The holiday season gives people a chance to spend time with family and friends, and an opportunity to indulge in delicious celebratory meals and desserts. Pies are a common dessert during the holidays, but they can also be fattening. Luckily, there are ways to alter the recipes of holiday pies that will create pies that are wonderfully delicious, as well as low in fat and calories.
Pumpkin Pie
Holiday pumpkin pies are easy to make and healthy to eat. This is because the main ingredient, pumpkin, contains no fat and is packed with vitamins. To alter a pumpkin pie recipe and make it a healthier version, replace a standard version of condensed milk with a low-fat version. Use a pie crust that uses graham crackers as the base, instead of flour and butter, which contains high amounts of fat. The result will be a delicious pumpkin pie that contains significantly lower fat and calories.
Healthy Fruit Pies
Fruits pies are traditionally made using butter crusts and canned, syrupy fruits. These pies, although made with fruit, are usually high in fat, have low nutritional value and excessive amounts of sugar. To correct this problem and make a healthy, highly nutritious fruit pie, replace a flour and butter crust with crushed almonds. Crushed almonds can be easily pressed into a pie pan and used as a healthy alternative to flour crusts. Use only fresh fruit for the filling, combined with a small amount of flour and turbinated sugar, which is an unrefined form of sugar. This will lower the sugar content of the pie significantly, without losing any of the taste. Remove all peels and pits from fruit before adding it to the pie as filling.
Meringue Pie
Meringue pies are fluffy, creamy and delicious, but can be fattening if they are made using heavy cream and butter. Luckily, you can make a fluffy and creamy meringue pie using low- or non-fat milk, and a low-fat graham cracker crust. Since there is no cream in the filling of the meringue pie, scald the non-fat milk in the bottom of the pan repeatedly and incorporate it into the mixture slowly. Using turbinated sugar instead of refined white sugar will lower the amount of overall sugar in the pie. This will give you a healthy, low-fat version of lemon or chocolate meringue pie.
