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.