Here’s to holiday food traditions!

ONCE AGAIN, IT’S THE TIME OF YEAR to make my grandma’s traditional family favorite date bars, pumpkin pie, and cranberry relish. Of course, it’s also the time of year to consume lots of high-calorie diet-busters like eggnog, cookies, cocktails, and rich meals. Yes, it’s easy for extra pounds to pile on at this time of year if we aren’t mindful of what we put in our mouths.

However, the holidays can be healthier than you think—and it is possible to keep some of those nostalgic family food traditions alive without sabotaging your healthy eating habits. In fact, though you may not realize it, many traditional holiday foods are actually superfoods, meaning they are packed with nutrients like vitamins, antioxidants, and fiber.

Let’s take a look at some of them:

Dates

Dates are a popular choice during the holiday baking season but not so much the rest of the year. This is unfortunate because dates are bursting with flavor, fiber, antioxidants, potassium, and vitamins. They’re also wonderful eaten plain as a snack or in desserts or smoothies. There are many different date varieties to choose from and some are truly like candy. Medjool dates, for example, have such a rich taste and soft, chewy texture that you’d swear you were eating a caramel!

Clementines

These small, easy-to-peel citrus fruits are packed with vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants. They’re an awesome source of vitamin C to help immune function, which is a major benefit with flu season underway and COVID still making its presence known. You can eat clementines plain as a snack or work them into smoothies, salads, desserts, or even main dishes.

Pumpkin

Go ahead and call it a gourd, but this fiber-rich winter squash is chock full of beta carotene—you know, the stuff that’s good for your eyes—as well as antioxidants, vitamin C, and potassium. You can use pumpkin in all kinds of recipes, such as pies with skim milk, smoothies, and (my favorite) chili.

Pomegranates

Showing up in supermarkets now, these big, plump, juicy fruits are loaded with nutrients like fiber, protein, vitamin C, vitamin K, folate, and potassium, as well as antioxidants. The little seeds, called “arils,” are rich in fiber, minerals, bioactive plant compounds, and some sugar, and the juice is full of antioxidant activity just like red wine and green tea. The juice also has anti-inflammatory properties and has been shown to help with the digestive tract, the joints, breast cancer, and colon cancer. Eat the berries plain or try them in smoothies, and drink the juice.

Cranberries

Another bold little red berry— though significantly more tart than sweet when compared to pomegranate—the cranberry is an excellent source of antioxidants, vitamin C, and vitamin E. These berries have been shown to reduce the risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease. Solid research also indicates that cranberries help in preventing urinary tract infections.

For use in recipes, boil whole berries in a saucepan with a pinch of sugar until they pop. Then reduce heat and simmer. I like to use the raw berries in a relish that’s made with an apple cut up with peel on, an orange with peel on, a pinch of ginger, and honey. Put the ingredients in a food processor until they’re reduced to small chunks. The relish is delicious with main entrees.

This holiday season, don’t discount the healthy aspects of the delicious winter fruits and vegetables available. Try to incorporate some or all of these into your next holiday meal.

Don’t lose that heirloom holiday dish!

So back to my family heirloom— Grandma Stein Date Bars. For years at Christmas time, I helped my mom make these. My job was to sit at the table with a cup of warm water, scissors, and the dates that I had to cut up into quarters. Nowadays, thank goodness, you can buy bags of conveniently cut-up dates. My Mom, now 93, is beyond making the bars, but my plan is to capture her voice reading the recipe out loud and adding her own caveats to preserve our family memory with a nifty new app from Google Play or the App Store called Dishstory. This easy-to-use interface allows users of all ages to quickly navigate and create audio recipes for posterity. The audio heirloom exists perpetually and can be shared to bring the voice of a distant, departed, or disconnected loved one to life.

Dishstory is an innovative way to keep treasured family recipes and kitchen memories in hand at all times. It ensures the family culture and legacy will live on in future generations’ kitchens. As stated by the app’s developers, two local Toledoans, “Nothing tells a family’s story like the food they share and recipes they prepare together.”

Healthy regards from Eating Well for a warm and cozy holiday season.

Laurie Syring, RDN/LD, is Clinical Nutrition Manager at ProMedica Flower Hospital.