7 Healthy Alternatives to Soul Food

Even if you've never grown up at a house with someone named "Big Mama" you've seen what soul food is all about... fried chicken, black eyed peas, candied yams, collard greens, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and gravy, hot-water cornbread, macaroni and cheese... and that's just the main fare. Then you have dessert... peach cobbler, pound cake, sock-it-to-me cake, caramel cake, pineapple upside-down cake, banana padding, sweet potato pie... have you gained calories just from reading this paragraph? It's called soul food for a reason... it has SOUL.

What is soul? Soul is real ingredients, made by real people. These people have been cooking for families and communities for years. Most people equate soul food with Black food, but that's not always the case. Soul food is food that fills you up and tastes good and makes you feel like you're having dinner at home.

Most of us want that home-cooked taste without all the calories, but you might be thinking how in the world can I have healthy soul food? Let me give you some options:

Greens with Turkey Bacon (instead of greens with hamhocks or other pork products)

Usually for flavor purposes, greens are cooked with some type of pork product such as salted pork, fatback, hamhocks, or pork bacon. What I'm suggesting is that instead of pork which is full of fat calories try a turkey substitute such as turkey bacon. Turkey bacon tastes similar to pork bacon except that it has a significant decrease in fat without sacrificing the taste.

Baked sweet potatoes (instead of candied yams)

Candied yams are so full of butter and sugar (usually brown sugar) that it's more sugar than potatoes. Consider baking your sweet potatoes and then adding just a little butter for extra flavor if you need it. Sweet potatoes are already sweet so the extra sugar and butter added can put on hundreds of extra calories that you'll spend days burning off. Sacrifice the sugar and time spent at the gym for a baked alternative every once in a while and you may not miss the taste difference.

Grilled chicken (instead of fried chicken)

Yes, I'm about to talk about your fried chicken. Fried chicken is cooked in one of two ways... deep fried in oil, or deep fried in lard or shortening. Either way you're adding a lot of oil to your meal. Did you know that oil calories are measured by the tablespoon? So let's say it's about 50 calories per tablespoon... do you know how many tablespoons of oil you had to put in the pot to cook that chicken? I'll give you a few seconds to attempt to do the math. Do you then realize how much of that oil goes in your body when you eat the chicken?

Peaches & Yogurt (instead of peach cobbler)

Trade in that flaky crust and syrup-laden peaches for some fresh peach slices and some yogurt. You'll be losing the syrup from the peaches so that will save you calories. You'll be losing the butter and sugar that goes in the main part of the cobbler... plus all the calories from the breading components. I think yogurt is a fair tradeoff in calories compared to the rest of those things.

Garden Salad (instead of cornbread)

Let's find a way to replace the starchiness of the cornbread. If you're willing to give up the cornbread for a good garden salad full of fresh vegetables and a vinaigrette dressing (instead of a dairy-based dressing) then you can make up those calories somewhere else.

Pasta with Marinara Sauce (instead of macaroni and cheese)

With macaroni and cheese you have to deal with the calories of the cheese more so than the macaroni. You can keep the macaroni; just replace it with a good marinara sauce. If you're not a big fan of marinara sauce, perhaps a good pesto will work for you. An alfredo sauce will give you as many, if not more calories, than just doing macaroni and cheese. Remember, the goal is to reduce calories in some of our favorite soul food items.

Baked apples & Ice Cream (instead of caramel cake)

I'm not going to lie - caramel cake is one of my favorites! I'll take the hit of the calories there if I'm going to take a hit somewhere. I'll give you a compromise here. If you trade in the cake with some baked apples, then you can have a scoop of ice cream on top of it. Yes, ice cream, not even frozen yogurt, but if you're strong enough to handle it - do frozen yogurt instead of ice cream. I wanted to give you a few calories somewhere so that's why I said ice cream.

I hope you don't hate me for these options. I just want to help you not gain those five to ten pounds on Thanksgiving or Christmas... or shucks, any given Sunday after church for that matter! Some people have meals like this on special occasions whereas others have it fairly regularly. Do I recommend substituting all the time? No! Just consider these options to be alternatives to the normal soul food fare. Not only will you be providing good tasting options, but you'll be saving your friends and family some unwanted calories as well.