By Gloria Agugua
As we all know, it’s the holiday season. A lot of people will be eating junk, biscuits, chocolates and all that unhealthy stuff.
Here are some alternative ways to snack while watching your waist line:
Salty Snacks (Kale chips): Instead of eating potato chips and plantain chips, you can have kale chips. They are healthy snacks to give your family a treat all year round.
How to make it:
Wash fresh kale leaves. Allow the water drain, then remove it from the stem in bite size pieces. Lightly coat with olive oil, lay kale leaves separately on baking sheet.
You can flavour to your taste. E.g. Lemon juice and black pepper, cayenne pepper etc. Put in the oven for 10 to 15mins bake until the edges are brown but not burnt. Then it’s ready to eat!
Sweet Snacks: You can substitute this for chocolates and biscuits this season and it would have your home smelling like the holidays.
Cinnamon pear chips are so yummy and addictive.
How to make it
Slice the pear in thin slices. Sprinkle with Cinnamon, then you put wax paper on the baking pan to prevent pear from sticking to each other. Pre-heat the oven to 120 or 100. Bake the pears for 1hour flip them over and bake for another hour. You can serve hot or cold.
Deserts: instead of ice cream and cake this jolly season, you can try frozen banana ice cream.
How to make it: For a cup size serving you need 1 large ripe banana, it should be sweet and soft.
Cut the banana into even-size small pieces.
Freeze over night
Blend the frozen banana pieces in a blender or food processor.
Keep blending the banana until it looks crumbled or smashed, then you scrape the pieces down.
Again, blend till it looks gooey like banana mush. Scrape down the food processor
Blend again; the banana will look like oatmeal: it will get smoother but still have chunks of banana in it.
Watch the magic happen!
Suddenly as the last bits of banana smooth out, you’ll see the mixture shift from blended banana to creamy, soft serve ice cream texture. Blend for a few more seconds to aerate the ice cream. (if adding any mix-ins, like drizzle of honey, a few almonds, half a teaspoon of ginger or cinnamon, this is the moment to do it.
Finally, transfer to an airtight container and freeze until solid: You can eat the ice cream immediately, but it will be quite soft. You can also transfer it back into the airtight container and freeze it until solid, like traditional ice cream.
These few gems will help you indulge this jolly season without the guilt.
