How to reduce the calorie content of traditional New Year's meals

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

New Year is just around the corner, and many housewives are already thinking over a festive menu: traditional Olivier, red fish, herring under a fur coat, jellied meat, caviar, baked duck and chicken - the New Year's feast has always been famous for its variety and abundance.

It is very difficult to deny yourself festive dishes, when the neighbors on the table with might and main "devour" delicacies - but what about those who are afraid to get better? Many ladies have been preparing for a long time and persistently to celebrate the New Year fully armed: diets, a beautician, a new dress and fashionable styling … but if you give your appetite free rein, a new dress will have to be put in the closet "until better times" - extra pounds will not be long in coming.

To still enjoy your favorite foods and not gain weight, try to reduce their calorie content. Yulia Bastrigina, a nutritionist, an expert of the Bodykey program, helped us to figure out how to make the traditional New Year's table dishes not so harmful:

Olivie

Dish number 1 on the New Year's table. The dish itself has a very high glycemic index, but there are several secrets that can be used to reduce the total calorie content. To begin with, you can partially replace the potatoes with a steamed zucchini. Potatoes provide a high carbohydrate capacity, while courgette has a starchy neutral flavor and can be a good substitute. You can also "conjure" with meat filling - it is better to use lean boiled meat or chicken than doctor's sausage - the salad will be tastier and less high in calories. The third and most important thing is that dressing with mayonnaise with 67% fat content is completely contraindicated for those who at least somehow follow the figure. Therefore, in order to reduce calories, we choose 10% mayonnaise or make a yoghurt dressing.

It is better to use lean boiled meat or chicken rather than doctor's sausage - the salad will be tastier and less high in calories.

You can often hear that homemade mayonnaise is much healthier and less nutritious. In fact, homemade mayonnaise can reach even higher fat content than industrial mayonnaise, since they are all cooked in olive oil, which has a crazy calorie content. "Shop" mayonnaise in some cases, due to the manufacturer's savings, can be much less energy-intensive. So do not think that if you made mayonnaise at home using traditional technology with egg yolks and olive oil, you will reduce the calorie content of the dish. You will most likely end up with an even higher percentage of fat than the regular 67% mayonnaise.

Herring under a Fur Coat

Another Russian tradition on the New Year's table - herring under a fur coat - has a composition similar to that of Olivier, and therefore has a high calorie content. Such dishes can be called "dumped" salads, since there is a lot of everything in them, and all the ingredients contain a large amount of carbohydrates. Moreover, in a herring under a fur coat, vegetable ingredients are combined with fatty herring and a dressing of fatty mayonnaise.

That is, here, as in Olivier, if you want to somehow reduce the load, you can again work with the percentage of fat content of mayonnaise. All other products will have to be left - otherwise the salad will lose its taste.

But there are no hopeless situations: since the herring under a fur coat consists of several layers, you can make one layer of potatoes less, and leave mostly beets and carrots. Make boiled potatoes, for example, a substrate, and put herring on it, then alternate beets with carrots - foods with a lower glycemic load. Potatoes contain a high glycemic index and a large amount of carbohydrates, which, together with the fat that comes with mayonnaise, forms a carbohydrate-fat bomb, that is, the very thing that subsequently entails a sharp increase in hormones that store fat.

Fried meat and poultry

It is important to understand that some meat products initially carry too much fat. Duck, goose, pork are very high in calories in themselves. For example, a roasted turkey is about four times leaner than a goose and even much lighter than chicken. A whole chicken has a very uneven distribution of fat. Much is found on the thighs and on the back. Therefore, it will be much more correct to choose a turkey for the New Year's table - it is large, satisfying and contains much fewer calories than chicken.

To make the dish the least high-calorie, it is important to properly stuff the bird.

To make the dish the least high-calorie, it is important to properly stuff the bird. You don't need to add energetic foods like rice or buckwheat to your turkey; use fresh vegetables and herbs for this. Or, on the contrary, if you bake the whole bird and stuff it with undercooked cereals, then they, in turn, will absorb the fat that will be released during cooking. Then those who want to lose weight do not need to eat this cereal, they should only use it as an absorbing mechanism.

Sandwiches with caviar

We all love caviar sandwiches, especially on holiday when everyday food gets boring. Of course, you should not overuse this product - make sandwiches on a huge slice of white bread with a greasy layer of butter. In no case use tartlets - dried and concentrated, they are often fatter than the bread itself. You can make them on regular bread with butter and caviar, and this will put a load on the hormonal system that stores fat. And you can use rye bread, which is much healthier.

Alternatively, you can make toasts from dried Borodino or rye-wheat bread without butter - small squares. Caviar is laid out on them in a small slide, and pierced on top with a stick with an olive to make it beautiful.

Ideally, it is better to make the New Year's table “gourmand”, where there is a little bit of everything in small portions, so that a person can get maximum pleasure - to try a large number of dishes, and not to gorge themselves on “basins” of Olivier. The times of scarcity have passed, but, unfortunately, the thinking that there should be a huge amount of products on the tables remains. We must fight this.