While Thanksgiving can be a challenging day of the year for all dieters, it’s especially difficult for vegetarians and vegans who abstain from eating turkey. There is no shortage of vegetable dishes at most Thanksgiving tables, but the meal often revolves around turkey as a main course.

While the vegetarian diet is diverse and exciting, there are certain parts of the Thanksgiving meal that can be challenging to navigate on a meat-free diet.

Meat-Free Main Dishes
This year, whether you are eating a vegetarian diet, vegan diet or simply want to cut down your consumption of animal products, you can easily swap the turkey out of your Thanksgiving dinner without sacrificing tradition. While offering meat substitute like “Tofurkey” is one option, many home cooks prefer to take advantage of fresh seasonal produce and hearty grain salads.

Read Full Post >

More than 250 million turkeys are slaughtered in the industrial system each year in the United States, and about 46 million of those are for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful, warm holiday, full of family time, great traditions and good food. Unfortunately, there are many not-so-good things about the Thanksgiving turkeys most grocery stores offer to their customers.

The status quo for raising turkeys and other meat birds is the industrial, factory farming system. The conditions in which factory farmed turkeys are raised is horrendous. It’s cramped, with each bird given about 3 feet of space to live its life. So that these cramped and stressed turkeys won’t turn to pecking at each other, prior to confinement their beaks and the tips of their toes are cut off (processes some liken to having the tips of a child’s fingers and toes chopped off). These turkeys, raised in gigantic warehouses, are denied their natural instincts and can’t eat their natural diet of seeds, vegetation and insects. They’re also bred to grow so rapidly that it puts an incredible strain on their bodies. Some researchers estimate that factory farmed turkeys spend at least a third of their lives in chronic pain.

Read Full Post >

I love Thanksgiving. It’s my very favorite holiday ever. Lots of friends, lots of food, no gifts to buy – it’s just about the perfect holiday, in my mind. There’s just one small problem – the food and the festivities tend to make one a bit, shall we say, sluggish. After filling your belly with a week’s worth of calories, you feel like taking a 3 hour nap. Instead of doing that, why not try some of these fantastic, family friendly options that will help you not only enjoy the day but end it feeling as if you’ve done something good for you?

Start the day off right. This year, all of my kids are finally old enough to participate in a Turkey Trot and I hope to make this an annual tradition. Even just running a mile, first thing in the morning, gets the blood flowing and gets everyone off on the right foot. Knowing you’ve done even a tiny bit of exercise makes it less likely that you’ll fall, face first, into the pecan pie.

Read Full Post >

Planning on standing at the kitchen counter for hours preparing the Thanksgiving meal? Or perhaps you will be sitting in front of the television for hours while someone else prepares the Thanksgiving meal. Either way, your back is going to take a beating. The following gentle yoga inspired poses and stretches will help smooth out the kinks and restore your spine for a second helping of holiday fun.

Kitchen Counter Stretch

Place both hands on the edge of your kitchen counter. Take one big step back and fold forward from your hips, keeping both arms straight. Reach your hips back as you lower your chest in between your arms. Take five deep breaths and then stand up. Repeat as often as needed between mashing up the potatoes and stirring the turkey gravy.

Read Full Post >

Wendy Gregory Kaho blogs about the care and feeding of a gluten-free family at Celiacs in the House.

My family has a list of holiday dishes that are not to be tinkered with or changed. They must look and taste the same way each and every year. We even have serving dishes and casseroles for each recipe, like the 28-year-old wedding gift baking dish to hold the stuffing.

When we found out about celiac disease and that three of us would be gluten free for the rest of our lives, one of the challenges was to get those textures and flavors from our traditional holiday foods without gluten. It’s gotten easier over the last six years to make our traditional stuffing recipe now that there are good gluten-free store-bought breads, cornbread mixes, and recipes available.

I created this gluten-free stuffing recipe especially for DietsInReview.com. This recipe combines two kinds of gluten-free bread that is cubed and toasted in a low oven, then it’s combined with gluten-free cornbread that is also cubed and toasted.  This is all added to the rest of the ingredients and baked. We never stuff anything in our turkey but onions, celery, garlic and a carrot because we like a drier stuffing to soak up lots of gravy.

Gluten-Free Stuffing

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup celery, finely chopped
• 1 cup onion, finely chopped
• 3 tablespoons butter or olive oil or a combination
• 2 teaspoons poultry seasoning or 1½ teaspoons of dried sage and ½ teaspoon of thyme
• 1½ teaspoons of salt
• ½ teaspoon of pepper
• 2 tablespoons of dried parsley or add ¼ cup of fresh chopped
• 4 cups of gluten-free bread cubes. (I used about 6 slices of whole grain and 6 slices of white sandwich bread.)
• 2 cups of cornbread cubes (I used ½ pan of Pamela’s Cornbread Mix made without sugar. The other half will be frozen and go into the Christmas stuffing.)
• 2 cups of gluten-free broth
• 1 beaten egg

Click through for the Gluten-Free Stuffing Instructions, and to share the recipe with a friend.
Read Full Post >