This past weekend I had to challenge of making something for a pot luck at work. I'd never made anything for a potluck. Oh, I've been to them plenty of times, but I always swung by a store beforehand to grab soda or rolls or cookies from the bakery. This time I decided to actually put forth some effort.
I should mention here that my boyfriend and I are trying to lose weight, so many of our recipes are of the lower fat, lower cal variety (not all of them however...we're doing the everything in moderation plan). Since I knew there wouldn't be alot of lighter fare at the potluck, I decided to try to go that route so I'd have something to fall back on (for the record, I still stuffed myself).
My first attempt was some low cal cookies I found on SparkPeople.
Not sure what happened but while I'd expected dryness in the dough, it was pretty much the exact opposite. And yes, I'll admit, I just sort of dropped them haphazardly all over the pan. Of course, the liquidity of them might have had something to do with me taking the lazy route of separating my egg whites and dropping some yoke in there. I thought I'd pulled most of it out...apparently that doesn't count?
I about freaked when I took them out of the oven. Instead of the light brown, smallish, fluffy cookies I remembered from childhood, the Monster Cookies of the Deep emerged....
Strangely enough, they tasted really good! But getting them off the pan was no easy feat (a lesson to me to use wax paper next time). After we got done poking and prodding these with a knife and a spatula, we finally managed to get them onto a plate.
According to my boyfriend, these cookies had their own defense mechanism...by looking like rotten meat jerky, they kept our roommates from eating them.
However, I was not about to serve these bad boys to my co-workers. So it was back to the drawing board of "what to fix for a group of hungry people." Then I was hit with inspiration. Fruit Salad! I love fruit, but for some reason I never seem to eat enough of it. I figured with fruit salad, I could eat the leftovers and not feel bad about it.
Wanting to give some variety, I decided to make two salads. The first was called a Winter Fruit Salad and was a recipe from SparkPeople.
My version excluded the kiwi fruit and the pear and added a couple sliced strawberries for color. I also used four different apples: Braeburn, Fuji, Golden Delicious, and Granny Smith (one each). A few shots of lemon juice kept them from turning brown and didn't make the salad overly tangy.
This was a double batch and I had alot left over, so next time I'll pare it down to one serving. This coming weekend, I'm making it for myself and will freeze the servings. Of the two, this was my favorite.
The second salad was my boyfriend's favorite. This whipped fruit salad was a little higher in calories, but still not too bad in the scheme of things.
This was another double batch, so I mixed sugar free Cool Whip with Light Cool Whip and since the store didn't have any healthy looking blueberries, I went frozen. While the taste was pretty darn good, the salad itself didn't look as pretty as the first one.
I will definitely make this again but would like to experiment a little. I may want take out the pineapple (never have been a fan of the stuff) and add nuts and/or marshmallows to give that real fluff feel.
It would also be fun to try some different flavors of pudding.
For the record, everyone at work seemed to like it, but the double batches made alot so we still had leftovers. Which is never a bad thing!
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