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.