By Orlea Miller ‘16
Thanksgiving is easily a foodie’s favorite holiday of the year. While my day-to-day life revolves around the foods I’m eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Thanksgiving is the one time of year when everyone else does the same. We begin looking into airline fares months ahead of time when making our holiday plans, and then spend at least a week or two carefully selecting Thanksgiving recipes and entering the grocery store madness just to eat together as a family.
My family sticks to the traditional foods for this annual event: turkey, stuffing, rolls, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, and green beans (and a countless number of pies and other treats). Unfortunately, they don’t like straying from the recipes they’re used to either. However, after years of box-made stuffing, I decided to try out a new recipe for Thanksgiving this time around.
I found the recipe for “Save-the-Day Stuffing” online (a.k.a. homemade stuffing with a few healthy swaps) to lighten everyone’s plates this year. I used the typical veggies but included light bread and liquid egg substitute, and ended up with a pretty tasty addition to our household’s Thanksgiving repertoire.
Ingredients
(MAKES 5 SERVINGS)
6 slices light bread
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped mushrooms
1 cup fat-free chicken broth, room temperature
1/4 cup fat-free liquid egg substitute
1 tbsp. light buttery spread
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, to taste
1 oz dried cranberries (if desired)
Directions:
Leave bread uncovered at room temperature overnight. Otherwise, begin by lightly toasting bread.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cut bread into 1/2-inch cubes. Spray a medium baking dish with nonstick spray, and place bread cubes evenly along the bottom of the dish.
Chop up the celery and onion to prepare it for the stuffing.
In a medium pot, combine broth, celery, and onion. Cook for 8 minutes over medium heat.
Remove pot from heat, and add mushrooms and garlic. Season mixture to taste with salt, pepper, rosemary and thyme. Let cool for several minutes.
Add egg substitute and butter to veggie/broth mixture and stir. Pour mixture into the baking pan, evenly covering bread cubes. Mix gently with a fork. Bread cubes should be moist, but not saturated (if necessary, add 1 – 2 tbsp. water, and then mix again).
If desired, throw in the dried cranberries to add a sweet kick to your stuffing!
Cover with foil, and cook dish in the oven for 20 minutes.
Remove foil, and fluff and rearrange stuffing. Return dish to oven (uncovered), and cook for an additional 15 minutes.
After comparing my homemade stuffing to the boxed one we have had at our Thanksgiving table in years past, I was impressed. This version had more flavor and texture, though I admittedly added in more chicken broth than the recipe called for after noticing it looked dry before putting it in the oven.
I found the stuffing recipe, along with quite a few other holiday dishes at www.hungry-girl.com, one of my go-to websites for healthy sides, entrees, and desserts that are just as tasty as the original version, yet far more nutritious and lower in calories and fat.
After my mom and I finished baking pumpkin and apple pies, a flourlesschocolate cake, and a pumpkin roll, my six-year-old brother decided he wanted to chip in to our Thanksgiving dessert collection too! With a little bit of help on the frosting end, he decorated his own turkey chocolate cupcakes for all the kids (with blue eyes for the boys and pink eyes for the girls of course). One of my mom’s signature dishes, and a family favorite, is her sweet potato casserole which is pictured here as well.
Even on arguably the most American holiday, the Ferrantes can’t abandon their beloved pasta. No need to be alarmed, we still have turkey and all the fixings, we just save all of that for last. Every year, I look forward to the warm broth of our first course, pastina and spinach soup. This tradition has been around longer than I have, and I could not imagine our feast without it. Homemade cinnamon rolls are another favorite and staple of our Thanksgiving meal; since my mom started making them a couple years ago, the rolls have more or less become the second course of our Thanksgiving meal. They always seem to come out of the oven while my aunt is carving the turkey, so we usually devour them as we anxiously await the main course.
In the evening, we headed to the Dudley Co-op, which was unusually sparsely populated this Thanksgiving (only two co-opers remained on campus). We raided the leftovers fridge, rationalizing that the food would go bad anyway, and ate our fill of roasted beets, tomato-pepper hummus, sourdough bread, and homemade deep dish pizza. Later, we celebrated the end of the day with cheap champagne and roasted marshmallows and chocolate in Christine’s room in Dewolfe.
s been open in the North End (basically Boston’s Little Italy) for almost 62 years now. The new satellite shop in Harvard Square will receive deliveries of all sorts of pastries (lobster tails, tiramisu, and empty cannoli shells that will be filled to order) from the main bakery in the North End each morning. To finish off the exciting Italian-American immigration to Harvard Square, the new shop will also offer coffee drinks, including espresso and cappuccino.
crimsoncrave.com 
