Hospitality

  Many of you know my cousin is about to have a baby (he was actually due to show up a week ago yesterday & she's being induced in several hours), and so I decided to be thoughtful and make extra food so that there would be enough to freeze for her and her husband whenever they could most use a ready-made meal. These are the recipes I chose & she okay-ed:

• lightened up Shepherd's Pie: okay to be honest I found this recipe & helped in a tiny bit of the prep work but due to events of that day Mom actually cooked this one, so I'm not sure what to say about it (oh she made a few accidental tweaks to it ha), but taste-wise it was very good. I had leftovers for lunch one or 2 days after that night. If you rmember we made one of these for St Patrick's Day this year but this is a different recipe. Although I can't really say since I didn't do the work on this one, it seemed like this one might have been a little less work. It was about 
• Cracker Barrel copy-cat tenderloins that I've put on here before, but I doubled it. I wanted to put a word of warning that if you ever try doubling it you might want to cook only half at a time. I used our biggest cast-iron skillet & dumped the whole bag of 2+lbs of chicken in, but although it eventually cooked the chicken to the point of near mushiness, it wouldn't caramelize (that's the yummiest part!) because there was so much liquid in the bottom. In the end I took out half, kept it on med-high heat until all the liquid was gone & dark brown spots began to show on each side of the tenderloins, and then switched it out for the other half until it was all done. These are 5 pts+ per serving.
• No Peek Beef Tips: This is one of those sort of unfortunate dishes that looks a bit like "wet" dog food but tastes awesome hahaha! We didn't have noodles so Mom made some brown rice to go with it. I didn't need to double this recipe because it says it already makes 6-8 servings. I used water because, like the original blogger who posted it, I didn't want it to have a sweet flavor caused by ginger ale. The only thing I did differently was to add the mushrooms along w/everything else- but it makes no difference. I was surprised I even used mushrooms because Dad and I aren't the biggest fans, but they add a good flavor & Dad didn't even know there were any until we mentioned them after he had already consumed 2 bowls!! I left it in for exactly the 3 hours w/out ever opening the oven & it was perfect! I typed all of the ingredients into the Weight Watchers recipe builder and dividing it into 7 servings it came out to a modest 5 pts+. That's so low for an almost fully meat dish so I have a hard time believing it. I did have a hard time finding an appropriate match for the meat. You may want to try it yourself in your tool of choice (I also use MyFitnessPal.com often) instead of simply taking my word. 
• This last one was a strange situation because I planned out supper & marinated the chicken for over 2 hours earlier in the day & then once Mom came home I decided to go to The West Texas Fair & Rodeo w/some friends spontaneously so I ended up eating out there instead. Mom finished grilling these lemon chicken kabobs up & those family members that were left here to eat them said it was very good. I will taste them later and let you know my personal opinion. We didn't grill veggies on the skewers, although my original plan was to do zucchini and yellow squash (because my cousin's husband likes those & my mom too) with these but our little store was sadly out of stock. We did do some little potatoes & corn on the cob though. I have yet to figure out the nutritional info for this, but I'll update it later.
• I also made a giant batch of "my" chewy chocolate chip oatmeal cookies that I've posted on here about before and I shared them with a friend and sent half to my cousin' s to freeze for later. 

Another long one

Maybe one day I'll keep up with this blog better & actually do one post after every meal so that it's more specific and in more paragraph form rather than one giant list. But for now this is what you get, sorry.

• First we'll start w/this lemonade chicken that I got off of that my fridge site that finds recipes based on what's in your fridge. Let me just start out by saying it sounds gross, and I thought it was! so if you don't want to read any further on this one, I don't blame you- but just in case some of you find it interesting I posted the link to the recipe. 
• If you you're craving decent homemade sloppy joes & you already have ground beef (&these other ingredients) but don't have sloppy joe mix on-hand try this easy recipe. Just remember I NEVER use any kind of pepper or spicy spice & I tend to choose "ground"/salts over fresh stuff like onions & garlic, etc a lot. so in this recipe & all others bear that in mind. We happened to have some Sister Schubert's® dinner yeast rolls in the freezer (they're my all-time favorite roll/bread right now so for awhile we were buying a big pack at Sam's every few months so we always had some if we needed them) & so I just made sliders out of them & added some shredded cheese- mmm-mmm-good!! :)

  

  sloppy joe sliders

• A breakfast option: peanut butter banana muffins, though they tasted a tad more on the bran muffin spectrum. I would have added more sugar (I can't remember if I used Splenda in this or not, i've been trying to use up a big bag we have) or something. Mom said it would be better with less peanut butter too, though my first assumption after tasting it was it needed more haha
• I can't even remember how long ago I made this bbq chicken or most of the other recipes on this post!! I really need to remember to post more often. This is what I remember about this one: We ironically only had honey bbq sauce so I didn't really know how to tweak it. I ended up adding less than half of what it called for on honey. It was decent, but not memorable and we didn't choose to make the rice. 

Parmesan chicken

• Another Parmesan chicken; I don't really remember but I'm sure it was fairly tasty. haha. Oh I do recall that the breadcrumbs & such had a hard time sticking to the chicken. It was beautiful when I took it out after about half-time & I should have taken a pic then, but when I turned them over so they'd cook evenly it kinda crumbled off

• & speaking of that last line, this oven-fried chicken didn't work too well for me. For one thing I used Greek yogurt (this time I used Light&Fit because it was all we had but I think it was vanilla & it's best to use plain flavored- plus I don't think it was the best brand either)+ milk (according to the Chobani conversion chart I've linked on here before) instead of buttermilk and it made the chicken too sweet. I'm not sure if that affected the texture as well, but it pretty much never got crispy no matter what I did to it. I don't remember if i doubled the chicken or not but there wasn't enough room in the dish for all of what I had "marinated."... so basically, i think I'd call this one overrated. 
• I made this alfredo pizza for the first time many months ago when staying w/my cousin, Rachael, & then again 2 weeks or so ago. Both times I substituted broccoli for the spinach, which I don't eat, and this last time I used some non-wheat pre-formed crust similar to what it calls for because our little nearby store didn't have the right one. Also, I cooked & used the chicken leftover from "marinating" the oven-fried chicken this time. Again, it was too sweet, especially with the Alfredo sauce. 
• nutty chicken: I'm not normally a big fan of nuts or nutty-flavored things, but my parents are so I thought I'd test this recipe and see how I felt about it. It calls for pine nuts, but we found them ridiculously expensive at our store for our taste so we subbed out for the finely chopped almonds from the baking aisle. I think we reduced the sauce a little too much so it wasn't as much liquid as it should have been to kind of pour it over the chicken. We just put it to the side. I actually ended up really liking this dish. 

nutty chicken

• cashew chicken: okay, so I just realized while typing that that I do love almond & cashew chicken when I go to Chinese restaurants, even though I said above that I don't like nutty things. I don't remember details of making this but I know it was tasty. Oh Mom got salted almonds in a can but it ended up needing that extra flavor anyway. We just individually crumbled (they were soft enough, I realized after I'd chopped a few) some onto each serving we ate.

Beans & Sausage skillet dish

The other night I tried a different kind of thing than we generally eat: sausage. This sausage-bean dish was super super quick to make. & fairly tasty. I wasn't sure if I'd would like all those flavors so I left the second can of beans out to cook by themselves just in case. I've never tried this kind before but I like them- reminded me of re-fried beans, in that they mashed well & had a "soft" flavor. Anyway, if your stomach can handle sausage okay and if you have enough points/calories/appetite left in the day for it you should definitely give it a try.

Chicken sautee

I've discovered the best thing! Sauté Express cubes (garlic and herb this time) by Land O'Lakes make cooking super fast & easy (tastier too). I love this chicken with green beans & potatoes. I made no substitutions this time- love that it's so few ingredients =D This wasn't supposed to take too long, & it probably won't for you, but our chicken was being defiant & did not want to cook through. Once we finally got that step passed the rest took no time at all. Oh, a tip on finding the green beans (if you're like me & didn't know what part of the store to find these particular ones): at our local store they were w/the fresh produce. which I know makes sense, but I'd never seen any bags there before so I figured I'd just get some frozen ones, until I stumbled upon the right ones. They were sitting right next to a bag of french style beans on the "wall of vegetables" near broccoli (i think). Very very tasty! & filling too. I calculated that one chicken breast & 2 little potatoes (depending on how many pieces you cut them into; but 2 whole ones) & some green beans came to about 4 WWpts+

Cupcakes!

I was sifting through some WW-friendly desserts online the other night and saw this one for chocolate-orange cupcakes. My uncle seemed to obsess over chocolate-orange things while we were all on my trip together and so, thinking of him and knowing he would be in town this wkend, I ended up trying them out in honor of him. I re-calculated everything for myself on myfitnesspal.com (& then on the WW calculator) because I made some changes. I didn't have any orange extract and didn’t want to have to buy it just for this, so I just nixed it. I also used the Betty Crocker super moist triple chocolate fudge cake mix because the store where we were did not have any kind of dark chocolate mix. I left some un-frosted because we have some cream cheese-haters in our midst (crazies!!). Those come to 2 WW pts+ but the normal frosted ones are only 3pts/cupcake (serving= 1 cupcake; recipe made 24 (so you might want to cut it in half if you're NOT planning on having company/sharing). Also if you choose to have a frosted one but leave the orange off of the top it’s still 3 pts, I checked.

They were/are yummy! VERY moist, orange taste is very subtle (mostly cause i didn't use the extract), & the tastiest when iced.

made half of them tiny :)

waiting for them to cool down before putting them up for the night before frosting them

finished product. I left some un-iced & some w/out oranges though

Last week (only recipes I hadn't tried yet. I did a few recipes again that I've already written about on here):

• chicken Parmesan meatloaf muffins: these were interesting, but not my fav. We did actually find pre-ground chicken so we didn't have to grind it ourselves. I thought it was decent at the time, but became less tasty after being leftover in the fridge. 
• pretzel- coated chicken nuggets: I didn't use black pepper or mustard powder- fyi. I ended up running out of egg & pretzel topping mixture a little more than half-way through so I had to add more. The second-batch of crushed topping were bigger pieces (we just smashed these) of pretzels and the first batch (which we put in the food processor) was almost to fine a powder- so i guess you have to get them somewhere in the middle....... but anyway they were tasty, fresh. However not so much after you re-heat them a day later in the microwave & the pretzels aren't crunchy any more. 
• breakfast biscuits: these were very simple & very tasty. the only thing I'd say is work as quick as you can to form the dough over the muffin tins because we had a really hard time once it got warmer and sticky. It even shrunk back down in the end. 
• double chocolate cookies!!: except I threw in some white chocolate chips too & made it TRIPLE =) so tasty. If you're gonna make these for more than 2 people (we had 3, including me) I would recommend doubling the recipe because they were gone in a matter of hours. You could always freeze the leftovers or share w/neighbors/friends.
• beef and broccoli in the CROCKPOT: okay, so unfortunately I had to buy sesame oil (i don't remember how much it was) in the Asian foods section at Walmart, but I only had to use a little bit and it'll last for awhile. But let me tell you it was GREAT! I love beef and broccoli but half the time at restaurants the meat is too chewy. This way you can pick your meat and cut all the fat off of it that you want (or rather DON'T want). The frozen broccoli we bought was mostly the stalks though so watch out for that. Great option for those nights when you won't have time to cook- just get it together the night before (unless you're one of those weird morning people!), put inside of crockpot in the fridge (if it'll fit) & then pop in back in on low on your way to work/school & voila!

This week:

• tonight I made baked broccoli mac&cheese: we used Barilla Cellentani noodles (basically look like a double macaroni noodle) a Tablespoon of onion salt instead of a real one as called for.... I would highly stress the importance of using the correct/ big enough size pots for each step, because at the end I was using our biggest sauce pan/pot (besides the big giant one we use for spaghetti noodles) to mix the cheese sauce into everything & it was too hard- led to many plain noodles that hadn't gotten mixed properly. but fairly tasty. 
• yesterday I tried this pine nuts chicken: It turns out that pine nuts are expensive (according to my mom who went in search of them at the store) so we substituted the chopped baking almonds instead & it worked well in our opinions. I learned how to steam asparagus (supposedly you're not supposed to boil it but we don't have a steamer so we put it in a shallow dish w/a tad of water & kinda arranged the whole pound of asparagus in there so that it was as flat as possible with the big ends (after cutting off the thicker ends) in the middle where possible. It cooked about 3 mins and then i checked it & i think it ended up needing to go longer). I would suggest separating the 2tsp of olive oil and using as little as possible for the chicken-browning because you have to use some (even though it didn't seem to point that out) for the other sauteing too.  I actually used (thanks to mom's help) real garlic & onion (instead of shallots) this time. .... anyway i don't remember deviating from anything too much. but I did discover that i really like tarragon. it smells nice and isn't as strong & "herby" as rosemary. The other thing to say is that I think I reduced the broth down too much so in the end it wasn't liquidy pretty much at all- so we rolled the nuts & asparagus around in what was left & put them on the plate next to the chicken (oh the chicken ended up needing to bake a little longer too) & sprinkled the nuts on top. 

catch up before THE trip

This is gonna be a scattered, hurried post because I procrastinated doing these last recipes & I'm actually supposed to be packing & getting ready for the big Ireland trip right now.

• This Sweet Garlic chicken is from a fun site where you can click on what you actually have in your fridge/cabinets & it gives you as many options for recipes as it can think of that use only those ingredients. It was tasty but coulda used more garlic, as I used the powdered stuff. 

• These were TASTY! Zucchini-Cheese stuffed chicken that was only 4 pts per chicken? YES PLEASE! 

this was just a simple omelette with shreds of bacon & cheese in it. but mom said it was pretty so i'm putting it on here

• Another thing did recently was to grill (mom did the actual grilling) some tasty weight watcher hamburgers (very low in pts!) & Key West Chicken w/c was also from that My Fridge site (this site does not calculate pts btw; but i did calculate it to be around 8 pts/chicken). Both were very tasty, I have pics of neight & can't remember if there was anything different to tell you about how I followed the recipes. We had The chicken on the first night & saved the hamburgers for the next day. 
• had Zucchini tots with the burgers- good but i didn't get them quite crispy enough, except for 1 or 2. I nixed the onion (oh i may have put in a dash of powder, i don't remember) cause i didn't really want that flavor
• Today I made chicken parm in the crockpot because i didn't want to heat up the kitchen w/a hot oven on this summer day. I cooked some spaghetti noodles to go with it as well, like they serve it in restaurants. It tasted pretty good but I like chicken parm because it's crispy & this didn't have any crunch to it at all. It calls for you to brown the bread crumbs ahead of time for this reason, but i burnt most of them & ended up having to just use plain breadcrumbs. & then the whole flour in the bag thing didn't work for me- all ended up in gloopy clumps, not covering all of the chicken breasts. Then the actual bread-crumbing part didn't work too well for me either-- all in all i made quite a mess & would have rather had it baked. But if you're craving chicken parm for cheaper than you can get it at Olive Garden or the like & you work all day or something- this is a decent option. For about 7 pts. 

ok sorry this was a chaotic, not that interesting post. hope it gave you some PINspiring ideas for food still though. 

See yall on here again in 2.5 weeks or so, after I'm a more experience world traveler!! 

Fudge brownies with caramel and pretzels

warning: NOT Weight-watchers friendly! I tried my best to calculate it & it came to around 11 pts per serving w/around 15 or so servings total.

    I stumbled upon this recipe on Pinterest a week or so ago & immediately thought of one of my best friends, Kacie. It so happens that her birthday is today and that she loves caramel and sweet-salty combinations. We got together last night to celebrate, so I made it for her.

• I used a Pillsbury fudge brownie box mix instead because it was on sale at our store. 
• We used sugar-free (I think Smuckers) caramel sauce
• I got generic pretzels for the savings, but I would recommend trying a name-brand. They got kind of soggy and different textured so I don't know if it may have been a bit better perhaps with non-generic ones. 
• I put the brownies in for around 33 mins and Mom checked on it while we went out for food. When I came back she had spread the caramel (nearly the whole jar but not quite) over the top of the pretzel-brownies and then I sprinkled the sea salt on top. I can't read, so I did all this before it cooled- read it backwards somehow!! haha. so make sure you let it cool at least some so that the caramel doesn't all sink in lime mine did. If you look at the pic on the recipe site it's supposed to be more of an icing than like "hot fudge." I kept adding more & also more sea salt because it kept soaking in where I couldn't see it anymore. 

So it was pretty good while it was still warm, & I think ice cream may have made made it even tastier. The more it set though the caramel made everything sticky and kind of hard and the pretzels were tough and kind of leathery... not sure what would help with that- maybe putting it in an airtight container right away? Next time I'd use "real" pretzels, less pretzels, & let it cool down before I topped it. Anyway it was fun to try & the birthday girl seemed to like it well enough. 

Memorial Day grilling

   Didn't wanna do the cliche hamburgers or bbq on the grill for Memorial Day this year, but a grilled supper did sound nice while everyone would be home. I thought, hey why not pork chops? so I looked for a recipe in the Weight Watchers collection and found this one. I thought I bought boneless chops but it turned out I just got really tiny lean ones. Still good though. I used the little red potatoes I believe, because that's all our store had in stock.

• Pay attention to the directions so that you have time to let it marinate in the fridge for a few hours.
• Mom helped me and we had one so this time I actually used real garlic cloves.  
• Our zucchini ended up cooking too long and was kinda burnt-ish and slimy at the same time :/  
• The potatoes & chops were REALLY good! I used a bit less than the called for rosemary & it was still a bit strong- so beware if you don't like strong herb flavor. 
• mom did the actual grilling so I'm not really sure how long everything ended up taking in real life. 
• She did grill a lemon & tried it on her zucchini

I forgot to take any pictures. 

Homemade chicken nuggets? Who knew

Tonight I made chicken nuggets from scratch!! a healthier version void of hidden spices I hate= great idea!!
They were easy & fast (more/less) to make & very very tasty- didn't even need ketchup, though I did use some anyway. The only thing was that I did not at all get them cut evenly. oh and i used the Italian breadcrumbs and original Panko that we had on hand instead of wheat or whole grain or whatever (so it's actually more than the pts listed). We had some peas & mixed (canned) hominy with them this time. Next time I'm going to have to make more!

4 WW pt/ "1/4" of  the recipe (IF you use the wheat breadcrumbs)

chocolate fruit dip & pork tenderloin

•    Ok I feel more than obligated to share this recipe. This stuff was seriously TASTY!! It tasted more like a mousse than a dip. I wanted to just eat it with a spoon ha. It was pretty rich for me for fruit, so next time I'd prob think about adding less cream cheese. 
• And let me just say: only 2 pts/2 Tbs!!!! It could be like a cheating dessert, or more incentive to eat fruit =D
• I guess I didn't get a pic of this one, but it looks like the pic on the blog. 

• seasoned pork tenderloin: I had wanted to make this for awhile now but the time I went to our local store before this they had only one tenderloin package left and it was looking a little worse for wear so I didn't buy it. Then later mom got one for me at HEB I think. Of course just yesterday when I was at our same local store they were fully stocked. Anyway, this was an interesting recipe for me, though I've been told it turned out (made it a little over a week ago) to be one of my best "creations." Dad even said it tasted like catering- although now that I think about it, that's not always the best kind of food ha. But hey, I'm available to make it for your next event ;) haha. 

• so I used sugar-free pancake syrup (a bit of generic we had left and then actually the IHOP brand one)
• we didn't have any dry mustard & I didn't want enough of that taste to use the kind in the fridge, but i did see mustard seed in the spice cabinet- so i googled it. It said to crush it w/a mortar and pestle which we do not have, so I thought I'd give the food processor thing a try for making it more into more of a dust. yeah, so that didn't work at all and nearly burnt out our machine since the blades were never hitting anything. In fact it burnt (not badly though) my finger when I tried to take it apart to pour out the seeds. Well I just used it anyway (the yellow specks on top if you can see them in the pics). 
• I found no cloves in our cabinet (though I saw them last night!) so I googled substitutions. I found this handy spice substitution chart. Though I ended up following another recommendation and used All-Spice in place of the cloves 1:1 ratio.
• I nixed the pepper, as I don't like it
• I let it marinate overnight and then didn't get it out of the fridge until after 3pm that day. 
• It didn't have a whole lot of fat to cut off but I had a bit of a hard time of it and I felt like going vegetarian in the middle of that. I don't quite think I cut it into halves & such correctly, but it all worked out in the end. 

  

Breakfast treats

•    French Toast WW-friendly: I actually made this one before the cheesecake, so I already had 2 egg yolks sitting in the fridge by then cause this one calls for 2 egg WHITES.

I used our regular 1% milk and whatever bread we had that was not the low-cal in the recipe.

• monkey bread muffins: These didn't quite turn out right. I'll attribute most of that to making them pretty late at night. First off I used sugar-free regular pancake syrup and the only reduced-fat dough I found happened to be Buttermilk. 
• ...so somehow one can of dough wasn't perforated right and I couldn't really see where to tear it and then I went through both cans dividing it into only 2 & rolling the bits into balls & into the sprinkle-sugar mixture before I remembered that it says to divide each "strip" of dough into THREE equal pieces!! Therefore I was out of dough before I was a little more than half done filling the 12 cups (muffin pans)-- red alert to my brain haha. I kind of sorted it out in the end but the portions weren't quite the same. 
• It calls for 2 Tbs of cinnamon to be split into 2 different parts. I would recommend using a lot less! I had a lot of the cinnamon-sugar mixture leftover after rolling the dough in it. Then right before you put it in the oven you're supposed to sprinkle the second half of the cinnamon over the muffins. I don't know if it's because I ended up having different portions in each cup or what, but I had a ridiculous amount of cinnamon on each one & it was overwhelming. I would have reduced it to at LEAST half of that last T called for in the recipe. I was worried about the amount of butter-syrup too once it was distributed, but be assured it does soak in eventually if you let them sit for awhile (I made them at night, tried one that was more liquidy and then the one I had in the morning was great)............ No picture (because they all got eaten too fast), but they pretty much look the same

chocolate chip cheesecake (WW)

   I'm gonna go ahead & admit right off the bat that I wasn't personally a fan of this cheesecake. at least how it came out for us- maybe I did something wrong. It wasn't awful though just depends on how you like your cheesecake. It was too mealy for my taste and I wasn't a fan of the almond extract being so strong a flavor. It uses a whopping 6 egg WHITES- so then there's the what do you do w/all the yolks?! (stay tuned later for the butter cookies I did use them in). I used generic Oreos to save money and the regular sized semi-sweet chocolate chips we already had on hand. I'm pretty sure I crushed the cookies for the crust in a food processor this time instead of inside a baggy.

you can't even see the chocolate chips cause they all sunk to the bottom for whatever reason but they're in there. in fact I ended up melting some more on the top later. I thought i got a pic after it was cut but I can't find any

seasoned green beans

   I've been searching for ideas to revamp veggies/sides. These green beans with olive oil & garlic were pretty good, although they didn't quite stay crisp/crunchy. I think we ended up over-cooking them and they turned out pretty leathery. I just used the powdered stuff as usual instead of real onion & garlic or whatever, & I don't like pepper so I nixed that.
2 WWpts/serving

homemade goulash

   While looking for some new food blogs I found this recipe for a goulash-like dish that looked yummy.(made this over a week ago now, just tryin to catch up) I used wheat shells that basically looked like the one in the picture on the site. Our little grocery store doesn't carry ground turkey, so I got our usual 97/3 lean ground beef. As usual I didn't bother w/fresh onion (plus I didn't want chopped onions to have to pick out or taste too much), just used the powdered stuff. I also cut out the mushrooms completely, as Dad and I don't care too much for them. It went well & was quite tasty. We had enough for the 3 of us and then for a few other times in the week.
8 WWpts/serving

low fat chocolate chip oatmeal cookies

   I was hungry for cookies the other day and as I'm trying to stick to lower fat/calorie/pts foods I looked up recipes on 1 or 2 of my favorite food blogs which show the nutritional info (more importantly already have the Weight Watcher pts calculated/serving). I found this one for oatmeal cookies on what's probably my favorite recipe index right now: SkinnyTaste. They're only 5 WW pts for 2 cookies!
   The only substitution I made was using Mexican vanilla to a slightly lesser measurement than what was called for in the recipe. They were GOOOOd! & abundant, as I paid attention to the 15 part instead of the bottom where it says it makes 30 cookies- & I doubled it! It ended up being 3 separate batches, so I made 3 different "textures"- really soft/chewy for me, medium ones, & very small crunchy ones for Dad. We still have plenty, but sadly they're getting hard & way less fresh :/ sad.

How to find the recipes

I just realized some of you (less tech-savy) might not know that w/in each post are the links to the recipes I used. If you see words w/in the post that are a different color (right now it's a green color but that may change someday) than the rest of the text- that should be the hyperlink you can click to open up the website where I found the recipe(s) that the I talk about in that specific post. Always post a comment/email me if you have questions or a link doesn't work. 96% of the time I initially find the recipe idea on Pinterest but I always try to link to the original recipe for you so there's less chance of confusion.

Bubble up Enchiladas

I'm not a big fan of mexican food, enchiladas usually being one on the "I'd rather not" list most of the time. This twist on the average enchilada is more to my liking though as it does not use corn tortillas (which I don't like so much), instead it calls for biscuits.
Our local grocery store didn't have any ground turkey so I opted for our go-to very lean ground beef. That's the only difference I made and all was pretty darn tasty :-) and The site has a pretty good collection of recipes that have WW+ points already calculated (unfortunately the serving size is not usually listed or obvious). In fact, stay tuned for a lite french toast later in the week ;)

pre-cooked biscuits

finished product

Weight Watchers Baked Chicken

This recipe was simple, fast and fine. It could have been much more flavorful. The only big change I made was to use the LIME juice we already had instead of the lemon juice it calls for, and of course we never have fresh herbs so I always use the ground, sprinkle-on type. This pic is the finished chicken after a little over 30 minutes in the oven. I'd probably recommend the whol 35 mins.

Breakfast &pb cookies

I told mom I would make these breakfast muffins so she'd have them before she had work early Tues. or wed. - forgot mon. pm and most of tues until around midnight- decided to go ahead and make them anyway. Benny & Pace came over when they smelled the bacon & started begging of course ha. We happened to have a big bag of frozen hash browns from Schwann's for some weird reason so I used half of that- but if I do it again I'd use less hashbrowns. the ratio was a little off for my personal taste. It was a little too starchy. Pretty tasty still.

yummy bacon at 1ish am!

crispy hashbrowns

uncooked hashbrowns

gross looking egg mixture

and finally the finished product

• Today was Peanut Butter cookies day to celebrate Dad being able to eat again after his colonoscopy. I came up with the idea last night so I went ahead and mixed up the dough for this Paula Deen recipe. My goodness was that dough ever tasty!! I think it was that Mexico vanilla I used! I refrained from eating too much, stuck it in the fridge & left it for this afternoon. Mom and I wondered how this would go because it doesn't have flour, baking soda or anything obvious to cause the rising. But as you can see it did indeed work. They were good but mom and I preferred them in straight dough form!! yum =)
• I decided we needed more and before the Paula Deen ones were done I wasn't sure if it was going to work so I started on a second batch with another recipe I'd seen last night when I was looking on Pinterest for crunchy peanut butter cookies. This one doesn't have flour either but it does have baking soda. Since our eggs are only medium size I added a 2nd (calls for extra-large i believe) so the dough was pretty runny. As you can see in the picture these cookies were looking like giant pillow cookies (although that may have been because I didn't want to have to use a whole other cookie sheet (small one is missing) for just 4 or so cookies so I made them bigger blobs than I should have). I thought they'd be nice and fluffy (how I love them but they were for dad so they were supposed to be crunchy) but I guess for one thing they ended up in the oven too long. They turned out chewy in the middle, crunchy on the edges and so hard (sticky) to eat that it detracted from the taste. I never got a clear "read" on them- they even reminded me of the taste of pork rinds at one point!!!!   obviously I don't highly recommend this particular recipe. 

-oh & fyi I used crunchy pb for both recipes because it's Dad's favorite.

Paula Deen recipe

the other one "exploded" into giants!

crunchy, chewy, sticky other version

CHOCOLATE snickerdoodles

2 things I love in one cookie- w/c I also love!!
The only change I made was to sub some of the butter for whatever generic GREEK yogurt we had. The following is a link to a conversion chart I've used several times before to sub buttermilk or butter etc.:
http://chobani.com/community/blog/2011/04/chobani-kitchen-conversion-chart/

You have to be careful not to over mix everything-think I might've a little too much. they have to be REFRIGERATED (dough) for at least 30 mins before you bake. I just left them overnight. The only personal touch was me sprinkling some extra stuff (actually I'd say use a lot less cinnamon & stuff for the mixture (maybe a little more than half of what's called for) because we had SOOoo much left over that was just wasted) on top right before I baked them.

had to crush the chocolate

couldn't fit all the dough in anything else flat

ta da! :)

Cracker Barrel copycat "grilled" chicken tenderloin

I love that I found this recipe on Pinterest because this is probably my favorite menu item at Cracker Barrel :)
Make sure you read the instructions fully before making plans because I did not and didn't start soon enough to marinate it in the fridge for 4 HOURS. Whoops!! Oh well. it was well ready for the next night's supper. I added extra honey because I wanted it to be sweet. It's VERY easy &oh SoOoOoo tasty!!!!!!!!! I highly recommend you try this recipe ASAP. Oh and just so you know, it DOES taste like Cracker Barrel's! Perfect blend of sweet&tangy

Stay w/Matt & a few other things

One day I made my own meatballs!!! which of course we ate on spaghetti. I've apparently lost this recipe but it was really easy. from what i remember:

• ground beef
• salt
• seasonings of choice (i know it called for Italian season cause i forgot until after the first batch was baking, so i just sprinkled some on the top of the second batch) 
• quick oats

roll them into balls (may have used the cookie scoop for starters) & bake. done. they were really good! 

Adventures at Matt's: 

• I made the Easter version of monster cookies, using lots of Twix, 1 Snickers egg, 1 Milky Way egg, a few mini Reeses pb eggs all crushed up into regular cookie dough. What's funny is I used their hand food-chopper thing & i pushed down hard at the wrong angle & it went flying onto the kitchen floor where his dog, Archer, happened to be there waiting! luckily we stopped him from eating any of the chocolate!! Anyway, they still turned out good. I don't think I ended up using as much chocolate as they did in the recipe so it surprisingly wasn't flavorful enough for me. but I think it could be a yummy, unhealthy new tradition after each big "candy holiday." -no pic because we lost the ones I kept aside to bring home somehow before I could take a pic of them. but basically they looked like the ones in the pic on the recipe-
• Matt likes to make breads & he'd been wanting to try homemade bagels, so we gave it a stab while I was there. 

instructions out of a book

I'm pretty sure these are the ones I made w/the method you can see in the book

the 2 on the left are the ones Matt made using whatever method 2 was

Matt added some sort of seed to the top of his



We made them into breakfast sandwiches (for supper) w/GIANT but tasty turkey sausage