then reseal and put it back in) This will serve about 12. To tell if its cooked, get the leg and move it a bit and if the juice is clear then its done and if there is some blood then it needs more time to cook. Some turkeys have a thermometer that sticks up once the turkey is cooked. Pumpkin pie: Frozen pie shell 1 can of Libby’s pumpkin (100% pumpkin pulp) ¼ pound sugar 1 ounce dark brown sugar 1 pinch of salt 1 tsp cinnamon 6 ounces of milk ½ can of evaporated milk 3 eggs Pre heat the oven to 420 degrees F. Make the frozen pie shell. The cooking instructions are on the packets found in stores. For the filling: Mix together the pumpkin pulp mix with the sugar, the dark brown sugar, a pinch of salt, the cinnamon, milk, evaporated milk and eggs. Mix them all together with a hand held mixer until there are no lumps and pour it in pie shell. Bake it till the crust is golden brown and till the filling is stable and not runny. It should take about 45 minutes. |
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