Arlene Remembers Her Dad on Father’s Day ❤️

Well, hello, and Happy Father’s Day, we hope that you’ll be celebrating with your family, this wonderful day when we honor those men in our lives that have really made a change or may have really been a role model for us to follow. And if you’re a dad out there, who has stood by your family, has provided as well as you could all your life, has gathered your children around you and has loved them, I’m honoring you today. Because you know what, you’re a special person. In a day when everybody wants to get away from commitment, doesn’t want to accept their responsibility after they father children, doesn’t want to provide for them, give them food to eat. I want to tell you that you’re a good role model. And God bless you, God bless you abundantly if you take care of your family. And I know that God loves you in a very special way. The man in my life that was the best role model in the world was my own father. And I’m going to share with you because he was a unique individual. He and my mother married on January the first, 1934. And that day he began to keep a daily diary. My dad passed away in October of 1992. And every night of his life, he wrote in the diary. Our family has 56 volumes. I mean just incredible amount of information of he and my mother’s life together. It’s their whole lives are documented in these books. And I chose the one. Now I’m not going to show the year. But you probably can figure it out because it’s something I’m going to read, I don’t care. It’s 1946. So now you know how old I am. But that’s all right. This was when I was born. It says January the eighth because I was born at 1:17 in the morning, he said that we came back home to pick up Lillian and Florence, who was my mom and her best friend. At about 9:45 we left for Columbia Hospital in Williamsburg. And at 1:17am Wednesday, January the ninth an eight pound 10 and a half ounce baby girl came into our home. But the Lord is good. Bless His name. Lillian was feeling fine when we left the hospital at 2:30am. I was home about 3 a.m. I called Wilma, who was my aunt, to tell her first and Ronnie who’s my brother, just then awakened and Aunt Wilma told him. So finally to bed at 3:30am. The new baby’s name is Ruth, Arlene Bobek and she weighed 8 pound 10 and a half ounces at birth. My dad had a unique way of telling detail, and then just letting his emotion, his feeling toward God just roll out his of his pen like he did from his mouth. And he would go on the next day saying he woke up and he told him whatever. My mother was quarantined in the hospital for nine days when I was born. And that was an extreme hardship for her because she had not been away from her boys or my dad for that amount of time. And he talks about that. But one of the things that you know, we’ve been reading through this today here in the studio and the crews all fascinated of the detail that dad gave on what was going on the events in the world. Well, he says there was a lot of rationing because this was right after the war. He says butter is selling for 95 cents a pound at the A&P. Soap powder is scarce as is face soap and laundry soap is very scarce. Sugar is hard to get, as are all the jellies. OLIO is difficult to obtain, and so is meat lunchmeat also is scarce. And so it goes, but nothing to worry about. For he hath said, I will never leave thee. I will never forsake thee. So that we can boldly say, the Lord is my helper. I will fear not what man shall do unto me. What a legacy, my own father left for me, and I have to share you with you this Bible that he used. He was a lover of God’s Word. And you know, this is the book that he lived by. He was a role model, a good role model because he patterned his life, his feelings, his emotions, after God’s word. And that’s after God himself. Have to show you how he, you know, some people would never put a mark in a Bible, my dad believed it was a tool and you use a tool and use it for whatever any little idea or thought that the Lord would give him when he was, when he would be reading, Dad would write it in the pages. He wrote here oh how I love thy law. This is his reference study bible. Then he would page after page, every little thought you can see he would just write down here and there. He kept, he was, I told Dad very often, Dad, you should have been a statistician, because every little detail meant so much to him. Here he wrote, let me find the right page, how many times he had read through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, He began April the first, 1930. And by September the 30th 1930, he had read it through the first time, completely. That’s a lot of reading. Well, he was hungry for the Word. He, if you go down here, you’ll see he didn’t finish the 26th time because he passed away went on to be with the Lord, before he was able to finish that, but what a wealth of this Word was in my Dad. Look at this page after page after page, you can see where he would mark it with things that were important to him. You can see he even marked up in the in the margins and, and he didn’t just read through the text, he would read all the helps, read up and down all the references. That’s what he called really studying the Bible. One of the most wonderful sites that I can remember is sitting Dad sitting at the kitchen table. He’d have his colored pens with him and the ruler, and he would be reading, just poring over the Word of God. This legacy, I can’t tell you the value it has in my life. He was a special man. And if you have a godly father, who took you to church, who taught you of the things of God, that’s more important than anything else in the world. But if you’re sitting out there you say, but Arlene, I didn’t have that kind of an upbringing. But if you’re a man, you can be that kind of a father to your children. You can be that example that they will look up to and say my dad took me to church. My dad taught me about God. Do you know that you’re blessed if you honor your parents? Do you know that the Word says that? That’s what this program is about today. I’m honoring the parents. I’m honoring, particularly fathers. I don’t want to leave my mother out of the equation because she was a godly woman too. And I’ve told you about her many times, but my dad was a special man. And everybody that knew him knew how special he was. So today, I’m preparing his very favorite meal. Now you say, I tell you what it’s going to be. You’re going to say, Arlene, that’s not very healthy. Do you know my dad never weighed, there was only a four pound variance in his weight all his life. He went from 158 to 162. He had good principles and much discipline in what he ate, though. He would never think to pick up a doughnut before he would have his good breakfast in the morning. So today in honor of my dad, even though he’s in Heaven with the Lord, I’m going to prepare his T-bone steak with creamy mashed potatoes and gravy and the dealed carrots that he liked and the broccoli and you have to have, you absolutely have to have strawberry shortcake. On today’s program, we’re honoring you, Father. You’re a very special person. We’ll be right back to get started in just a minute.

Here’s today’s At Home hint. Add two tablespoons of corn syrup to your brownie batter for really moist and chewy brownies. If you’ve got a helpful hint that you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you. Send your hand to At Home hints, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148-1499. Well today, like I said, we’re honoring fathers and dad loved T-bone steak many times, you know, he was a pastor. All my life I remember him being a pastor. And many times from the pulpit, he would say, no, it would be about 10 minutes to 12 when your stomach’s growling saying, oh, boy, when I get out of here, we’re going to go and eat. He would something in his one of his sermons would come up and he’d say, yeah, you know, I just know. And you get that T-bone steak when the mashed potatoes and that rich brown — he’d call it mahogany gravy, and everybody go arrgh because it makes you so hungry. Those of you that remember my dad, and we’re in our church, you’ll know what I’m talking about, because we all knew him together. But anyway, he liked the broiled, and he liked the pan fried. But mostly he liked it tender, and he would tell you could fix the elaborate meal. And if it wasn’t tender, he never held back. He’d say, well, Arlene, the vegetables are great, the potatoes are great. But you know that steaks a little tough. Then you kind of go, oh, Dad, I bought the best I could find. I thought it would be good, but that’s just the way he was. He told the truth, but he told it he in love. So today in honor of my father, my precious Dad, we got a couple of really nice T-bones. And when I would do when I was preparing it for him, because this is the way he liked it. I’d take a clove of garlic, he was a great lover of garlic, and just rub it over the skin of that T-bone just on both sides if you can, and you want to cut it so that you can get the flavor of it out there. Just rub it like that. And we’ll rub it over — use the other half here. You know, when I think about my dad, I think about how much he enjoyed good food, how much he enjoyed fellowship around the table reading through the diaries, you can see where he would be at my aunt’s or he would be — my mother and dad would pick up the boys and they would go here, go there, go to camp meeting, go to visit my grandmother. And it was always wonderful because he enjoyed people. He enjoyed being with people, that was an important part of his life. Now I’m just going to pepper these down just a little bit. Don’t do too much. Now you can add other seasonings if you’d like. Maybe some of your family likes, I don’t know maybe some onion salt on there, or maybe use onion powder. Or maybe you want to do some special herbs. Whatever. The important thing is you start out with a really good cut of meat. That’s important. Now I’ve put some oil and some butter. If you use all butter, it’ll burn brown. So you don’t want to do that, but the combination is good. And we’re just going to put these in. We’re going to let them, they look good. Yeah. And what I like to do is put that little clove of garlic in there just to flavor because we have to make some gravy with that. Okay. Do we have some cloths, Linda? Could I get some cloths, please? Okay, you don’t want to put the lid on this because if you do, what will happen here is it will like boil it and steam it. You don’t want that taste. You want a grilled taste. And to get that you have to keep your heat pretty high. Keep it pretty high, so it gets going pretty good. Okay, now also, we have some mashed potatoes that we’ve been cooking. Here we have our carrots, and he loved carrots with dill and just butter on them. That was one of the ones he really, really liked. So let me make sure I get my flame going here. There we go. And this, Dad liked meat. Every kind of meat that he liked, had to be well done. You would never give him a rare steak of any kind. Pork chops, the stuff had to be falling off of it. He would even prefer it would be dry as opposed to being pink. If it was pink, he didn’t want any part of it. And do you know, it’s funny because Dad believed the Bible where it talks about not eating the cloven hoof. And so for years, my dad never ate pork. Wouldn’t eat ham. At holiday times we would prepare him chicken or something like that instead of ham because he just felt that that’s what the Bible said, and that’s what he believed. Thank you, Lynn. And so that’s, that was dad’s theory and he ate well, he ate good. He ate very, he wasn’t a health food nut, but he just ate good balanced meals. A lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. He liked his sweets though. I have to tell you he really did. Okay, so we’ve got the steaks going. Have the potatoes going. Got the carrots going. We’re going to put the broccoli, lot of vegetables with this. Okay, now we’re going to do the shortcake for our strawberry shortcake. This is a very easy one. This is the one he liked the most. I would try to give him different ones. No, he didn’t want that. He wanted this one because this is what Mom always made. And this is very simple. It’s on the Bisquick package. This is about two and a third — let me make sure — two and a third cups of Bisquick, we just put that in our bowl. We have a half a cup of milk. We have about three tablespoons of sugar and then we’re going to add some melted butter. This is about three tablespoons of melted butter and we just mix this up. Mom used to make these a lot for us. We would, she’d be she had, like when the strawberries were really in season, and she had good fresh strawberries and maybe not too much for dinner because this would fill you up. And we make this all the time because this is what dad really liked. But she’d make little individual ones. She wouldn’t make a big one. But because it’s a special event for Father’s Day, we’re going to make one large shortcake and put it together. You want to mix this just until moistened. Make sure I got all that milk out there because it seems a little dry. Okay. Clean off that spoon. You’re going to preheat your oven 425. Now, don’t turn those steaks over. If you’re doing them on in the skillet, do not turn your steak over, leave it on one side until it’s completely cooked through. Now we’re going to pour this into a pan that is not greased. It’s a, you can do it into a cake pan or a pie pan whichever. It will work. And basically, we’re just going to flatten it just like this. It’s amazing how short this cake comes up. Dad used to call how short it was. Never quite understood is relationship to tall that he meant by a shortcake. But I think he meant it was it was flaky and it was delicious. All right. We’re going to put this — here we go. Just like that. This goes in the oven at 425 for about 10 to 15 — 15 to 20 minutes. All right. And we’re going to watch the time there. It browns, it gets nice and it gets flaky, it puffs up. And then you let it cool. And then you split it. Now what you do with the strawberries in the meantime, you do a little maintenance here. The strawberries, you want to clean them like this. You rinse them first. Don’t rinse them after you’ve cut them, because if you do, okay, because if you do all the juice from the berries goes down the drain. So you wash them rinse them first, then you cut them up in slivers, then when you’re going to sugar them, which is what you’re going to need, you take some sugar, and you just pour over it like this. And you sweeten these a little over time because you want to be sure. If the berries real sweet, you don’t need a lot. Then you take a knife and you just start cutting down through, down through your ripe berries. Find somebody’s at the door. Could somebody get that? Thanks. Okay, so you just keep cutting down through your berries, because what that does is that renders the juice as you keep cutting down through there. Some people take a potato masher, I don’t want them in strings, I want pieces of berries. And you’re going to need probably a little bit more than that. So you add a little bit of time. Just a bit like that. Okay? And just keep going. And then you want to refrigerate these until you’re ready to use them and you’ll be amazed at the juice that comes up off these berries. And what you’re doing is you’re cutting the sugar into the berry to make it real, real sweet. Well, I’m going to, I’m going to cut this more but I need to check on my steak here. And let’s see if it’s nice and brown. Isn’t that beautiful? You know it. Okay, it’s time to turn them over because they brown beautifully. And we’re going to let them continue to cook. We have our garlic in there. And I’m going to show you how to make those creamy mashed potatoes when we come back. Stick with us now. We’ll be right back.

Well, we’re going to show you how to make those good mashed potatoes the dad always loved. We’ve boiled our potatoes. Now remember, you want to cut them small, so it doesn’t take all day for them to cook because the bigger they are, the longer it takes. You cut them all about the same size. Then I use my mixer because I’ll tell you, that’s the creamiest way to make them. And this is quite a bit, this is about five pounds of potatoes. Not just for two people. This is for a few more than two, and then just add your salt in. And I try not to add too much because people can add it at the table if they want to. Do you like pepper, add your fresh ground pepper now. If not, wait till later and then just start doing this very easy. Now the key to making good mashed potatoes and I tell you this, you don’t add the milk now. If you add the milk now, you never get rid of the lumps. I mean that you have got to have the lumps mashed out of them. And that’s why I’m using the paddle because that’s the way you do it. You mash the lumps out of them and make sure that you drain all of the water out of them because if you don’t, you’ll have a problem. All right, you can see these are pretty creamy already because they’re very — and you can’t, like cheat and say, well, I won’t let them cook as long because I’m in a hurry. It’s not going to happen. Okay, so. So we’re going to turn it up a little bit. I’m going to get my spatula here. And just make sure you get them around the sides. Okay, there we go. Now you want to warm your milk and I have milk warming over here, and just because see if you put cold in and they chill down so fast, and it’s not good. So we just add, hey, ho, all right. Usually happens to me. I’m not surprised. When I use this mixer, it jumps out at me and let them just go and whip and whip and whip. Let’s come back to our steak. Okay? Now, I would probably let this go ahead and brown and cook some more because I don’t think this is totally and completely cooked through as much as I want to. But what I’m going to do is bring this steak to the platter. Don’t they look beautiful? These beautiful steaks are from Foodland, and to the drippings here, I’m going to add some water because you have to, Keep that away from you so it doesn’t burn you. All right. See the drippings with the nice, when it renders that nice brown liquid in the bottom. That’s what you need. If it’s watery, it’s not going to be real good. So you want this nice brown liquid. Leave those little cloves of garlic in there. Now I’m going to add a few mushrooms. And we’re going to turn this up and let it crank. And then to these steaks, we have some cold water. We’re going to add some flour, a couple of tablespoons of flour to make our gravy, because dad says to that mashed potatoes you have to have good rich brown mahogany gravy. And we’re going to be making our gravy and we’ll be right back in just a minute for our final scene for our Father’s Day show. We’ll be right back.

To receive the recipes presented on today’s program plus many more great recipe ideas, send your best donation and a stamped self-addressed business sized envelope to At Home, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148-1499. You will receive Arlene’s heartwarming newsletter Enjoy! featuring an entire month of at home recipes including today’s mouthwatering dishes. Be sure to include the Enjoy! issue number with your request. Well, here we are at the final table. I want to show you first of all, this is our T-bone steak dinner with a nice mushroom gravy, a thin gravy. And here’s our strawberry shortcake. Remember I showed you how to do the biscuit and to sweeten the berries just put it together with some cool whip. We’ve got our carrots, added a tossed salad that Dad really likes, some broccoli, just very plain. Our creamy mashed potatoes. There’s our extra gravy. And down front is just a crusty piece of bread with some butter we put in the oven. What more could you want? Well, what I could want would be for every father, to stand up and be a man to his family, to provide for them the very best that you can and to honor your wife, honor your children, and be the man in that house by being a role model that’s pleasing to God. And you do that by taking your children to church every Sunday. Worship there, show them how much you love God, and they will follow in your footsteps. Of all the things that my dad left me and if it could have been a million dollars, it would not have been as special as the fact that I knew this was the most precious book to him in his whole life. He treated us, he loved us. Not one time did he ever abuse my brothers or I in any shape or form. He was a loving father. And today I honor Him. I thank God I was born into this family. I thank God for a man who could affect the change in my life and create in me a desire to know God like he knew God. And if you can do that, father, you’ve accomplished everything there is in the whole wide world. Happy Father’s Day. And be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you fathers, you moms too. See you then.

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