This episode is interesting because it takes us back to 2002, when At Home returned from a four-year hiatus that started in 1996. This was just the 3rd episode filmed in Arlene’s new “apple kitchen,” and the show starts off with her sharing some fun family photos.
For dinner she’s making an old-fashioned favorite: stuffed peppers with tomato gravy! To go along with it, she’s making creamy mashed potatoes, cole slaw, and a peach cobbler for dessert. Yummy!
Arlene’s Stuffed Peppers with Tomato Gravy
Ingredients
- 2 Tbsp butter
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 1/2 lbs ground chuck
- 1 1/2 cups cooked white rice
- salt and pepper, to taste
- cayenne pepper, to taste
- Mrs. Dash seasoning
- 1 small can tomato sauce (8 oz)
- 6 medium to large red or green bell peppers, tops cut off, membranes and seeds removed
- 1 family sized can tomato soup
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- In a skillet over medium heat, combine butter, onion and garlic and cook until tender but not browned. Set aside.
- In a large mixing bowl, combine ground chuck, onion/garlic mixture, cooked rice, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, Mrs. Dash seasoning and tomato sauce. Mix thoroughly. Stuff meat mixture into each pepper carefully so as not to cause the peppers to burst. Continue until all the peppers are stuffed. Make any extra meat mixture into mini meatballs.
- In a Duct oven pot, place the tomato soup and 2 cans of water. Stir to dissolve and blend. Place peppers carefully into soup. Cover and place in preheated oven and bake for 1 hour. Reduce heat to 325and uncover pot. Continue baking until tops are browned and peppers are tender, about 30 additional minutes or longer. Makes 6 servings. Enjoy!
- Note: I personally will allow these to bake as long as 2-3 hours at 325 degrees because I like the flavor and texture when they're baked that long.. it's up to you.. you can't ruin them.
Arlene’s Creamy Lump Free Mashed Potatoes
Ingredients
- 6 large potatoes
- salt and pepper
- 1/4 cup butter
- 1/2 cup warm milk
Instructions
- Peel and cut potatoes into 1 inch cubes and wash thoroughly under cold water. Place in a large pot and cover with cold water. Cover with lid and place pot on stove over medium high heat. Cook until fork goes into potato and comes out without any difficulty at all.
- Drain potatoes thoroughly. Place butter into potatoes and using a mixer, begin to mash potatoes with blades (do not turn mixer on yet). Continue to mash using an up and down motion and then turn mixer on and continue to mash potatoes. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- After all lumps have been mashed out, add milk and turn speed up on mixer and whip potatoes until light and fluffy. Additional milk, salt and pepper may be added if desired. Makes 6 servings. Enjoy!
- Note: A great way to keep potatoes hot after they've been whipped is to wrap pot in a big thick bath towel. Keep on back of stove, wrapped and they'll keep hot quite awhile.
Creamy Cole Slaw
Ingredients
- 1 medium head new cabbage
- 1 carrot, grated
- 2 tsp sugar
- salt and pepper
- mayonnaise to taste
- raisins to garnish
Instructions
- Grate the cabbage and place in a large mixing bowl. Add grated carrot and mix to blend. Sprinkle sugar over vegetables, add salt and pepper and mix to blend.
- Add 1/2 cup mayonnaise to start and mix well. If it seems dry, continue to add mayonnaise until it's creamy and moist. Garnish with raisins. Makes 6 servings. Enjoy!
Easiest Peach Cobbler
Ingredients
- 1 cup self rising flour
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup milk
- 1 cup butter
- 1 qt fresh or canned peaches, do NOT drain
- 1 cup sugar (additional)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- In a saucepan, combine peaches and juice with 1 cup sugar. Place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Keep hot.
- Place butter into 9×13 inch baking dish and place in oven to melt, but do not let it brown. In a bowl, mix together self rising flour, sugar and milk. Pour this mixture into baking dish and spoon hot peach mixture over batter.
- Bake for approximately 30 minutes in preheated oven. Serve hot of cold. Great when accompanied by vanilla ice cream. Makes 12-16 servings. Enjoy!
Transcript
- Well, hello and welcome to At Home Today. We’re so glad that you could join us. Is always so nice when the family drops by. I wanna talk about family today because you ask me so many times about, “you know, that little boy that sits at the table?” You mean my great nephew, Josh. Well, I want you to see how Josh has grown in 11 years on the screen is Josh. As you see him at the table on the right, and here he is today on the left 13 years old, this is one of the nicest kids you’d ever wanna meet in all of your life. He is just the sweetest guy. He was the center of attention in our family for six years. And then along came the rest of the family kids anyway. This is Josh. I have to show you cause I’m proud of these kids. This is Josh and this is his brother, Jake. Okay, then here’s Corey. This is Corey. And this is his little sister Haley down here. These kids all belong to my nephews and niece on, my first brother’s family. And then this is Reno and Reno and his sister Rihanna. These are all precious kids in the Pittsburgh area where we happen to live now their little cousin, I’m gonna set this down. Here’s their little cousin and her name is Hannah. And she lives in Delaware and she has a cousin that lives in Delaware, too. His name’s Adam. And he is so new. We don’t even have a picture. He’s just a new, tiny baby, but these are my brother’s children. Now we go to Paul side of the family. This is miss Megan. And she lives in Illinois. She’s a sweet as she can be just going to be two. And that’s her little brother, Joshua. We have two Joshua’s great nephews. Can you imagine how confusing this is? But we love these kids. You know what? The Bible says that you’re blessed when you’re quiver’s full. And I tell you, these kids could not be more precious to us. If they were our own grandchildren, we just love them. And so for you that ask and wanted to know this is Josh. Now, 11 years later, I hope that you’re gonna stay with us because today we’re making an old-fashioned dinner, stuffed peppers, mashed potatoes, and a wonderful dessert. And we’ll be right back to get started in just a moment. Stay with us. Here’s today’s At-home hint. Here’s today’s at-home hint, freeze, dollops or pipe rosettes of whipped cream on a wax paper lined baking sheet when frozen pop them into a plastic bag and freeze until needed to top desserts. If you’ve got a helpful hint, we’d like to hear from you, send your hint to At Home hints, Cornerstone television wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. All right, we’re gonna start with our stuffed peppers first, what you wanna be sure to do. And peppers are plenty full this time of the year. And they’re great to buy, go to the farm markets and get little baskets of them. And they’re multipurpose. You can cut them up, clean them and freeze them if you want to. But this is the time of the year. I like to make stuffed peppers best. And you want to look for good farm ones, not any that have any marks or bruises on them or anything like that. And the way I cut them is I cut a circle right around the top, just like this, the whole way around. And then this should pull right out, which it does. There are most of all your seeds. Now see this part right here. This is very good. Just to cut that off, you can throw that in an omelet when you’re frying up some eggs with some onion or whatever, don’t discard that there’s a lot of good on that part. All right, now you wanna go into the pepper, pull out any of the membrane. Remember if you work with hot peppers, you always want to use gloves because the membrane is where all the heat is. People think it’s in the seed. Actually it’s in this membrane that runs down the inside of the pepper. So you want to be sure to clean that out. It doesn’t taste very good and then give it a gentle tap. And all the little loose seeds will come out and you have a nice clean pepper. All right, into the filling. We have a pound and a half of really good ground chuck. I like to use ground Chuck and I have some cooked rice about a cup and a half of cooked rice. This would be enough for about six peppers. If you want to stuff them like really full, you might go with two pound, but this’ll be enough. All right, now I have done a one medium onion and I have already browned in a little butter. You say, why do you, cook it? Why don’t you just do it raw? Because when you add heat to an onion, it brings the flavor out. And I like the extra flavor, that browning it gives. And it just, it changes the flavor of your peppers also because it adds another dimension of flavor. All right, now we’re gonna add some garlic. This is what, you know, honest anymore. You put garlic in everything because it just is good for us. And it just, it adds such good flavor to whatever we’re making. Now we have our Mrs dash, which we just, as according to your desire, if you like a lot of spice, add more. If you don’t, don’t, now we’re gonna do some seeds there. We’re gonna put some cayenne because Paul and I have gotten away from the black pepper and we’ve been using cayenne more because we found that it’s healthy and it’s good for us. So you don’t use as much as maybe you would, the black pepper. Remember this has some heat in, it will leave a Tang to the food. It loses some of its strengths during cooking, but some of it will linger. So just be cautious with this. All right. And we want to do some salt. Again if you’re on a salt restricted diet, keep that in mind. You can always add more at the table. You don’t wanna overdo it when you’re cooking, but you have to have some in there because it wouldn’t taste really good if you didn’t all right? Now for the sauce, I already had some water in my Dutch oven getting hot on the stove. And what I’m gonna do is put about three cans for this many peppers, about three cans of tomato soup. Some people like to use tomato sauce. I think I like the sweetness of the soup more than the sauce, because that’s just what my mother always made. When mom made stuffed cabbage or stuffed pepper, she always used just the plain soup. And I think that that’s why I do it. And I’ve got used to that flavor. And you just want to stir to make sure that dissolves just like that. And if you like a kind of watery broth to yours, don’t put three cans, just put two. I like it more to be like a gravy, and this will thicken somewhat as it bakes in the oven, but oh, these peppers are so good. And to me, the longer you bake them, the better it is just has such a wonderful taste in the end. I’ll tell you on a, on a night when you wanna just make some mashed potatoes and put all that together. And it’s a wonderful dinner. I like coleslaw with this meal too, because I think that you need another vegetable besides the pepper. I just think that it needs to add something to it. And coleslaw’s a nice mix, but we certainly have had these different times when we didn’t have the coleslaw. All right, now we’re gonna mix up our filling just like this. And you know, you can get your hands in there if you have to, which I probably will. Okay. And you, and you just want to blend this really well, make sure everything’s in there. I’m gonna add a little bit of tomato sauce to this. Sometimes the rice will thicken it up to makes it too hard and you don’t want it like a big, hard meatball that they’re filling. So you want it to soften it, and you’ll soften it with the tomato sauce. And that also adds the flavor because the tomato is the sauce that we’re, the soup is the same flavor as the tomato sauce so. I’m just gonna go ahead and add it all, and it will be wonderful. Okay. Now we’re gonna start stuffing our peppers. And as we do, you don’t wanna push it in there until they’re bulging because you know what will happen? They’ll burst while they’re cooking. ‘Cause they have to have room to be able to expand. And then we just place them in our Dutch oven or a deep pot just like that. Okay. This is enough for about six, five or six. These are pretty big. Actually I like about six medium-sized peppers because that’s a pretty big pepper for a kid to have for supper. But you could also cut these in half. You can also at this time of the year, when these are so plentiful, why not make them to this point and then put them in a Ziploc bag and put them in your freezer. It’s wonderful to pull these out. If you only need four, you’re just gonna have, four people for dinner and you want some of these big peppers, pull out four, put some tomato soup on them, pop them in the oven. It’s a real quick dinner and you’ll really enjoy them. All right. So almost have our pepper stuffed just like that. Okay. Almost there. You know what? While I’m stuffing these, we’re gonna take break, and we’re gonna come right back with more of today’s program with a peach cobbler and some good mashed potatoes. We’ll be right back. All right. We’ve put the peppers, the stuffed peppers into a 350 degree oven. You know what? The thing about this, you can leave them cook for two or three hours when they start to get brown, put the lid on them and they’ll cook through it for you. Okay? Come on we’re gonna do our peach cobbler now. And you’re really gonna find this fascinating ’cause this is so simple and so easy. You have a 13 by nine baking dish. We put one stick of butter into that dish and we put it in the oven for it to melt. You want it to brown, so don’t leave it and forget about it, but it’s melted. Okay? Now in the bowl we have one cup of self-rising flour. That’s different than all purpose. The all-purpose you use it to bake bread or whatever. This has leavening agents in it already. That’s one cup, one cup of sugar. That. And one cup. This is so simple. One cup of milk, just like that. Now we’re gonna mix this together, and this is going to form, the batter for our peach cobbler. Simple and easy three little ingredients well four counting the butter. But what I have on the stove is a chord of peaches. And we’ve put that on earlier. These are sliced peaches. Get to them in just a minute. I wanna put this in a dish, so you’ll see what I’m gonna do here. Just like this. Doesn’t have to be totally smooth. All right, we’re gonna pour this into our baking dish. Like, so make sure we clean it all out, get it all out of there, we need every little bit of that batter, because we’re gonna put a chord of peaches in with this cobbler. We just wanna mix up a little bit and, spread it around, make sure it gets to the corners, just like that. All right. Now leave that for a minute. Come with me to the stove where we have had our peaches and you don’t drain them, but you need one chord. So you say, well, how do I know if it’s a chord? You know that a chord has 32 ounces check the cans. You might need a big can, a small can, three small cans, whatever don’t drain them though. That’s important. And these have just come up, you’ve added a cup of sugar to this. It’s cooked and they’ve come up to a simmer. And that means it’s just bubbled a little bit around the edge. Now what we’re doing with that, we’re just gonna take a spoon and spoon the peaches on top of our batter, just like this. Juice and all, because the juice is gonna help to flavor the batter. And if you have fresh canned peaches, whoa, are you in for a treat. Just put it all there. I questioned about, wow, that looks like a lot of juice. They said, “Don’t drain the more juice the better.” So we have the juice from the peaches plus, when you put that cup of sugar in there, that’s gonna come into a juice also. So there we have it. This is gonna bake in a preheated oven, a 400 degree oven, and this is gonna be awesome. And you’re going to love it. Okay? Let me get this. Put it in the oven. Remember always preheat the oven. It’s so important. It’s just necessary to do that because you don’t wanna start this out cold. You start it out cold you’ll have a problem. Beautiful. Look at that. Cobbler yummy. Yes. All right. The next dish that we want to prepare, and this might seem like a simple thing to do, but a lot of people don’t know how to make really good mashed potatoes. We have some crew members here at the station that we could go into a situation that we’ve had with him, but he forbids us to talk about it because it was such a horrendous idea. He made mashed potatoes one time, but we won’t go there. All right, I have done my potatoes. I like the little red ones or the white ones. And they have to be fork tender. By that I mean, when you plunge a fork in there, they break apart. That’s how tender they need to be. That sometimes takes 20, 25 minutes. You just have to keep checking because each potato cooks differently. And you want to make sure all of the juices off them, all the water. And we’re gonna, for the sake of time, we’re just gonna put them into our big, wonderful mixer. A little dropping there. And the first thing you want to do is remember, you have to season them. This is the time to add the salt. Remember be generous with salt because potatoes absorb salt. So we’re gonna put salt on the potatoes. And then if you want to add pepper, this is the time I believe I will add some black pepper. Don’t have to, but we like pepper in our house. And this is the time to add the batter. And again, it’s according to you. If you want a lot of butter, I think we’ll do another little piece here because this is quite a few potatoes. Now we have a staff here, we have to feed after every program. So, and they get rowdy if they don’t get fed. So we try to keep them happy. Right, Mike?
- [Mike] Absolutely.
- Okay. Thank you very much. Okay so now before you whip potatoes, you have to mash them. And the mashing, now these might fly so. Everybody out there just wear a helmet or something. We’re just going to make, stop and go motions with this mixer until they start to mash. You cannot add your milk now. Now I’ve seen people do that. I personally was taught. You have to mash them when you add the milk, you whip them. So we’re mashing now. And at this point is when you’re gonna get all the lumps out of the potatoes. We did these a long time ago on a show one time, and I’ve had more people stop me at the mall and say, “You know, Arlene, I learned how to make good mashed potatoes without lumps for the first time in my life from you.” That makes me feel good. ‘Cause mama taught me well. All right so now when you see that, depending on the kind of potato, sometimes these will start to whip up because, the lumps will come out very easily. So you increase, but you always wanna keep scraping down the sides of the bowl to make sure all the lumps are out of them. Now let’s talk milk. The best way to keep your potatoes from getting cold is to warm the milk or the cream, whatever you want to use in them. And I tell you what, sometimes I’ve been in a pinch and I’ve not had cream. And all I had was a little chunk of cream cheese. And I put that in there. And that takes for the milk. It works wonderful. And the taste is so unique. Or if I have like breaded pork chops and I don’t have a gravy to put on a mashed potato, make them special, add garlic to them, add parsley to them, add like bacon bits to them. Then you don’t miss not having the gravy because they’re like a gourmet potato. All right. Let’s take a look at this. I think you’ll see what I’m saying. A lot of the, big pieces of potato, I don’t wanna pick that up because I want to go all over the place. Here we go. You can see they’re getting creamy. You wanna take this off of the beater, clean it off because now we’re gonna add the warmed milk. Because we have, you can see, I can pack them. You see how smooth they are. All right, now’s the time to do the warmed milk. Can I have that here in my pan? And you wanna add just a little bit to start. Remember the liquid that you add is gonna make them softer and softer and starts slowly because this you’re gonna, see how they’ll form into the greatest mashed potatoes. See how they’re already becoming more and more smoother? more and more liquidy? Because now we’re whipping them. Gonna add a little bit more. I’m gonna turn there we go. See how smooth and creamy they’re getting now. That’s what you’re looking for folks. This is creamy, mashed potatoes. Just keep adding a little bit at a time, even though they’re splashing everywhere. It’s okay not to worry. This is a great meal. Mashed potatoes, stuffed green peppers with a tomatoy, gravy which you’ve cooked them in. Coleslaw, and peach cobbler. What more could you want? It’s a great, great dinner and easy to do. You can put your peppers on early in the day and just let them go. You don’t have to put them on now. This is a versatile dinner. You could put them in a crock pot and cook them for a long period of time. The high heat on a Crock pot is around 300 to 325. The lower heat is 275 to 300. Think about that. Extend your cooking period longer because you’re doing them in the Crock pot at a lower temperature. They’ll work wonderful. Be sure that you, if you get a, a whole big box of green peppers at the farmer’s market, think of different ways that you can use them, chop some up for maybe a recipe where you need a little chop, green pepper. And and then stuff some put them in the freezer, and when you find out that the pepper is like along about January or February of the year, or a couple of dollars a pound, it’s nice to go to the freezer and pull them out. So I think we’re just about there. I’m gonna add a little bit more, again, this has to do with the type of potato that you’re using. So when we come back from our break, we’re gonna be at the table and we’re going to show you everything we prepared today, just for your dinner idea. All right, we’ll be back in just a minute. Stay with us. Be sure to write in for the recipes that you’ve seen demonstrated today. And we’re gonna even add a few extras that we didn’t have time like our Coleslaw we’ll include in the recipes for the month. Now I want you to see this beautiful table full of delicious food. And I hope you’re gonna try these because you saw they weren’t hard at all. Right here is our beautiful stuffed peppers with, I mean, they’re done to perfection. If that’s too large, a portion, cut them in half, make them open face, lay them flat in the plate and just pour your soup on top. They’ll bake fine that way. And we’ve made a thick gravy, which it produces off of those wonderful peppers are mashed potatoes creamy oh boy. Everybody’s like, can’t wait to get into those. We’ve also added some Coleslaw, and this is the recipe I told you that we will certainly be including in this month for you. And then our peach cobbler. We’ve just put a little powdered sugar on that, that bakes at 400. And trust me with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, that would be unbelievable. I hope you’re gonna try them. This is a very simple meal, but very delicious, nutritious and something that I think you’re gonna include in your recipes more often than you thought, because some people are intimidated by what do I put in the filling for those peppers? Oh, is that like how you make stuffed cabbage? There’s no struggle. It’s very simple, very easy just a few ingredients, but the key to good peppers is allowing them to bake long and slow. Start them with the lid on. And then as they get closer to being done, take the lid off, so they get that roasted flavor. You don’t want a boiled flavor. You want a roasted flavor. I hope that you’ll try these. I know that we’re looking forward to tasting them and I wish you were here with us, so that you could enjoy with the crew and myself. It’s always such a happy time when you’d come by. 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 again.
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