Arlene is making “quickies” today! Easy recipes for when you need to put dinner on the table in a hurry. This 2003 episode features a fast pasta and bean soup, a yummy apple bundt cake (that uses a boxed cake mix!), and the easiest macaroni and cheese you’ve ever seen… with just 4 ingredients!
EZ Macaroni and Cheese
You won't believe how quickly you can make this mac and cheese!
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup butter, melted
- 2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni noodles
- 3 cups shredded cheese (any kind or combination of cheeses you like)
- 1 quart whole milk
- salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Spread butter in 9 x 13-inch baking dish. Add macaroni (uncooked), cheese, milk and salt and pepper. Mix very thoroughly.
- Bake in preheated oven-for 40 to 60 minutes, depending on how dry you like your macaroni. If top begins to get too brown, cover loosely with aluminum foil until finished baking. Makes 12 servings. Enjoy!
Batrice’s Apple Bundt cake
This easy cake has a surprise hidden inside: apples!
Ingredients
- 1 box yellow or caramel flavored cake mix
- 1 can apple pie filling (21 oz)
- 3 eggs
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Place eggs in a bowl and beat well. Mix with dry cake mix. (Do NOT follow directions on box.) Mix well and then fold pie filling into batter. (It will be a little dry or stiff.)
- Pour into a greased, floured bundt pan and place in preheated oven to bake for 45 to 50 minutes. Makes 8 to 10 servings. Enjoy!
- Note: You can also try chocolate cake mix with cherry filling or white cake with blueberry filling.
Pasta and Bean Soup
This easy soup has a delicious Italian flavor.
Ingredients
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 1 Tbs olive oil
- 1 can plum tomatoes (28 oz)
- 1 can beef broth + 1 can water (15 oz)
- 1 can white kidney beans, drained (15 oz)
- 2 tsp dried basil
- 1/2 cup baby pasta shells or macaroni, uncooked
- grated Parmesan cheese
- chopped parsley for garnish
Instructions
- In a heavy saucepan, saute' onion and garlic in heated oil for 2 minutes. Add tomatoes, breaking them apart with wooden spoon, beef broth and water, kidney beans and basil. Bring to a boil.
- Stir in pasta, simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally or until pasta is cooked. Serve immediately in bowls, top with grated Parmesan cheese and chopped parsley, if desired. Makes 4 to 6 servings. Enjoy!
Transcript
- Well, hello and welcome to At Home today. We’re so glad that you could join us. It’s always nice to have friends drop by, I know I say it all the time. But I mean that, and it wouldn’t be the same without you being here with us today. Today, we’re going to do some different kinds, I usually like prepare a whole meal or a theme, but I have found a few recipes that I call quickies, that the ones I’m preparing today, they don’t relate to each other at all. But they’re quick things that you can add to your meal. And I wanted to share them with you, and I thought I’m just going to do a show, two shows in fact, this week and next week on quickies, stuff you can prepare fast for your family. Add to like, maybe you have a piece of meat, and you think I don’t want potatoes. I don’t want rice. What can I do? Maybe you want to do my pasta dish today, or a quick dinner idea, quick dessert idea for your dinner. That’s what we’re going to do today. So you want to get your pen and paper together, and I’m going to share a letter. In fact, one of the recipes that we’re doing today is from this lady. Her name is Beatrice and she is, I don’t know where B- oh, she’s from Washington. Okay. Dear Arlene, I watch your program almost every week and I enjoy it very much. I also received your cookbook as a gift at Christmas time. Thank you. I hope you’re enjoying it too. From my son. I have a recipe for you and maybe you already have it, but I want to share it with you. We need more programs like the one you have, there are too many violent shows. We all know that’s true. Seems like there are no more morals in people. So keep your faith in God and keep on cooking. I enjoy your show very much. And God be with you. She says a real big mouthful there. It seems like nobody has morals anymore. It seems like there’s so much violence everywhere. That’s why it’s important for us to keep Christian television going strong, where you’re watching this today. And I would ask you just to keep them in prayer, Christian stations, all over the country, easy to give up because the battle is rough. But you know, when you say we’re going to stay here because God called us to do this, you have that determination and you do it because that’s important to keep Christian television coming out. That has good moral value that teaches your kids what’s right and wrong. Helps you to raise your children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. That’s what’s important. Not how much money we make in the lifetime. When we get to heaven, and he says, and what did you do, Arlene? He’s not going to be impressed with how many cookbooks I wrote. How many times I made this, or I made that. But what did you do for me? That’s the important thing. That’s what he’s going to ask all of us. So we want to be prepared, and we are prepared to get today’s show started and we’ll be right back in just a moment with our first quickie recipe. Here’s today’s, at-home hint, potatoes will take food stains off your fingers, just slice and rub raw potato on the stains and rinse with water. If you have a helpful hint you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you, send your hint to At Home Hints, Cornerstone Television, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well, today on our quickie show, we’re making three separate quickie dishes that you’re going to want to add to your list of easy and fast and delicious recipes. The first one is a favorite, everybody’s favorite. It’s macaroni and cheese. Now the thing I hate the most about macaroni and cheese is boiling the macaroni. Right Jim?
- [Jim] That’s right. Jim knows, he has a family he’s cooking for, and his wife. Well, this is a recipe that you don’t have to boil it. And let me show you how you do it. It was like five ingredients. Okay. We have a fourth of a cup of butter melted in the bottom of a thirteen by nine baking dish. And, all we’re going to do now, is take, and you can use any kind of macaroni, elbows, I like the little shells for something different, two cups, and you’re just going to drop it right in. Look at that. It is not boiled, right out of the package. Like so, okay? Now, we’re gonna add cheese, and this takes three cups of cheese. And I don’t like to use just one kind. I like to do variety. So we have Italian here. This is a combination of mozzarella, smoked provolone, parmesan, romano, fontana, and asiago. My goodness, that’s a lot of cheese, but it’s good. So we have a cup of that and we’re just going to sprinkle that one cup of cheese, like so. Now, if you’ve got kids that like other stuff added to their macaroni and cheese, some people like onion. I don’t, I think it overwhelms the macaroni and cheese. Some kids like peppers or whatever. You know what? You can add it to it, but it’s important that you keep these basic ingredients to get the desired effect of baked macaroni and cheese. This one’s colby jack, this I like real well. It’s one cup and just sprinkle. So simple, so easy. You could make this, I mean, if you have 40 minutes when you get home from work, you can make this. One time I was invited to be a guest at a little boy’s birthday party. He was going to be six years old, his name’s Brandon, and his mother said, do you want to go to Chuck E Cheese? Or what do you want to do? No, mom, you know what I want for my birthday? I want to cook with Arlene. So, his mother contacted me. They had been friends of our family, anyway. She says, Arlene, would you come and let Brandon Cook with you? Well, we got to the house and Brandon, there were about 65 people at the house, and Brandon made macaroni and cheese. And I tell you what he was the head of the party. We had such a good time with him. Now, all you do is pour one quart of milk over the pasta. Just like that. Brandon’s mother had made one recipe of this before we got there, so, cause she was going to serve everybody. But everybody thought that Brandon’s tasted better than his mom’s. Yeah. Right. Okay. Now I’m going to just add a little cayenne pepper. Don’t have to, if you don’t like it, I just kinda like it cause it gives it a little, a little bite. Like that, and you might want to do some salt. Again, this is coarse salt, and I like it cause it bursts flavor. Can add more at the table. Okay. This goes into a 350 degree oven for 40 to 60 minutes, depending on how much you like, if it’s soupy, you like it real dry. You can adjust that. Okay. All right. We’re going to put this in our oven. Just like that. Easy to do and oh boy, is it ever good. You’re going to really enjoy it. Okay. The next one is something called. Okay, come on. There we go. Something called pasta bean soup. And we’re going to start. Usually you think of soup, oh, I got to cook it all day. Not this one, you don’t. We’re going to do some oil in the bottom of the pot, and I have some garlic, a couple of cloves of garlic or just one, whichever you prefer. Let’s see, I better get this one. And a nice big onion. We’ll do the onion first. You always want to render from the onion. If you have, if you have something that’s cooking long, it’s good to get that oil hot, get the onion brown because it, it bursts the flavor of the onion and then adds to the soup or whatever you’re making. So we’re going to do this, make sure I get it nice and high. And you don’t want to do the garlic first, cause we know the garlic will burn. So we don’t want to do that. Okay. Coming up really nice now, shouldn’t take too long. I want to get that on the flat part, if you can flatten it out in the bottom of the pan, and it’s really important. I know these are basic simple little things, but if you can, if you can make one layer on the bottom of the pan, it works better and works quicker. If you just throw the onion in there and you don’t stir it around, guess what? The pile in the middle, there will only be a little bit on the bottom that has anything browning. The rest of it, won’t be brown. So, we want to keep stirring, moving it about just like so. Now we’re going to add our garlic. Fresh garlic. Yum, yum. And we stir it around. Anything that starts with garlic and onions is good. It’s very good. We also want to thank Lillian, who’s a guest here with us today. She’s here for a visit in her daughter-in-law, we’re so happy they both could be with us today. And someone said, this is part of a gift for you, right Lillian? We’re glad to have you here. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. We don’t very often get to have people in an audience, because we don’t have room for an audience, but every once in a while for somebody special. And Lillian is special, because that was my mom’s name, was Lillian, and she truly too was a very special lady. So, I’m going to keep working on this and now it’s just starting to come in. Smell that Mike? Smells good huh? Uh huh! Because it’s just really getting nicely brown. Imagine you could do this one in a crock pot, if you wanted to. I would do this first, dump it in the crock pot, and then do all the other things that we’re going to be adding. But it’s really important to get that brown, just like that. We’re getting there. I think we’re going to take a break while this is browning. And when we come back, we’ll finish our pasta and bean soup. And I have another quickie for you too, we’ll be right back. If you’re just joining us, you’ve come at the right time, because we’re sauteing our onion and garlic, getting ready to put the other ingredients in. If you can see this now, this is what it should look like. See how nicely brown? It might take you more than two minutes, but keep an eye on it, cause it will brown and burn very quickly. Okay, now we’re going to add one can of beef broth right in, now we’re building the foundation for the soup. I’m also going to add a can of water because that’s, I’m going to put some pasta in this and that needs to cook in a lot of liquid. So we’re going to add a one can of water, like so, and we have tomatoes. These are the plum tomatoes, and we’re gonna, I’m going to squish them. Because they need to be squished. Okay? Hope they didn’t squish all over me, sounded like it might not have worked to good, but it’s hard to find these that are the diced and mash. So I just, they’re better than putting them in there whole. They’ll cook apart, but you still need, you still need to squish them and break them apart. Don’t let the kids do this. This is not pretty. Well, maybe Jim’s kids have fun. I don’t know. But I think it takes a talented hand to do this. No, it really doesn’t. You could put them through a grind or whatever you want, but sometimes just feels good to squish them. You know what I mean? Okay. The other ingredients here are some white kidney beans and some pasta. Now let’s talk about pastas that we use in soups. Ditaloni is very good, it’s like little tiny, they almost look like the beads you put around your neck. They’re hollow. You know, that’s a nice one. Acini di pepe, which is like little pearls, a little tiny pearls, very small. That’s nice. Elbows is okay. A little tiny baby shells are fine. You know, whatever you like, whatever is what you enjoy. And you’re not going to put a whole lot in here, so don’t worry about, you know, oh, that’s going to be too much pasta. Whatever kind you like, that’s the kind I want you to use. And whatever you have in the house, when you’re making it, that’s the kind you use. All right, so, we’re using something that we thought look like elbows, but they look more like corkscrews today, but they’re going to be fine for a pasta for our soup. Now, this is going to have good tomato goin. Keep your fire up high. And we’re going to add now the white kidney beans. Those are cannellinis. We’re going to add those in, just like so. And, we need some basil. Okay, maybe Linda, could you get me some basil please? And let’s see, what else? I think, once this comes up to a boil, then we’re going to add our pasta, but you don’t want this to happen until it comes to the boil. Thank you so much. You are too good. Nice to have an elf that you say, could you get me? And they get it. You know, that’s very nice. Two teaspoons of dried basil. Remember what I told you to do? You want to crush this so that it breaks forth the flavor. So there’s one and there’s two. I love basil. It’s so easy. If you can get the plants in the spring, you want to put them in your garden. Cause that stuff, oh, it’s wonderful. If you want to make homemade pesto in the summertime, put basil on your list to get for your garden. You’re going to love it. Okay. We’re going to let this go head cook for a little while, and I’m going to make the next quickie and then we’ll come back to this. I’ll add my pasta. Okay, the next one is something that’s a wonderful, wonderful dessert. Put it together in no time flat. Especially if you want a cake. And what we do here is just take three eggs, which we have, and we’re going to break them into the bowl. One. I always use the large egg, not the extra large, but the large egg. One, two and three. Now, gonna mix them up a little bit. I’ll use this bigger one. They need to be, be beaten a bit, just like that. And then we take one standard Duncan Hines cake mix. Don’t use a pudding cake mix, okay, that would not be the right one, because I think your reaction to the chemical and stuff is different. Just a regular cake mix. And we’re going to dump that into the eggs. Do not prepare the cake mix, as it says on the back of the package, okay? You don’t want to do that. Okay. Now, we’re going to mix the eggs with this, and this is going to get pretty thick. This is the recipe that Beatrice, the lady at the beginning of the program I was telling you about, this is the one she sent. She said, you can use a chocolate cake mix. And then you can add, cause we’re going to add like a can of pie filling. We’re going to add apple pie filling, right here. This is what’s going in next. And we’re going to fold that in, but she said you could do chocolate cake mix and cherry pie filling. You could do yellow cake mix and blueberry pie filling. Man, I thought, my mind was a whirl, and I thought won’t these be good, yummy yummy. But you need to mix this up really well. Make sure that the dry powder is all completely incorporated in the eggs. Okay, let me go. Let me leave this for one minute. Since this is boiling, we’re going to add our pasta right in there. Basically, cook that ten, fifteen minutes, that soup is done. Okay. Very good. Now, back to the cake we’re mixing. Now, what you do now is have a bundt cake pan that you’ve buttered well, which we have here. And we’re going to add, I don’t think I’d use a mixer for this. That would be very hard since it’s so thick. Now we’re going to add our apple filling, and we don’t want to like stir this around, we want to fold it. I’m going to show you about folding. This has lots of fruit in it. That’s the kind you want. Here we go. The whole can. It’s about 20, 21 ounce can. Okay. Now to fold you go down and up, down and up and over, down and up and over, down and up and over, until looks like that is pretty well blended. You certainly don’t want to stir it all around. Okay. Just make sure that the fruit gets into every part, just like that. We’re going to put it in our bundt pan. And this is going to bake 350 for about 45 to 50 minutes. That’s all. When we come back, we’re going to show you the finished products of our quickies from today. Okay? Stay with us. Here’s how you can get today’s recipes. Now be sure to send for your copy of the recipes or if you’re online and you have that capability, why don’t you just go there and subscribe to our newsletters and get, come to your door every month via your email. And you don’t have to send in any kind of a envelope or whatever. It’s just a more easy, convenient way for you to be sure that you get all of our recipes. Well, today I’m going to show you what we’ve made. First of all, this is our macaroni and cheese that we did not have to boil. Your kids are going to love this. All the cheese sticking on the top there. Look at that, oh, yum. That, couple of hot dogs or salmon patties or whatever. Great. And it’s just any kind of cheese you want to use, you use in that. Next we have our pasta and bean soup. Look at this, kind of reminds you of pasta fagioli. And again, just cook it. Don’t have to let this cook long. So don’t cook it over cook it, Okay? And then we’re just going to put a little parsley. And how about a little parmigiano reggiano? Yum, yum. There you go. Delicious little crusty bread with it. What more could you want? And then here, this is a lovely dessert, again, three ingredients and so good. I want you to see how beautiful this comes out. Just look, see the pieces of, isn’t that great, pieces of apple in there. Just did a bit of powdered sugar over the top. Could drop a little cool whip on there. Whatever, let your imagination work with you. And I hope that you’ll, you’ll write for the recipes because quick and easy ideas like these don’t come along every day. And if you have like a couple of pork chops, what am I going to put with that? Why not put some macaroni and cheese with it? Or you have some little meat cakes or something? Let your imagination go. Soup is always on the menu. I love soup. It’s good for you. It tastes good. So I hope that you have enjoyed today’s program and I hope you’ll send for the recipes. You know, I say it all the time. You’re part of my family. You’re part of my big family out there that if you didn’t come by, wouldn’t be the same. So until the next time, be sure to join us because it wouldn’t be the same without you here at home. We’ll see you then.
- Food provided by McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores in Brentwood and Monroeville. Taste the world.
- Cornerstone television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers, whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
Quick & EZ, Luv it!