Christmas Stuff - Part 2 - 2013

Food is Christmas ‘stuff’ as much as ornaments on the tree. Every December there are foods that stand out. Some are new for the year and some are part of the family tradition. Here are the December 2013 special foods for my Christmas.

Red Velvet Cake - The food with the most tradition this year. My mother use to make it from scratch. Now I buy it at the grocery store - making sure that it had cream cheese icing (not the icing that is mostly butter).

Pumpkin Ginger Scones - The food that is new this year and destined to become part of the tradition. I’ve already modified it to use butternut squash in place of the pumpkin!

Cranberry orange relish with plain yogurt - The food that joined the tradition a few years ago. It had good color, is healthy compared to so much Christmas fare, and has a welcome tangy taste.

Kale - The food that I started experimenting with last fall but only decided belonged in my refrigerator when winter weather got serious. I include it in every soup and stir fry I make! It is loaded with good nutrition - and lends a green color to winter meals. I buy a large bag of pre-washed Kale and keep it in the freezer. It crunches easily into small pieces when it is still frozen and cooks up the same as fresh when used in soups and stir fries!

Popcorn with pumpkin seed oil - The food that will go beyond Christmas now that I’ve learned to make it. I pop the corn in a paper bag in the microwave. No more not-good-for-you additives from the packaged microwave popcorn! And then drizzle it with pumpkin seed oil which turns a nice green color on the white corn…..green and white for the season. Add some apple slices for nutritional balance and to achieve the full Christmas color scheme!

Baked Yogurt Custard

Icy cold smoothies made with plain non-fat yogurt have been a great way to get calcium through my diet this summer - but smoothies will not be appealing as the weather gets cooler. In the past week, I started looking for other ways to eat yogurt that are warming. My favorite so far is Baked Yogurt Custard.

Icy cold smoothies made with plain non-fat yogurt have been a great way to get calcium through my diet this summer - but smoothies will not be appealing as the weather gets cooler. In the past week, I started looking for other ways to eat yogurt that are warming. My favorite so far is Baked Yogurt Custard.

The basic idea is to use non-fat plain yogurt, fruit and eggs as the basis for custard rather than the more typical milk (usually with some fat), sugar, and eggs. The recipe below was my first experiment:

• 1 banana
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup grated sweet potatoes
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon orange zest
• 1 cup yogurt 

Slice banana into baking disk. Mash. Add other ingredients. Whisk thoroughly. Let mixture come to room temperature.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake custard until ‘set’ (it took about 30 minutes in my oven).

Let cool to comfortable eating temperature.

The resulting ‘custard’ is thick and has a pleasant tang from the yogurt and orange peel. Some discoveries with this initial recipe: 

• The grated sweet potatoes were a little crunchy (I was trying to clean out ingredients from the refrigerator and should have saved the sweet potatoes for something else!) and
• It probably was too much to eat at one sitting (but it was so good!) 

I’ll make some adjustments next time and try some other fruits similar to what I have been using in smoothies during the summer. Pumpkin custard using yogurt rather than evaporated milk sounds good too; it would require sugar of some kind (honey rather than white sugar?). It occurred to me that Baked Yogurt Custard could also be made with vegetables (different seasonings and no sugar) to be more quiche-like. It is a lower fat technique than using cheese or cream. And I will try cooking it in my crockpot rather than heating up the whole oven!

The bottom line of all this is that I’ll continue buying as much non-fat plain yogurt through the winter as I have all summer!