RECIPE | What to serve this holiday season when entertaining & hosting

With everyone’s busy schedules, we find that it’s getting harder to schedule time with family and friends. Especially with the holidays coming up, the weekends are filling up fast with holiday parties and get-togethers.  

We’ve been trying to spend quality time with everyone and what better way to do that than cooking and eat together? 

One of our go-to for nights like these is Mexican food! Bring on the tacos and fajitas, right? Old El Paso’s dinner kits includes shells, seasoning and easy instructions so we used the Hard & Soft Taco Dinner Kit as well as the Restaurante Steak Carne Asada Kit for steak fajitas (our fave).

Steak Fajitas:

1. In a large pan on medium to high heat cook sliced red onions and red & green peppers.

2. Add the sliced beef (we used a sirloin cut), seasoning mix and a few scoops of water.

3. Once the beef is cooked to your liking, remove from heat.

4. Add cheese, hot sauce, guacamole, corn salad, sour cream and whatever your heart desires on a soft or hard shell!

To give our typical taco-night a twist, we decided to be festive by adding a holiday taco to the menu: ground turkey, cranberry with Brie cheese – let’s just say it was pretty tasty!

Holiday Tacos:

1. In a large pan, add the ground turkey, seasoning mix and a few scoops of water

2. Once the turkey is cooked completely, remove from heat

3. Serve with cranberry sauce and sliced brie cheese on a soft tortilla!

We’ve noticed that cooking for a large group of people can be pretty tiring, not to mention the costs and clean up can add up fairly quickly! We tried to come up with a few hacks that have helped us in the past!

One key ingredient in any Mexican dish is avocado. We all love avocados but there is that very small window of opportunity for when they are at their freshest. The easiest way to tell what an avocado is going to look like on the inside is to open the little nub at the top. If it’s green you’re good to go and if it’s brown, best to put it back down! 

A lot of people must have caught on to this because when we go to grocery stores, most of the nubs have been taken off already!   Have you ever noticed that whenever you buy an avocado, it goes bad within a few days? Hard to plan ahead when you don’t know if your avocado will be at its prime. Another trick that we like is to pick an avocado that is at the ripeness we like and then to put it in the fridge. This usually extends the life of the avocado by a few days or even a week.

Another way to cut down on costs this holiday season is with cheese. I know that doesn’t sound like it’s possible since cheese is always so expensive. If you’ve ever kept an eye out on flyers, you’ll notice it’s mostly the big bars of cheese that go on sale and never the shredded. The next time you’re thinking about buying shredded cheese, buy a bar instead. We love using our food processor and the shredding plate to shred up the cheese manually.  It actually ends up saving you a lot of money! Any leftover cheese can be placed in the freezer for the next time you need shredded cheese quickly! 

We would love to hear what tips and tricks everyone has up their sleeves for ensuring that pot lucks and get-togethers go as smoothly as possible! 

- Our post was sponsored but opinions are our own -

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