Fast and Easy Casseroles and Dinner Ideas!

Well, hello, and welcome to “At Home” today. We’re hoping that this will be a day that you get some good new recipes for some casseroles. This time of the year particularly is when casseroles just taste so good. These ones that I’m doing today, you can do ahead of time and put them in the freezer. And if you’re a working mom or a working wife, you can come home, bring it out of the freezer, pop it in the oven, because two of them bake in the oven and one is on top of the stove. But they’re very simple, very easy, and quite tasty. And I hope that this has been a good day for you, I hope that things have been working out for you on your job or there in the home with your children. You know, sometimes, we get so caught up in life, that we have to stop and just reflect and take time to enjoy the moment, to enjoy what’s happening around us. And there’s nothing that brings more enjoyment to me than family photos, especially of little ones. I love kids pictures. We have a picnic, we any kind of get together, I’m usually the one that’s got the camera and I’m taking the shots, and I don’t like the ones where everybody just kinda stands like this. I like candid shots. So, our audio man upstairs, Bob Taylor, he was telling me about a picture he’d taken of his niece. And this is so cute. He’s taken great pictures, but look at. This was set up, I think, in a studio. This is Sierra Nicole. Isn’t she the sweetest little thing? And just look at that, does that bring joy to you? When you see that picture, don’t you just want to smile? I mean, she’s got a little powder on her nose. This is Bob’s niece, and of course, he’s as proud as he can be of her, like I am of my nephews. And these are the things to me that make you stop and say, “Ah, life is good.” Because when a picture like that can put a smile on your face, it causes you to stop and think, now what really is important in life? The things that I’m so wound up in and I’m so absorbed in right now, or what we can invest in little treasures, like Sierra Nicole? I think that’s what’s really important. So, if you’ve got little ones around you today, I want you to gather them around you, I want you to put your arms around them, draw them close to you, and just give them the biggest, tightest hug you’d know how. And remind them how much that you love them and care about them, ’cause it’s really important to do that. Don’t be so busy that you don’t stop and take time with your children. And then when you have some love left over, hug your husband, or hug your wife. Come on, give them some attention today, too. Don’t let the things of life catch you and absorb all of your time so that you don’t have time for your family, ’cause the family’s what’s really important. Okay, soon as I get home tonight, Paul’s gonna get a big hug from me, I’m telling you that. Well, we’ll be right back in just a minute, but here’s a break. Stay with us now, it’s casseroles today on “At Home.” Here’s today’s At Home Hint from Michelle and Emily of Clarksville, Pennsylvania. An easy way to peel hard boiled eggs is to run the eggs under cold water while peeling. It gets all the shell and the thin skin off quickly and easily. If you’ve got a helpful hint that you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to At Home Hints, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well the first casserole that we’re going to be preparing today is called macaroni and sausage bake. And it’s so simple, like I’ve told you. These are very easy. What I’ve done is just taken a pound of bulk sausage and about a half a cup of chopped onion, and we browned it. We went ahead and did that ahead of time just to save some time here, and drained it very well. Get all the grease off it. We’re gonna put that into our mixing bowl. Now you don’t want the onions to burn, so you’re gonna have to watch it when you’re cooking this so that they don’t burn. Because when it gets in with the grease from the sausage, sometimes it gets away from ya. The sausage won’t be cooked, but the onions will be too well cooked. So just be careful. But that’s just a pound and that’s all you put in here. Now the next thing we’re going to add, this is one cup of elbow macaronis that has been cooked. So you can see how much this is. This should make about six servings, all right? So we’ve cooked our elbows, put that in next. And then we’re going to add one can of cream of celery soup. And just right out of the can like that. I’m sure that you have your favorite brands and they’re all good, I guess, but if you’re just used to using one kind, that’s the kind you usually buy when you go the store, you keep picking the same brand up. And we clean that out very well. Not gonna dilute that in any way. All right, and then to that, we’re gonna add two thirds of a cup of milk. That will dilute that cream of celery soup. And we’re gonna beat three eggs. Just three into a container. Get good, fresh eggs if you can. Usually in the recipes, when we’re calling for eggs, it’s usually a large egg. If you buy the jumbo egg, it might throw your, what you’re doing with the eggs. If they’re binding, it might make it too wet or whatever, because the size of the eggs really does make a difference. If you’re using medium sized eggs, you buy medium, then I would add an extra one. But usually we’re using the large size, so that’s important to remember that. And we just beat these up. And then we’re gonna add that in. Okay, we have our eggs in. And then we take some cheese. Now this is Velveeta cheese, and you can buy it, I didn’t know if anybody was aware that this was available. It’s already shredded, so you don’t have to sit and do that, which is really good. This is about one and a half cups of Velveeta cheese, and we’re just going to put that in with everything else. And now comes the mixing. And if you like sausage, the smell of sausage and the onions cooking, that will whet everyone’s appetite just to begin with, believe me when I tell you. We were cooking it here and everyone’s coming in saying, “Where’s the eggs for breakfast?” You know, that’s what it smelled like ’cause it smells, there’s just something about eggs, or sausage and onion frying together that tastes so good. And I’m going to spray my two quart casserole. And I don’t know that you really have to do that, I don’t think you would, but we’re gonna do it just for safety’s sake, because you don’t want a casserole that you can’t get out of the dish. That’s very discouraging. But we’re gonna mix this up, and then pour directly into our two quart casserole. Looks good already, doesn’t it? It smells wonderful. This you could do ahead of time. You could, I would suggest that you, I was gonna say maybe you could put it in the freezer now and then bake it. But with the eggs in there, I would not do that. I would bake it first. Be sure to bake it first, all right? And then you could freeze it, and then bring it out and just warm it up. All right. This will go into a preheated 350 degree oven. Really important to get it good and hot. Don’t put it in and then let the oven get hot. That’s too hard, and it will dry out too. So, that will bake for 40 to 45 minutes in the preheated oven. That was easy wasn’t it? That’s the first one. We’re gonna show you at the end of the program some ideas on how to put some other things with that, what you would serve along with the casserole. The next one is a similar one, but it’s gonna have a little different taste to it because this one is called a hamburger macaroni casserole. And we have taken a pound of ground meat, usually is good ground chuck because I like the flavor of the chuck. And we’ve browned it off, and drained it very well. You can see it’s very well drained. Now we’re going to add, and here we go with the soups again. We’re going to add one can of cream of mushroom soup. Just put that in the bowl. Just like that. Clean it out thoroughly. Don’t you like meals that you can prepare ahead of time? Where it doesn’t take so long when you get home? Nothing worse than coming home from work, and then having to prepare a meal and by eight or nine o’clock, you’re still doing dishes. There has to be a better way for working wives. And a friend of ours, she was telling me how that she cooks like one Saturday. She’ll take like six hours on a Saturday and she’ll cook enough meals for a month. Can you imagine? And then when she comes out and she freezes them, package them, puts the vegetables with the meat, if she has gravy with that. She packages it all together, tapes it all together, and puts it in the freezer. And when she comes home, either in the morning she’ll do it or when she comes home, she brings it out of the freezer, and puts it in the oven or the microwave, warms it up, and she has her meal. Now that takes discipline ’cause who wants to spend a Saturday doing that? But I got to thinking about it. If I only had to do that once a month, it wouldn’t be bad. So there’s something to think about. Okay, now we’re going to add a medium pepper that’s been diced fine. Right. And let me see, pimento, about a fourth of a cup of chopped pimento. Put that in. Nice colors in this one. And let’s see, with pimento and the macaroni. Now this is two cups of macaroni that has been cooked. We measured it before. You measure before you cook it, all right? Now we’re gonna mix this all together. This has a tomatoey flavor to it. Maybe I need another spoon here. Maybe a little bigger one. You just mix this up. This is gonna go into our casserole. You wanna mix this well. We’ve got some cheese here. I’m gonna show you what we’ll do with that in just a minute. And a product called French Fried Durkee Onions. I don’t know if a lot of people around the country like these or not. A lot of times we put them on top of casseroles because they’re quite tasty. Let’s see. This looks like it makes quite a bit here too, doesn’t it? Might have enough, nice big casserole. This will be great if you’re having company and you want something really quick. You can see this does not take long to put together. This one only bakes about 20 minutes. So we’re gonna spray our casserole. Whoah! When it gets away from you, you grab it and say whoa, hold on there a minute. Okay. Did you see that fast work on that, Larry? Larry’s like, woah. All right, we’re gonna put half of the mixture into the bowl. Just like that. And then we’re gonna sprinkle with cheese. Like that. And we’re going to put half of the onions, these french fried onions are gonna go here because the other half will go on top. Then we’re gonna add some more of our mixture. Just like that. I think this one is gonna be a winner. I think they’re already taking a poll. The crew’s taking a poll and I think that they think this looks good. I’m sure, because everything that you put in it is tasty. It’s stuff that’s not hard to enjoy by any means. If you have a little bit left over, you can make a little individual one if you wanted to. Just a one serving size. Now, this will then, we’re gonna put some more cheese on top. And then we’re gonna bake this for 25 minutes, sorry. And then we’re gonna bring it out and put the rest of the onions on top and bake it five more minutes, okay? Put the cheese there. This will… This is just about a quarter of a pound of cheese, not very much at all. And this is going to go into a 350 degree preheated oven, really important. And bake, like I said, for 25 minutes. While I’m doing that, we’re gonna take a break and we’ll be right back in just a minute. Well if you just joined us, we’re doing casseroles today and we’ve already got two going in the oven. We have a sausage and macaroni bake and then a hamburger and macaroni casserole. And if you just happened to tune in and you didn’t get to see them, don’t forget, we’ll tell you at the end of the program how you can get our newsletter and the recipes will be there. What we’re making for our third casserole-type dish today is halushki. Sometimes it’s spelled H-A-L-U-S-H-K-I. Sometimes it’s H-A-L-U-S-K-I. I mean, it’s all different. It’s kind of like kobasi, you know? It’s interchangeable. We were trying to figure out what’s the derivative of halushki, and some thought that maybe it was Slovak or Polish, or something. We don’t know, but we just all like it. It doesn’t matter where it came from. We’re glad that whoever made it figured it out and has shared it with the rest of the world. I have my skillet here and it’s pretty hot. And I’m just putting about a fourth of a cup of butter in it and we’re gonna let that melt. And what I have taken, here is a medium-sized head of cabbage and just chopped it up. That’s all I’ve done here, chopped it up fine. You don’t want great big pieces in it. You want it fine because to me, the finer it is, it picks up more flavor and you get better flavor. But this is a size of head about like that. So you can get an idea of how much you’re gonna get. If you want to make a lot of it, of course then you would get the larger head and you would adjust your ingredients accordingly. So this is starting to melt. And we’re gonna go ahead and just add our cabbage right in, right at the top of it. Okay. And to that, we’re going to add onion. Now if you don’t like a lot of onion, cut back on the onion. This is about a cup of chopped onion. Maybe a little bit more. But some people like to mix this together before they put it in the skillet. I mean, that’s fine. If you want to do that, that’s okay. But important just to keep this moving. Because once it starts to cook… Here we go. Once it starts to cook, it’ll start to get smaller and smaller because all the liquid and the moisture will cook out of the cabbage. And it will get gradually decreased in size. It looks like who’s gonna eat all of that? But believe me, when you get going, and this gets cooking, you’re gonna find out that you don’t really have as much as you think you would. This will probably serve, this is about a six serving if you have like this as a main dish, all right? If you have it as a side dish, you could serve more. The thing about this is, if you wanted to make this and add some kobasi to it, you could have it as a complete meal. You would take your kobasi fully cooked and just cut little rings of it, not big pieces, but some rings of it. You could add it to that and that would be fine. That would be your meat and your vegetable, and we’re gonna add noodles to this so that would be your carbohydrate too. And that would work out very well. Some people said they even have put hotdogs, chopped up hot dogs and put it in. I’ve never had that. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never had it so I don’t know what that tastes like. But I think for the true purists like we all are, we just like halushki just the way it is. We just like the taste of that cabbage and those onions and that butter, I’ll tell ya. What could you want more than that? All this does here now is we just keep cooking it. You can see, it’s starting to get a glossy color to it. We’re gonna add some salt. Just as much as you need. I mean, cabbage will absorb the salt too, so don’t don’t overdo it. Let people do it at the table if more if they want it. And some fresh ground pepper is always in order. That’s what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna give it a good coating of black fresh ground pepper, ’cause that really perks up the taste. I had a friend that used to live in the South and when they moved north, they said that the foods in Pittsburgh, they said, were bland because we didn’t know how to season well. I kind of took offense at that because I think some of the best cooks in the world are from right here in Pittsburgh. And, but they kept saying well, you know, you don’t put enough pepper. You don’t put enough salt, you don’t put enough seasonings. I’ll tell you what. If you ever have been to the strip and you get some of the foods that are cooking down there, I would beg to differ. There’s garlic, that smell is everywhere. And the pepper and all the spices that they use. I don’t agree with that, but I guess everybody’s, maybe they haven’t eaten at the right places, I don’t know. But anyway, you can see now that this is starting, little bits of it, are starting to brown because the onion’s browning. You can see here. And this is what you want it to do. It’s really just gonna keep cooking and cooking down. We’ve not added any more butter to this because this has to cook down for a good about 10 minutes. It’s important for this to get, not only is it browning, but it’s steaming through. You can see the steam coming up and the cabbage is cooking to make it soft. And that’s… Taste is incredible. We’re not done yet because we have boiled a one pound package of wide noodles, okay? Now you can buy the ones in the frozen food. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those. There’s wide noodles in the frozen food section of your market. And then there’s the package ones. Or you can make homemade, if you’re able to make good homemade noodles. They would be great here. But have them boiled. When you’re doing this, have them boiled and ready to go like we do. Okay, now we’re going to add a fourth of a cup of Crisco oil. We had the butter in there, now we’re gonna add the Crisco oil. Just like that. Okay? And I think it’s gonna give it the extra taste and shine. You can see that and it’s gonna coat the noodles very well, too. Just browning. If you start to see it getting too brown, you might need to adjust your temperature. I think we’re about there with this. I’m gonna add my noodles. And again, they should be very well drained. Because what you don’t want is water in with your cabbage, okay? And this is one pound. Here we go. Just add them all in, and continue to just do what you’ve been doing. Just keep mixing, mixing, mixing. Continue to mix, just like that. Okay? Doesn’t that look good? I tell ya, the smell is incredible. This is something that, you know, if you invited me to your house, I’d love to have a bowl of halushki with you. I think that people, these are foods that, they’re not fancy foods, but boy, my mommy would say they would stick to your ribs. She used to say this is something that’ll stick to your ribs. And some of us don’t want that to happen, but it does. But anyway, this is something that doesn’t cost a lot to make, but it’s very much enjoyed by everybody. And it’s delicious. Halushki. Well, we’re gonna wrap this up here, and we’re gonna be back in just a minute. But first we want to tell you how you can get all the recipes that you’ve seen on today’s program. We’ll be right back.

• [Narrator] To receive the recipes presented on today’s program plus many more great recipe ideas, send your best donation in a stamped self-addressed business-sized envelope to At Home, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. You’ll receive Arlene’s heartwarming newsletter, “Enjoy!” Featuring an entire month of At Home recipes, including today’s mouth watering dishes. Be sure to include the “Enjoy!” issue number with your request. Don’t forget now, please include your self-addressed stamped business-sized envelope. It’s really important. Some of you, most of you are doing it, but there’s still some that forget about it. And the very best gift that you can send. And we’ll be glad to send you the whole month’s supply of recipes from right here on “At Home”. Well, this is our casseroles. These are the finished product. This is our sausage and macaroni bake. I want you to see, look at this. Doesn’t that look good? Hot and piping from the oven. Oh boy. What we’ve added is maybe some green beans on the side, and some cottage cheese. There’s a well-rounded meal right there. That’s a goodie. Then this one is our shells. And there’s our french fried onions on top and cheese down in there. That looks good, and that has a tomatoey flavor. Remember, there’s tomato soup and also cream of mushroom soup in that one. And then here’s the halushki, which everybody is drooling for because we’re all hungry for this. We haven’t had this for a while. This is the way it should look and you can just put some pepper on top. And you can see that all the cabbage is very soft. You don’t want to have a mouthful and you bite into a piece of hard cabbage, so you cook that, I would say, probably from the beginning to the end, you could prepare this in about 20 minutes. But you have to keep the heat high so that cabbage keeps cooking with the onion. And those flavors together with the butter is just excellent. It just tastes real good. And what I would add to that, you can maybe do some sausages or a piece of kolbasi. If you don’t want to add the kolbasi to the halushki, you can just do it on the side. Or maybe you do a little meatloaf or something. Whatever you want to add to this. This usually is a meal in itself though, I got to tell you. Because it’s very filling and it’s very tasty. We hope that you’ve enjoyed “At Home” today. Remember to stop and take advantage of the times when something just makes you laugh or something that makes you feel good, stop and enjoy the moment. Don’t be in such a hurry that you don’t think about the good things that are happening in your life. Don’t be preoccupied with the negative things. Those will all change. Think about the positive things in your life. I hope one of the positive things in your life is your relationship with the Lord. Because that’s the most positive thing in my life and that makes every other relationship good. Well, be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you here at home. We’ll see you then, bye bye.
• [Narrator] Fresh produce provided by Jordan Banana, wholesalers of fresh fruit and vegetables in Dravosburg, Pennsylvania. Appliances provided by Dacor, distinctive appliances. A reflection of your good taste. Groceries provided by Foodland, where the answer is always yes! Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.