 in the Community Outreach Manager of the University of Maryland Medical Center. We're here today to talk to you about some healthy eating tips. While the holidays can be stressful, we certainly don't want you to overeat. And also with COVID, COVID can be very stressful too. So we're here today to talk to you about some healthy tips. We're gonna make a low-fat recipe and we'll discuss some of the things you need to do to be safe during COVID. Hi, my name is Asante Johnson and I'm the Community Health Specialist here at the Medical Center. Today I'm here to talk about how the holiday season this year is like no other. With COVID-19 here, we must celebrate a little bit different than how we usually celebrate. So with that, we must still remain healthy and happy during the season. And that's why we're gonna talk about this wonderful low-fat recipe, as Mary Ellen mentioned a little while ago. But I also wanna share a couple tips with you about how to stay healthy during the holiday season. I know we can't gather with our family and friends like we usually do, but we wanna make sure that we are not overeating. We are maintaining proper portion size when eating our healthy meals. We're not cooking and adding on the sweets, the sugar, the butter, things that can grow our health out of lack for as we go into the new year, okay? So let's go over some tips. We also have these nice little holiday information sheets that'll be online and available after this segment that you can always reference if you wanna share. This is a little placemat that has different information on it, such as avoid seeing anyone with COVID or COVID symptoms as we go into the holiday season. Wear your mask, wash your hands, and stay six feet apart. I think we've heard that enough, right? But you wanna make sure that you wear your mask, wash your hands, and stay six feet apart. Try virtual celebration. I know we just passed Thanksgiving, which was very food-filled, but a virtual celebration, you're still close with your family and friends. You can share recipes, especially this one that we're making today. One for the holidays. Maintain your weight. Maintain a healthy weight that you're going into the new year with. Enjoy what you eat, and remember that it's okay to splurge just a little bit. In this recipe here we have today, we're gonna splurge just enough and you'll understand what we mean in a little while. Keep moving. Never stop exercising. I know the weather outside is changing. It's getting cold. Temperatures are dropping. It's a little frigid. But in-home exercises, we reference our community health website where you can learn about chair exercises or indoor exercise that you can do at home. Watch your portion sizes. Don't overload your plate. Even if you try to stick with a small-sized plate, make sure that half of your plate at least is fresh fruits and vegetables here. Make sure another portion of your plate or one-fourth of your plate is your protein. And it should only be about the size of the palm of your hand. So you can get some great proteins like fish, chicken, lean-cut pork, lean-cut beef, stay away from fatty, fatty beefs and fatty-type cuts of meat at all times. Your other portion of your plate should be about a cup of grains. Whole grains are best at all times. Brown rice versus white rice. Whole grain bread or whole wheat bread versus white bread at different times. Alcohol. During the holidays, I know some people like to drink beer and wine and celebrate and get into the festivities. However, don't drink your calories. You wanna make sure that you go with a light beer or a light wine when you're celebrating throughout the holidays. No cream-filled drinks or heavy-type of mixed drinks are the best way to go for the holidays. Tip number six, enjoy the holidays. Remember they only come once a year. Try not to indulge and do your best to enjoy them. So now we'd like to make a demonstration for you on a low-fat apple crisp recipe. My hands are nice and clean, so I'm gonna go ahead and peel my Granny Smith apples. Granny Smith apples are really good and full of flavor and really good for recipes. While Mary Ellen is peeling her apples, I'll go ahead and talk about this low-fat, low-calorie apple crisp recipe. This recipe that we're making today, it's a serving for eight people. We can all stretch it out to about 10 if we do a little more smaller when it comes to portion sizing. This low-fat recipe is 205 calories versus the original apple crisp recipe, which is 257 calories. It's seven grams of fat versus the other one, which is 21 grams of fat. We do add a little bit of sugar. We're gonna use light brown sugar and a little bit of granulated sugar, or as people say, white sugar today, but just a little bit. We're really gonna get that sweetness from our apples. It's the type of apples that Mary Ellen is using and cutting right now. She's using Granny Smith apples, however you can use honey crisp or any other type of apple that you find to be sweeter. If you like tartness, you can go with a tartar apple and different things like that. So all of our apples are peeled and now we're getting ready to slice them and put them in a prepared pan. I briefly sprayed the pan with low-fat cooking spray and I'm slicing the apples about a quarter inch thick. So as Mary Ellen slices the apples, let's go over the ingredients that we're using. I previously mentioned you can choose whatever type of apple. The recipe calls for Granny Smith apples. They're on a little bit of a sweeter side. You can do honey crisp, which are my favorite and those are also on the sweeter side, but whatever apple you choose is also good. So we said three to four medium peeled apples and four. We want one tablespoon of granulated sugar or white sugar, same thing. Two tablespoons of lemon juice, three to four cups of rolled oats or fresh oats. We have actually here today organic oats. A fourth of a cup of all-purpose flour, two tablespoons of brown sugar, two tablespoons of melted butter, one teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and a quarter teaspoon of salt. So Mary Ellen's gonna work through cutting up her apples right now. In the meantime, you wanna have your oven turned on and heated to 350 degrees just to get it ready for this nice, wonderful treat that's gonna go in the oven. This is also a great recipe to do with your grandkids. You can do it, like we said, on a virtual session. Your grandkids could cook it while you're talking with them or you could both cook it at the same time. Also, but if you're seeing your grandkids and you've lived with them or your children, this is a great way to get kids eating healthy fruit and working with you in the kitchen, not doing a really hard recipe, but always remember to make sure kids you work with an adult and stay safe while you're doing this. So speaking of virtually, we actually did a virtual Thanksgiving. We had, our family was, we weren't all able to get together and we had a Thanksgiving. We actually did prepare a dessert for Thanksgiving virtually, it was kind of fun. So that's something else you can do during these times of COVID. You know, it's tough out there, but you can still make it fun. You can still see your family virtually. All right, so we have all of our apples for almost all of our apples in our pan. We're gonna combine some of our ingredients to get the nice coating that we're gonna need for it. These are rather big apples, so I think I'm good. As you see, they line the pan. So we're gonna go with our, what's first? All right, so we're gonna combine, we're gonna add the granulated sugar. Okay, one teaspoon, or one tablespoon. One tablespoon, yep. And then we're gonna do our two teaspoons of lemon juice. I use the little lemon, fresh people, fresh squeeze, or this is just as good. We're gonna do our three-fourths after that, of our rolled oats. So we're gonna do our quarter cup of all-purpose flour. Already measured. And onto our brown sugar. That's two tablespoons of brown sugar. And we have light brown sugar. We're definitely using light brown sugar, and you have light, and then you also have dark. If you choose a sweeter apple like Honeycris, you can definitely use less of the sugar as you go on. You can choose to only use one, maybe just the brown sugar instead of the granulated sugar. But however you choose to move forward is great with us. We add our two tablespoons. I'm actually doing four because I have a teaspoon. Okay. Onto our melted butter. And that's going to be two tablespoons. Two tablespoons. Next are cinnamon. One teaspoon of ground cinnamon. Our quarter teaspoon of salt. Now we're gonna combine everything and mix it together. Just give it a couple of tosses so everything can evenly get coated. As Mary Ellen's doing, you kind of want it to look like a cornmeal type mixture. Smells good. It looks amazing. This is so much better for you than an apple pie. Really is. Apple pies are really good, but this is just a little bit lighter, a little more healthy. We do want to try to stay healthy during the holidays as much as we can, but still enjoy. Gonna sprinkle it over your apples evenly. Make sure it covers all the portions. Smells amazing. We're gonna bake it for oven preheated to 350 degrees and we're just gonna pop it in the oven for 30 minutes. We're gonna bake it until it is lightly golden brown on top and the apples are tender when pierced with a tip of a fork or a knife. After it's baked, you want to remove it for five minutes and allow it to cool. There you have it. That is our apple crisp. Thank you for joining us today as we prepared this. Also yummy, delicious dessert for the holidays. We want to end by just going over a basic couple of tips that you want to keep in mind. When it comes to different types of food during this time of year, food is usually the main event going on when gathering or just preparing or having a portion of our holiday. So remember that you want to stay away from the salt as much as possible. Measure out the amount of salt that you're using. Don't just pre-hand pour and pour and pour. That's when you can get a lot. Use alternatives for salt such as fat-free chicken broth or turkey broths or beef broths to spice up your food and add that flavor that you need. Stay away from the heavy fats such as butter and sugar and different things like that. Do it in moderation. Everything should be done in moderation, even in recipes. Try tweaking them as you go through this year. Stay away from oily, fatty, greasy things. Try a healthy olive oil instead of a canola oil or other types of fatty oils. You want to try baking your chicken, fish, pan-searing it with little to no oil. Those are the better options to use for this year. Holiday cookies and cakes are abundance and like we said with our apple crisp dessert here, there are healthier ways to eat dessert. Sweets are always should be done in moderation. Hot cocoa and mixes and things like that, moderation as we said before. So thank you again for joining us. We do wish you a healthy and happy holiday here at the University of Maryland Medical Center and stay safe. So if you happen to make our yummy apple crisp recipe and you'd like to share it with us, we'd love to know. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us as well. Again, everything is available online. The recipe, our nice naughty and nice list for the holidays, as well as some information on making sure you wash those hands and wear your mask. Happy holidays everyone.