Cooking Vintage 90s Low-Fat Entrées: Ham BBQ, Chicken Salad, & Pepper Steak

Hi. I’m not real happy today. You know why? It’s house cleaning time, and I hate to clean house. I mean the everyday house cleaning, not house cleaning, but everyday cleaning is not too bad, but boy, that heavy duty stuff where you clean out drawers like this one and the closet in the basement. Oh, the basement. Oh, boy, the basement. If I could get Paul motivated not to have just one path from the bottom of the steps to the back door, boy, I would think I have accomplished a lot. I got to thinking about it. Let’s take a look at this drawer for instance. Now this is our silverware drawer that normally is over here in our kitchen unit, okay? I was thinking about cleaning drawers. Now this is known as the silverware drawer, but, see we have everything, plus silverware in this drawer. Here is the use and care of the convection plus single and double ovens. The ovens on our set, okay. Now here’s all the silverware, it’s here. The knives, the forks, hand cream in the silverware drawer, a funnel in the silverware drawer. Well, for goodness sakes, it looks like a few little Christmas light bulbs here. Hey, always prepared, we have to have, well, here’s a name tag from some function “At Home with Arlene Williams,” yeah. Well, there’s a little tube of some kind of, I think it’s icing, but I’m not sure. Pens, we have paint brushes, we have pens. Well, look, what’s here. Even a toothbrush in the silverware drawer. A teabag, one lonely teabag in the silverware drawer. And look here. Clear nail polish. Yeah, and oh, needle and thread. Well, that’s good. Uh-huh. Oh, look here. Cookie cutters in the silverware drawer. What else would you expect But a spare pair of glasses? Silverware drawer, right? What else do we have here? Oh, glitter sticks. Oh, good. Mm-hm. All right, and everyone needs a magic marker of some kind, a highlighter or something in the silverware drawer. You know, I got thinking about this the other day, isn’t this just like life? We start out life, and it goes on, and we know everything that makes up life, right? We work, we worship, we have relationships. We have children, we have grandchildren, but you know what happens? Either by our own design or someone else’s design, they start to clutter our lives with all these things that are not necessary, like a toothbrush in a silverware drawer. All of these things that clutter up our lives, self-condemnation, feelings of inferiority, sadness, stress, someone else’s jealousy toward you, start to clutter up our lives, and then we carry around all this excess baggage. When really, there would be so much room in this drawer if it was just for silverware, if all this other junk, it wasn’t cluttering it up. Everything would be neat and it would be in its place. But when we allow people to clutter up our lives with all the excess baggage, then we get bogged down and we get stressed out and we have no joy. So the Lord doesn’t want us to be like that, because he didn’t create us like that. If you start looking at yourself and realize that there’s excess baggage that you’re carrying around, that someone else has put on you, start throwing it out. Get rid of it, don’t let it stay. Get rid of it. You are not inferior. You are the way God made you. You are a human being. You have likes and dislikes. Don’t let anybody put you down for that. Don’t receive that excess baggage into your life. Let it go. So as we’re spring cleaning this year, we’re gonna clean out all this stuff. Hopefully, the girls that work on “At Home” are gonna be rooting through this drawer and giving it a good cleaning along with myself. We’re gonna get rid of the excess baggage, and I want you to do that in your life as well. It’s important, it’s necessary and it’s needful. So while we’re spring cleaning our drawers, let’s spring clean our lives, okay? We’re gonna do a special edition of “Cooking Light, Eating Right” today, we’ve got some really good recipes, low in fat, low in salt, low in sugar, and low in calorie. You say, “Is there anything that taste, I mean, does it taste good? Does it taste like anything?” Surprisingly, it does. Stay with us, we’ll be right back. Here’s today’s “At Home” hint. Here’s today’s “At Home” hint. Substitute low-fat ground turkey in recipes that call for ground beef. To add a beef flavor, stir one teaspoon of instant beef bouillon granules into each pound of ground turkey. Because bullion contains sodium, you may want to decrease the amount of salt in your recipe. If you’ve got a hint, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to “At Home” hints, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. I hope you enjoyed my little story about the drawer getting just filled up with all the junks that you… You always have a drawer that you just toss everything into, everybody does. I hope you enjoyed that. Well, what we’re gonna make first is pepper steak, and this is low salt, low sugar, and low fat. And what I’m doing here is browning a pound of boneless, sirloin steak. And you cut it in strips of about an 1/8 of an inch thick and about an inch or two long. Actually that’s a little bit longer than we need. So we just cut it in half, but trim off all the fat. And if you have a hard time cutting it, really important, put it the freezer, just until it starts to get firm and you’ll find it’s much easier to slice when it’s just a little bit firm. And we’re gonna turn this baby up on high, because this is just gonna cook a very short time until it browns. And then we’re gonna add our vegetables. We’re gonna serve this over rice. And actually, let me tell you, it only has 188 calories per serving and only eight grams of fat. Not bad, huh? You know that I think so too. This is one of those recipes that you can do and be enjoying it. Now that doesn’t count the rice that we’re gonna add to it. You’d have to add that too. But for a beef dish to have 188 calories, and only a few grams of fat is very good. So you put this on high heat. So it seals the juices of the meat in, and you don’t cook all the life out of it, because we’re gonna cook this again. We’re gonna, to add some other things to it. While that’s cooking, you would need to have, let’s see, three large, green peppers, thinly sliced, ready. You need two large onions, thinly sliced, ready. We have a clove of garlic, we’ve got some ginger. We’ve got a teaspoon of sugar, can of sliced water chestnuts. We need some beef granules, these are a bouillon granules. Some corn starch, some light soy sauce. This has less sodium. You wanna cut down on the sodium and a little bit of salt, some water, and we’re almost there. This beef is doing beautifully. Now this says just to cook it for a minute, but I’m gonna cook it just a little bit longer. Because I like my beef to be done. I was talking to a friend just recently and she said, “You know, my mom,” she was a lady who ran a farm. My friend grew up on a farm and she said, “My mom always said, when you eat beef, you have to cook it till it’s well done, because if there was any type of disease in that cow when they butchered it and you don’t cook it until it’s a high enough heat to kill any disease that was in there,” And I know we have the Food and Drug Administration, and all that, but sometimes I still like to think that it would be good to do, to cook it till it’s really, really done, because why take a chance? And, of course, when we pray over our food, that’s really important, because nowadays you just never know what you’re eating and it’s really important to pray, and thank God for it and ask God just to bless it to your body, and give thanks for it also. All right, we’re just about there. Let’s see here now. Make sure you’re rendering some nice brown juices at the bottom. Like I said, this indeed will cook again a little bit later when we combine it all. I think I’m gonna go ahead and take the strips off now and just put them in a dish. We wanna save the juices that are there. And we only started out with a couple of tablespoons of oil and what we did, we had it good and hot so that when you start to brown the meat, it browns up very quickly. If you don’t, you’ll be almost like boiling it. It will taste like, if you let that taste of, it getting hot the same time as the oil gets hot, don’t ever do that. Let the oil get good and hot and then you add the meat. Now to these juices, this is where we’re gonna add our peppers. Make sure here, yeah, we’re gonna add the peppers. We’re gonna add the garlic too. Let’s do the garlic in there, and it says one clove, but if you like more, add more. You don’t have to be worried about, oh, I’m adding too much or whatever. You’re not, don’t worry about that. Now, we’re gonna put our ginger in there too, that’s freshly ground ginger and some salt. That’s an optional. Don’t put a whole lot in, don’t put as much as you normally would think you’d need, because I think we’re all over salting too much. And now we have our peppers and the onions. This is gonna make this so good. Look at all those onions, wow. That’s two onions. And these have to cook for just about five minutes, so that the flavors will all get, as they call married or meld or blend, whatever you want to with the flavors in the bottom of that pan, and with the ginger that we added and also the garlic, and you don’t want the garlic to get real brown and burned, ’cause that I don’t like that taste. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that or not, but sometimes the oil’s real hot and you put that in and it just boom, it’s brown and burned. And then you have a flavor that isn’t real pleasing. So we have our onions and the peppers in there. And while we’re letting those cook for a few minutes, I’m gonna get rid of some of this. Put that over here. What we’re gonna do now is dissolve some of this. We need 3/4 cup of hot water. That’s six ounces. Well, this baby likes to spit everywhere there doesn’t it. Let’s see if I pick this up a little bit. Well, we’re gonna have to do it. Okay, we got hot water going here. 3/4 cup. What we’re gonna add to that is 3/4 teaspoon of beef bouillon granules. And you see, you usually get those little bouillon cubes. Well, that’s not what this is, these are the granules. These are, it’s like powder and they’re easier. You don’t have to wait so long for it to dissolve. So I need 3/4 of a teaspoon. Let’s put that in a little bit more. Okay. And we’re gonna dissolve this. Now this should cook for about five minutes. And because we don’t have a whole lot of time, I’m gonna hurry it along, okay? Now this should cook until these are a little more limp until they’re crisp, tender. If you like them like this and you don’t like them cooked a whole lot, then now’s the time to do it. We’re gonna add our bouillon to this skillet. Okay. Now, after we do that, we’re gonna combine corn starch with some water. And this is a tablespoon of corn starch. We’re gonna add it to our water, which is about 1/4 cup of cold water. All right, there we go. And this is just a 1/2 a teaspoon of sugar. Okay. And we’re gonna mix that together, and then we’re gonna put some, this is called, like I said, the light soy sauce. We’re gonna add 1/4 of a cup of light soy sauce to that. And make sure I have everything in here. Let’s add the chestnuts here too. This is just a small can of water chestnuts that have been drained. We’re gonna add that to our vegetables. All right. There’s that, and here’s this. Okay, now we’re gonna put the meat back in the skillet, just like that. Put all those juices in there ’cause that’s gonna flavor everything. Now this is a hearty dinner. You can see, this is a hearty meal. You have lots of goodies in here. And now we’re going to add our soy sauce mixture. This will bring it up nice and brown and thicken. Not a lot, but just a little bit. What more could you want? I’m telling you this is nothing but good eating. Yummy yum yum. All right, we’re gonna take a break and we’ll be back in just a minute. We’re gonna let this cook and thicken up and we’ll show you at the end of the program, our pepper steak. We’ll be right back. Well, we’re back and for the second dish that we’re going to be preparing in our “Cooking Light Eating Right.” This is the closest you can get to a fat-free ham. This is a low fat, low salt ham. And this is a about a pound and a half, depends. Actually I like this to be just a little bit chipped finer than this. This should be broken apart. But sometimes you ask them for it and they don’t take the time to do it at the Deli. So you kind of have to break it apart yourself and what you want this to be very fine, okay? Sometimes you can take a fork and just rake the fork over and it’ll come out real fine. All I’ve done was put PAM in the skillet. Now see, this is starting to brown up nicely and we’re gonna make sugarless barbecues. You say Arlene, “I love barbecues, but all the sugar in it.” Well, I got this out of a cookbook and I thought we’re gonna give it a try and just see. You keep your heat on high, ’cause you want this to brown and render any fat that might be in there. And really I’ll tell you there’s not gonna be fat because this is very lean. And that’s what you wanna go to, when you go to the Deli, ask for low salt, low fat ham. And because you’re gonna be putting a barbecue sauce on it, you’re not going to be worried about, you say, “Yeah, but it don’t taste very good.” Well, you know when you take stuff out that we’re all used to eating, when you take that outta the foods, then you end up with a product that doesn’t taste very good. But since we’re gonna be putting like a barbecue sauce over it, then it will be okay. Don’t worry about the flavor of what it tastes like before you doctor it up, as they say. So this now is on high heat. And again, like I said, we’re just browning, browning, browning it. And I’m getting it all over the place I can see. Okay. And we’re gonna let this brown a little bit. We’re gonna start our chicken salad, and I’m gonna ask Dale to kind of keep an eye on this. And Dale, if it gets real dark, will you give us this a turn? Okay?

Yep.

All right, come with me over here. We’re gonna take a look at the fruited chicken salad. That’s what this is called. And this is neat because it’s low fat too. And it’s also for diabetics, it’s people that have a diabetic problem. You can use this. It’s calls for a pound of cooked chicken breasts, skinless, boneless chicken breasts. And that’s what we’ve done. The easiest ways to cook it in the microwave and then bring it out and chop it. We’ve done that. We have some grapes, we have those ready. We have two cans of mandarin oranges that have been drained. Two jars of the apricots, baby food with tapioca. See this stuff is so good. I could eat this without, I mean, this is good. We have have some fat free yogurt, some celery, some green onions, a little bit of skim milk and some pepper and some salt. Now in this bowl here, first of all, we’re gonna mix. Let me do the baby food first. Two jars, little jars. Now you can make half portions of this if you want to. You can make double portions and offer it to a friend or take it to a neighbor or put it away for tomorrow’s lunch. Make a sandwich for yourself for lunch. And this is two baby food jars of apricots. Just like that. Okay. And there we go. And then we’re gonna take our yogurt like that, that’s 1/2 a cup of no fat yogurt. All right. And the salt and pepper, little bit of salt, little bit of pepper. Okay. And we’re gonna stir that up first, just like this. Okay, and that’s gonna be the foundation for the dressing that will be on your chicken. Okay. Now what we’re gonna do is stir in our chicken, which is a pound of boneless, skinless, and it’s been chopped and it’s cool. You don’t you wanna do that when it’s warm. Let me get a spoon over here and we’re gonna mix that and we’re gonna put our celery and our grapes. Sliced, those are the red grapes, oops. And our green onions. Okay. Now I’m gonna put them milk over the top of it. You can put that either in with the yogurt or later. Now I’m just gonna mix this. Now this should refrigerate for two hours to the next day, if you wanted to. And when it gets good and cold, then you’ll bring it out. And to serve it, you put it on a bed of lettuce or you could do it in a sandwich if you wanted to or in a croissant, eat it with a croissant. That would not be low fat of course, you understand that. But some crackers or something like that, but this refrigerates. Then when you bring it out, you stir in your mandarin oranges. This is called fruited chicken salad looks good, doesn’t it? When it’s good and cold, you’re really gonna enjoy it. Let’s go back and take a look over here at how the ham’s doing. And I think we’re almost there, ’cause see it’s a drier texture now. You don’t have that wet feeling to this ham because it has all fried out. We used to call this frizzled ham when I was a kid and put this on a sandwich. Enjoyed, it was real different. Right. Now, what we’re gonna do is pour ketchup. This is one cup of ketchup that we’re gonna pour over top of our meat. And we wanna stir that around so this starts to blend it. Just like that. Hope you like barbecues. I’ve always liked barbecues. I remember in school, they used to serve us barbecue and potato chips and corn for lunch. And that was one of my favorite lunches. And I hate to tell you how cheap that was, ’cause you wouldn’t believe it was probably like a quarter. I’m like embarrassed to tell you that because now you know how old I really am. But anyway, it still tasted good. Didn’t matter. Now what I’m gonna do here, is I’m gonna sprinkle this baking soda over this mixture and it’s gonna start to foam. Okay. Just like that. And I need some white vinegar. I’m gonna add about a teaspoon of white vinegar to this and we’re gonna have delicious… Here we go, this is a teaspoon of white vinegar. Sorry, I didn’t see it. So that’s gonna make it the sour. This is our sugarless barbecues. We’ll be right back right after this important message on how you can get today’s recipes. Stay with us now.

[Narrator] 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 size 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 mouthwatering dishes. Be sure to include the “Enjoy” issue number with your request.

Well, we’re here with the dishes that we prepared in the special edition of “Cooking Light, Eating Right” and here is our pepper steak that, beautifully done. And we’ve just added a bed of rice to it. And I’ll tell you it’s very low calorie, very low fat. And this I’m telling you is a good tasting, good smelling, it’s a crowd pleaser. You could prepare this for anybody and they would enjoy it. Not just people on restricted diets. Next to it, we’ve got our barbecue, sugarless barbecues. And the crew’s been munching on leftovers and they said it’s real good. So that means something, okay? And then our fruited chicken salad, you can see how beautiful that looks. We’ve put our mandarin oranges in and remember want that to be really chilled well, really chilled well. And what we didn’t get to do today is our creamed, really low fat creamed cucumbers. And we’re gonna include the recipe in the monthly newsletter for these, even though we didn’t get to prepare them on the program for you. But let me remind you that it’s always important when you’re dieting or not to drink a lot of good, fresh water. It’s important. My daddy used to drink water, first thing in the morning and the last thing at night and all during the day. He had a full head of hair, he had lots of strength and he stayed 160 pounds all his life. I’m gonna start drinking more water, how about you? And 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 now.

[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.