Date paste doesn’t sound appealing, but if you’re in the mood for a sweet something that isn’t devoid of nutrition, knowing how to work with it is a must.
Just Date Paste
Author: Melissa Walshe
Melissa Walshe is a food lover, an avid home cook, and an editor of the Guiding Stars blog. While creating, tasting, and curating Guiding Stars recipes, she has developed a knack for helping nutrition and flavor find a happy medium.
Melissa earned her Ed.M from Harvard, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Southern Maine. She uses her background in education to make nutritious, accurate food writing available to the home cook. In her free time, she spends a lot of time in the garden and walking her dog.
Just Desserts
Dessert is an ever-evolving challenge at Guiding Stars. We all love a little bit of something sweet now and again, and let’s be honest, most of us wish that sweet treats could fit into a well-balanced eating plan a little more often. Chasing the sweet food that’s not only nourishing but actually a delight to the senses is a little bit of a Holy Grail quest for those of us who work on recipe development for Guiding Stars. These are a few of our best tips for getting nutrition and dessert to come together.
Smart Leftovers
No matter how many dinner guests you have and how modest you might try to be in your preparation of Thanksgiving, leftovers are inevitable. If you’re not excited about an endless litany of turkey sandwiches and Thanksgiving dinner endlessly reprised in the microwave, knowing how to make “nextovers” is a must. Turkey soup and turkey pot pie are well-known tricks, but have you tried breakfast hash before? Crispy, sweet, and savory, you will love this dish for using up leftover turkey and sweet potatoes.
Smart Dessert
Pie is delicious, but crusts made with wheat flour and butter make it unfriendly to guests with wheat or gluten sensitivities or who are following a vegan diet. This torte wouldn’t work if your guests’ primary allergy concern is tree nuts, but it’s fantastic for the subset of dinner guests that often end up having fewer options to pick from. Using dates to sweeten good apples and a crust made of nuts, it’s also bringing some serious nutrition to the table. If you skimped on the meal food to save room for dessert, this is an option that will both please your tastebuds and sustain you.
Smart Sides
If you can get fresh green beans, they really don’t need more than a light treatment of garlic and herbs to be worthy of playing handmaiden to the sacrificial bird, so to speak. Color and crunch are also often lacking on a Thanksgiving table. While you could provide those with a salad, you could also save yourself time, money, and oven space by swapping in a fresh green bean recipe like this one instead.
Smart Appetizers
Snacking during the parade in the lead up to dinner is a tradition in my family. The array of nibbles, however, isn’t really all that different than the same kind of snacks we have access to all year. Cheese, nuts, shrimp cocktail, cream cheese and olives on celery. The dominant flavors are salt and fat, and the truth is, the apps tray can lean towards the side of more calorific than flavorful.
Smart Thanksgiving
When I say “smart,” I mean…follow me off the beaten path, here. Let’s play with the traditional ingredients of Thanksgiving, but put them to work in different and delicious ways. This month, I’ll be showcasing some recipes that our team especially enjoys using fall flavors to their best in recipes you don’t see every year.
Ham It Up
Here at Guiding Stars, our algorithm is intentionally designed to help you minimize the saturated fat and salt in your food. Ham, of course, is full of both. Ham, bacon, pancetta, and salt pork are not products you will find labeled with any stars. Slow cooking, however, gives us a beautiful opportunity to showcase the philosophy that no food is “bad” food, per se, but rather, that enjoying great nutrition and a good relationship with food is all about balance.