Arlene Makes Easter Dinner with Lots of Sides!

Well, hello and happy Easter to you today. I hope that you’re getting ready for this great event. One of the most fantastic events that has affected humanity more than just about anything else except maybe for the crucifixion was the fact that Jesus came out of the tomb to live triumphantly. John in the Bible John 11:25 says “I am the resurrection and the life.” Who else would dare to say that but Jesus. “He who believes in me will live. Even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” Do you believe this? That’s what it says. Do you believe this? I believe it absolutely with all my heart with every fiber of my being, I serve the risen Christ. And today we’re in celebration of that wonderful happening that brought hope to humanity. Humanity that had no hope at all. When Jesus came out of that grave he brought hope to the world. Life doesn’t have to be like it always was before. Now we have hope and his name is Jesus. Well we’ve got a lot of things to do today. Lots of stuff to show you. This is something I wanted to show you. I thought it was cute. Last year, 2003, my niece, Lisa, her two little ones Reno and Reanna made these pot holders for aunt Arlene. And they’re little hand print. This is Reanna’s hand print and she’s four years old and this is Reno and he’s six years old. Now they were a year younger when they made these. So they would’ve been three and five, but aren’t they darling better this than like a, you know something that you’re gonna throw away or put away. And look, even on the back we got the flower garden going love Reno to aunt Arlene. And this is to aunt Arlene, love Reanna. And of course she did a special, this is like your Salvado Dolly stuff over here, you know, but isn’t this great. I just love it. These are things that you remember, your kids your great nieces and nephews. They’re treasures to me. Well, we hope that you’re gonna stay with us because soon as the hints done get the roller skates on cause we’re gonna roll through some side dishes for your Easter dinner and a wonderful dessert that every everybody and the whole family is gonna enjoy we’ll be right back in just a minute. Here’s today’s at home hint replace half the mayonnaise in creamy dressings and dips with plain low-fat or nonfat yogurt. Add herbs, mustard, horseradish or salsa to boost the flavor. 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 Cornerstone Television Wall Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well, happy Easter again. One of the first dishes that we’re making for our accompanying ham, that I’m not gonna show you how to do cause we’ve done it so many times. However, the recipe is in our latest cookbook “At Home for the Holidays” a whole section there on Easter dinners, breakfast, sunrise breakfast that you want to get. If you haven’t, we’ll tell you how to do that later. But these potatoes, this recipe is in there. I have about five, maybe a little bit more than five cups of just cooked potatoes. Like you would for potato salad with the skins on, you peel them and you chop them up in small cubes. Now what we’re going to add to that is some green onion much as you want as little as you want. Okay, if you don’t like it, use regular yellow onion. That will be fine. A couple of cloves of garlic, just chopped. And that’s nice to do that finally. So nobody gets a big piece of garlic in their mouth. All right, we’re gonna add some fresh cut parsley. Fresh is always better. If you can get it than the dried want to make sure with that. And you’re just going to add some salt and pepper. Remember potatoes love salt. So you don’t wanna overdo it but then you don’t wanna under do it either because then they taste bland and we’re gonna do pepper. You could do Cayenne here if you wanted. Yeah let your imagination go at this this time of the year though. It’s so wonderful because everything speaks of hope and life. You know, we’ve all come through the long, hard winter and we’re so thankful that the tulips are up and the hyacinth are blooming and the crocus are up. Ugh, thank God. And that’s the hope. Every spring that’s the hope. Now we’re gonna take cottage cheese as cream cottage cheese, about two cups. If you have more potatoes, you wanna do a little bit more. We’re gonna just add that. And about a cup of sour cream we just put that all in there together. I love family holidays like this. When you gather your loved ones around you and you make things that they enjoy and you know there’s just something I can remember as a kid, of course, you know, my dad was a pastor. So Easter Sunday was a big deal. The brothers had to have the sport coats or the suits on. And I had to have my little hat with my little handbag and my little white gloves. I mean, it was a wonderful time and you looked forward to it and you just knew that Easter basket was gonna be there in the morning. When you got up to get ready to go to church and we’d find Easter basket and then we get dressed and go to church. Never ever forget those memories. They’re wonderful. Now make sure I have everything in this. I’ve sprayed the baking dish lightly with PAM, butter flavored PAM. And we’re gonna get rid of this. And all we wanna do is just spread this out. This is so easy to do. This bakes in 40 minutes at about 325 degrees. And you know, you can make this the day before, just pop it in the oven when you get home from church, if you’re having a dinner like that and all we do on top of that now is do our cheddar cheese and this, like I said in a preheated oven, really important get that oven good and hot. So that once this gets in there it will really start to bubble. Cause this has to bubble in order for it to be done. That’s how you’ll know that it’s finished. All right. Okay. This goes in the oven. Here we go. Right here. Good and hot. Paris potatoes. And you’re gonna love them. Hot and bubbly. Now the next one we’re moving right along here. This is called our fresh vegetable salad. This kind of does two things. It has a salad and the vegetables that we all like and this one you can make the day before cause it gets refrigerated. Two cups of broccoli, just the floret. This is a floret. Okay. Just that little top part. That’s a floret. Also two cups of cauliflower. Same thing. We have our onion half cup of chopped onion, half cup of celery. Don’t make it real fine because you want this to kind of be in the same size cause you don’t want it real fine. Just trust me. You don’t wanna do that and you have green pepper. Okay. And we’re gonna add some cherry tomatoes. Actually these are like the little grape tomatoes. We’re gonna pop those in too. This is a fourth of a cup of graded, finely graded carrot. Isn’t this great color. Look at that. It’s beautiful. I love it. All right. Now this is basically what we’re gonna use for our vegetables. If you have other vegetables you like add to it you can do that. Not a problem. You wanna put some purple cabbage in there you could or some mushrooms. I imagine that would be fine. This is just really colorful and very spring looking I think. Now we’re gonna make our dressing. We have our mayonnaise. I just use this. We have some mayonnaise here, which is about a cup. And of course you could double this. If you’re having a lot of people and you need more you could double this very easily. And to this, we’re gonna add a fourth of a cup of sugar which will sweeten it up a little bit. And then we have some graded Parmesan cheese and that nice. That’s gonna add a little different dimension and we’re just gonna mix this together like this. And that’s the dressing our vegetables. You say Arlene, I don’t know if I want that mayonnaise. My mother used to make the best and I’ve made it for you with a hard boiled eggs and a mayonnaise dressing. Oh, that’s a wonderful dressing. Now we also have some bacon that we’ve cooked but we’re not gonna add this now. This is going to the refrigerator to get chilled. When we serve it, we’ll sprinkle that on the top because that’s, what’s gonna make that good. Okay, how many minutes do we have there, Michael? Okay. Now I wanna show you how to make a wonderful raisin sauce for our ham. So I’m gonna let my kitchen angels put this in the fridge for me and move on to the raisin sauce. You understand how to do this? We’ll show you at the end of the program too. Now in this pan I have taken some raisins. Let’s see we have about a cup of raisins and a cup and a half of water and a half a cup of brown sugar. And what we did, you do that so they plum up like this. You cook them, ah, about five minutes until they plum up. Now in a small bowl like this. Okay, I’m gonna take some water. Fourth a cup, cold water, cold water is important. And about a table spin of corn starch. Corn starch is the thickener. You know how we always talk about that? Then we’re gonna put a teaspoon of rum flavoring just a teaspoon and some ground cinnamon. Oh boy. And we’re just gonna put about a half a teaspoon of the ground cinnamon like that, mix this together. And you want to get your you’re raisin the liquid and it has to be boiling so that this will dissolve. If it doesn’t, it’s not gonna be good and we want it to dissolve well cause you don’t want lumps in that. So I’m just gonna take this little whisk make sure that that all dissolves in the bowl. Then we’re just gonna pour this into our raisins. There you go. Ah, and cook this just for a couple minutes till it starts to thicken and it will get clear, but it will be thick. And what you’re gonna do is slice your ham. Then put the raisin sauce over top of it. Ugh yummy hold on. We’re ready to do a dessert. We’ll be back in just a minute. Don’t you dare go away. Well, the dessert that we’re doing for our big wonderful Easter dinner is the Easter hippity hoppity Easter bunny cake. And it’s also in our cookbook and I hope that you take the time cause you know what? Kids love this, big kids love this. If you know what I mean, besides the little ones. And so first of all, you need two eight inch layers of cake. That would be like this. This is one. And then these were cut out of one of these. Let me show you how you do it. And if you have the cookbook, you can follow. It has the diagram there, you cut like this. and like this, this part is an ear, this part is an ear. And this middle part is the bow tie that we’re going to be doing. All right? So all you wanna do now I’ve split this one because my family likes raspberry. So I split the layers just put a layer of raspberry preserves in the middle and put it back together. And then all I’m doing is using cool whip. The reason I use cool whip is because that with a raspberry makes a wonderful, wonderful combination. It’s just a flavorful and delicious. And this, you know, when you’re going in and out of cracks and crevices cause you wanna cover the whole entire surface with cool whip. And this also will have to keep refrigerated. You’ll have to keep this in the refrigerator and you want to do this. That’s what I like to do with cool whip. Because if you do with icing sometimes icing can tear your cake apart and you don’t want that to happen. So let me show you here. I hope you’re getting this. You just put your ears at the top put the bow tie at the bottom and then you just start covering with cool whip. It doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s why I like this. And kids can help with this because you just put it on try to get it all covered. So you don’t see it cake anywhere. And you know the kids sometimes with icing it’s harder to work with kids because the icing will stick. Cool whip is very forgiving as we all know, all right, so and you can do this very quickly. You can see, start taking long at all. Now you can do this with chocolate cake. You can do this with a yellow cake lemon, a white cake. If you’re baking your layers what you might wanna think about. And I love to do this. I use almond extract in just put it like a teaspoon in when I’m baking cake when I’m doing the butter. Even if it’s a box cake it gives it that flavor that it’s like fresh and the taste. Oh, I love almond anyway, but that really does it for me. It just gives it a different taste altogether and we want to push, make sure it’s right up against there. Don’t you see this is fun. If you give a kid a knife and say, “Okay, you’re gonna get to do this.” What do you think Michael? They’d have a ball. Wouldn’t they?

• [Michael] Yeah.
• Oh yeah. It’d probably be all over them but they’d still have a ball and you can see this isn’t taking long to do this. Now I’m on a tight schedule here cause they’ve only given me a few minutes. So we’re gonna see it’s a challenge out if I can finish this cake in time. I think I can but we’re also gonna decorate it a little bit. Besides just icing it. I didn’t wanna icing it all. Cause I wanted to see what it looked like before we got to that point. When kids, when you bring this dessert out kids just love it. And they’ll fight cause they want an ear. They want this or that. You know what it’s all about family. And that’s what Easter’s about. Getting that family together. I hope you’re all going to church together. I hope your kids know why we have Easter. That it’s not the Easter money. It’s actually a whole lot more. That hope that Jesus gives us when he came out of the grave. Oh my, you have to tell them when they’re little so that they remember when they get big and then they tell their children. Okay, we’re just about there. Little bit more on this side. I think we’re there. Totally icing. Okay, now. Yeah, it looks like a bunny, but we can do so much more. Inside of bunny’s ears is pink, right? Anytime I looked at them. So we have tinted some pink coconut. We’re just gonna put that on the inside of the bunny’s ears, just like that. And when I think of coconut, I think of Easter, you know you have to have coconut Easter eggs and then I’m gonna put it also right along the edge for his very lovely bow tie. Now you can’t really differentiate there. So we’re gonna take some of our jelly beans and we’re gonna put them all along here and that’s gonna show that that’s where the bow tie is. Now you can even outline the whole bow tie with jelly beans. If you wanted to, you know, use your imagination. There’s nothing that would be wrong. No matter what you did with this, nothing is wrong. Okay. It’s just use your imagination and get the kids involved. All right. There’s that. I’ll probably do them around here and around here. Now this bunny needs some eyes. We’re gonna give him two big chocolate eyes. Okay. Oh, he looks like he’s half winking on that one. Sorry I dipped him too soon. Okay, and he needs whiskers, right? So he has some licorice strings and we’re gonna give him some licorice whiskers never saw red ones, but hey this is our bunny and he can be whatever we want him to be. Looks like he went to the barber and got them short on the one side over here, but that’s okay. Okay. Now what you’re gonna wanna do also is I think he needs a couple of teeth. That’s me. Okay. So we have some almonds. We’re putting the teeth in this bunny like snaggle tooth, you know, he’s got some major teeth. He needs a trip to the dentist. Oh, why not? I love it. Doesn’t take much to make me happy. I just enjoy playing with cakes. Okay. Wow. He got, he’s got a big I’ll probably read adjust that cause it doesn’t look real nice. Now what you wanna do is take regular white coconut and go all over the rest of cause here they have fur, you know, bunnies have fur. Like everybody doesn’t know that, but they do. And you wanna just put it all over the place even on the sides. You wanna cover it completely with coconut. Now when you’re done, see we had to put it on this tray because we didn’t have this is a cookie sheet that we’ve covered with foil. You can also tint some of this green and put it on here. So it makes it look like he’s sitting in grass. This is our Easter bunny cake made especially for you for Easter, we’ll be right back. And we’ll be at the dining room table showing you all our side dishes and even a big, beautiful ham in just a minute we’ll be right back. We’re finally here in the dining room with our table just full of all the things we’ve prepared today for your Easter dinner. And there’s a chair here waiting for you to come. You know, it’s always nice when family comes by but I want to show you this is our vegetable fresh vegetable salad. We’ve just added the crumbled bacon on top. This wonderful salad you’re gonna like it. There’s the ham that we baked that we’re going to serve our raisin dressing. I’m sorry, raisin sauce with it. Remember it has that rum flavor with it. Oh, that’s a wonderful compliment. Next to it are the Paris potatoes. Aren’t they beautiful. Look how golden brown. We put a little touch of cayenne on top just to perk them up a little bit. You could use paprika or whatever. And next to it is our finish completed the way it’s supposed to look. Our Easter hippity hoppity Easter bunny bake all of these recipes, including a ham recipe is in our “At Home for the Holidays Cookbook.” So if you haven’t got your copy you’re gonna want be sure to do that. Could I encourage you that you and your family should really make every effort in the world to go to church together as a family this Sunday, you know we have to celebrate the things that are so important to us. That mean the most. If you take your kids to every practice they have for sports, or if they’re in ballet or if they’re doing soccer and their major and you, oh, I have to get them there. And you’re diligent about that. What about their soul? Those things last, they are temporary but what you do about making sure that your children your family know about the Lord Jesus Christ as a savior that lasts for eternity. And I would ask you, please get your family together, go to church and sing those wonderful songs “Up from the Grave He Arose.” “He Lives, He Lives Within my Heart Today,” nothing like that. I remember them all these years from when I was a little kid and they stay in your heart, not just in your mind but they stay in your heart. I hope you’ll try our recipes. I hope you’ll be sure to be with us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you here at home. We’ll see again, happy Easter
• [Narrator] Furnishings provided by Levin Furniture featuring Lane’s Country Living collection. Food provided by Jordan Banana Company wholesalers of fresh fruit and vegetables in Dravosburg Pennsylvania.
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