This is one of the oldest At Home episodes we have in our archives! According to our records, this show was filmed on June 25, 1991, which was just a week after the first episode was filmed on June 18th.
From the very beginning, Arlene was all about making easy meals that everyone would love, and what’s not to love about a hearty dinner with oven baked meatloaf, fresh corn on the cob, ritzy scalloped potatoes (one of Arlene’s favorites), and dilled carrots? It’s a great “meat n’ potatoes” dinner that is fancy enough for company but easy enough for a busy weeknight meal.
Oven-baked meatloaf
- 2 lbs ground beef chuck
- 1 cup old fashioned oats
- 2 eggs beaten
- 3/4 cup milk
- 2 tsp worcestershire sauce
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
- 3 slices white Italian bread, torn or cut into small pieces
- 1/2 cup chopped sweet onion
- 1/2 chopped green bell pepper
- 2 tsp dijon mustard
- 1/3 cup ketchup
Grease a 13×9 baking dish and preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine all ingredients except ketchup in a large bowl, and mix thoroughly either with clean hands or a large wooden spoon. Mix until everything holds together and there are no loose breadcrumbs or oats in the bottom of the bowl.
Form the meatloaf mixture into two large loaves and place side-by-side in the greased baking dish. Spread ketchup evenly over the tops of both meatloaves. (It's easier if you use a squeeze-type bottle and just squeeze it right on!)
Bake meatloaves, uncovered, at 350 for 1 to 1 1/2 hours. If you like a darker crust, you can up the temperature to 375 toward the end. Bake until the center of each loaf reaches 165 degrees when tested with a meat thermometer, or until juices run clear when you insert knife in the center of each loaf.
Remove from the oven and allow meatloaves to rest 10 minutes before slicing and serving. Enjoy!
Ritzy Scalloped Potatoes
Classic scalloped potatoes are made even better with the addition of buttery cracker crumbs!
- 8 potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced
- 1/2 cup butter
- Ritz crackers, crushed
- Salt and pepper
- 2-3 cups warm milk
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a casserole dish generously.
P1ace one layer of potatoes on bottom of prepared dish. Cover the potatoes with crushed Ritz crackers, salt, pepper, and milk. Dot with butter.
Continue layering, ending with milk to cover and butter. Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour. Serve immediately. Makes 8 servings. Enjoy!
Corn on the Cob
To Boil
Fill a large pot with water and bring to a rolling boil. One-half teaspoon of sugar may be added to enhance the sweetness, but DO NOT ADD SALT; salt toughens the corn. Place the shucked ears in boiling water. Avoid over-crowding. Cover, and when boiling resumes, cook for 3-5 minutes. Drain immediately and serve.
Dilled Carrots
Dill, butter, and carrots are a classic combination!
- 1 lb baby carrots
- 1/4 cup butter
- 1 tsp dillweed
- Salt and pepper
In a saucepan over medium high heat, cook carrots in water until fork tender. Drain thoroughly.
Place butter, dillweed, salt and pepper into pan and mix well. Serve immediately. Makes 4 servings. Enjoy!
- Hello, so nice of you to join us here At Home today. You know, we trust that this program is the type of program you like to watch and that you feel right at home when you’re watching. Today we’re gonna do something a little different because we’re gonna give you a whole meal. We’re planning from a wonderful oven-baked meatloaf that is very moist and very good. Then we’re gonna make some ritzy scalloped potatoes along with some dilled carrots and fresh corn on the cob. Someone said to me, “You know Arlene, that’s a real down home meal.” And it really is. It’s something that is easy to make and we can assemble it very quickly, put it in the oven, let it back, bring it out, and enjoy it with your family. What I’ve started to do, I’ve got some carrots cooking on the stove now and I just want to encourage you to not just hack a carrot straight across. Let’s go a little diagonal cut because it’s all the same. You have to cut it, right? I mean you can’t just throw a whole carrot in a pot. I mean, they take too long to cook that way. So you have to cut them and after they’re cleaned, just cut them on the diagonal. They just look so much nicer. And Linda Wilson, our producer, she says that her daughter says they taster better when they’re cut on the diagonal. Well I don’t know about that and I don’t know what her theory is, but I tend to agree with her ’cause I think they taste great. So you tell Christy that I agree with her, Linda. Anyway, so we’re just gonna chop these up. We’re gonna add them to the pot where they’re already cooking and while we’re making the rest of our menu, we’re just going to include the carrots. We’ll take a little spoon here and stir them around. I don’t add anything to the water. I just cover them with water and let them cook. Not a real heavy, fast boil, but just kind of a light boil because, almost a simmer, because that does not boil all the good out of them. It kind of lets the good stay in some of the carrots. Okay, so while that’s cooking, we also have our corn on the cob here. It’s going and then we’re steaming that in this. Unusual pot, I think you’ll enjoy seeing this. This is a stainless teel, if you can see the pot, and look at this. Whatever you put in, isn’t this a wonderful big steamer? And you don’t have to be dragging the pot across the kitchen with all the water and everything because it brings it right up and right out. It’s a great, great addition to your kitchen. It steams vegetables, it steams corn, whatever. Okay, come with me. We’re gonna start to do our meatloaf and what I have done here is taken about two pound of good ground chuck. Ground chuck is good. I don’t like the ground round because ground round is a little bit too dry because they really take all the fat out of it. And you need a little, if it’s gonna roast in the oven, you have to have something to keep it moist. Now we’re gonna add things into this meatloaf mix to keep it moist. I know a lot of people use part veal, part pork, and then part beef. I like to go strictly with the beef. I like it lean, but it has to have a little bit of fat, not much, but the ground chuck is just about right. And to this ground chuck we’re gonna add one cup of good ole oatmeal. It used to be I could not make a meatloaf that anybody enjoyed. I mean, it tasted horrible. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know why it didn’t taste good, but I have been working over the last couple of years and this is the one that my family likes the most and to this ground chuck just add one cup of oatmeal and it’s not instant oatmeal, it’s the regular oatmeal. Okay, and then we’re gonna take two eggs. Let me get some eggs. Two beaten eggs. Okay. It’s always good to crack the eggs into a bowl before you ever put them into anything that you’re preparing. Perchance you’d get an egg that is not the freshest and you wouldn’t want that in what you’re making. So, we’ll just beat them up a little bit. Okay, ’til they’re frothy. That’s about right, okay. Get all the good out of there, okay. And then to that we’re going to add, and this is what I think really makes this meatloaf a moist meatloaf, we’re gonna add about three fourths cup of milk. Now this is just plain milk, okay? There we are, okay. We’re also going to add some Worcestershire sauce, let’s say about two teaspoons, that’s about it. Give or take a few. And I like good, fresh salt and pepper. Let’s see here, get the right consistency the way I like it. There’s something so fresh-smelling about when you grind the pepper yourself. And it really, really adds to the taste of everything when you have good, fresh ground pepper. Now we’re gonna add some salt, not too much because people can put that on the table. If they want more salt, that’s fine. If they want less, okay. Let’s see, what else do we need in here? We need some bread because I like the combination of the oatmeal and the bread. I don’t like just the oatmeal. I think that, that sometimes makes it too porous and with the bread I think that, that adds a nice touch to it. So, so far we have a couple of slices of bread. Okay. Let’s get some more. You can cube this, but you know, I just have always just been breaking it apart. It doesn’t have to be in fancy cubes. Once it gets incorporated with the meatloaf mix, you really don’t know if it’s cubed or torn apart or whatever. So it doesn’t really matter at that point. But some people use flavored bread cubes that you can buy like at Pepperidge Farm or whatever, they’ll make them. Whatever you feel like you like to use. Some people like a spicier taste. Again, as I repeat so many times, whatever you like to do at your home is fine. You can incorporate whatever you want to into this recipe. So, this is good, fresh bread. Let’s see, just need to break these apart. I use crust and all. Some people cut the crust off, but my mom used to say it gives you curly hair. Well, I don’t think it works, but the taste is good because that little bit darker, baked flavor adds to all the flavor. It’s interesting that when you get all this put together, it marinates a lot of flavors. Okay, so we have the bread in there. Now I need to get some onion and some pepper and I have those here. Already done. This is a sweet onion and this is about a third of a cup, something like that. Chopped up, we will add that. Larry, how we fixed for time, we doing all right? Doing good? Okay. And some wonderful chopped green pepper. Now some people don’t put green pepper in theirs. I happen to like green pepper, and I’ve made it both ways and inevitably when I don’t have the green pepper and I’ve wanted to make that, I say, oh, there’s just something missing out of this meatloaf. So, I really like that. Now the next thing I do is I take Dijon mustard. Let me get a clean spoon over here. Dijon mustard is made, I believe, in France and it adds a tang to it. And I’ve never cared too much for mustard, but this does, and that’s about how much you need. That’s probably about a teaspoon 1/2. Maybe a little bit. According to what you like really. I mean, just help yourself, whatever you decide. Okay, let’s see, we have everything in here now and nice color. Now we’re just gonna mix this up and you say, oh boy, should I do that with a spoon? No, of course not. We’re gonna do this with our hands. This is At Home and when you’re at home and it’s your kitchen, you do it however you want to, but it really makes a wonderful meatloaf mix that once you get a good basic meatloaf, it’s amazing. People will start asking you, could you make that meatloaf again? I had a neighbor that lived next door and she was a precious lady. It was my pleasure to be able to lead her to the Lord before she passed away, and this lady used to make the most unusual meatloaf, but people would come to her house they’d say, “When are you gonna make one of those meatloafs?” She made all the other kind of things too, but the thing they asked for most was meatloafs and she used to roll it in breadcrumb before she put it in the pan which is really unusual I think, I’ve never seen that, but what it did when it baked in the oven, it would put a crust over the whole meatloaf and she would have one or two of those in her freezer and when her family would come in from Indiana or wherever, sure enough, Mrs. Plum would have that meatloaf and it got to be something that everybody looked for. Now you have to really incorporate this. You wanna really mix it up well. Really, really well. Okay. You see all those different colors in there. It’s getting just about the right consistency. When you can put your hand in there and it holds together, you know that you’re just about there. If you see ingredients still lying in the bottom of the pan, you keep mixing because it’s not ready yet. You have to have everything together. And keep turning your bowl, just mixing it around, mixing around. Pretty soon you’ll get there, okay? I think we’re just about there. I think it’s just about there. This looks like a lot of meat and I think I might have a little bit more than two pound here, so what I would do in that case, I would probably make two smaller meatloafs rather than the one large one and the reason is they’ll cook faster. If you have one large meatloaf, it takes forever. Then you have to spend all day in the kitchen, putzing around saying, “Oh boy, when’s it gonna get done, “when’s it gonna get done?” So you don’t wanna take that time. So I’d make two smaller ones. I’ve just sprayed the bottom with PAM because that puts a nice crust on the bottom of the meatloaf, okay. Let’s see, now. Make sure we everything in it. Okay, so I would take half of this meatloaf mixture, okay. Get it up in your hands. You can kind of tell. Now this is the fun part because if you’ve had a bad day, this is the time for frustration. This is a time that you can really work it out, okay? Everything’s in there and you just kind of, you say what are you doing that for, Arlene? Because you have air bubbles in there and see when you’ve added all of that you’ve been adding air to it. So what happens if you don’t smack it around a little bit, the meatloaf that is now. If you don’t do that, when it bakes, it will all crumble and break apart and you don’t want that. That’s not the mark of a good meatloaf. So, you keep doing that until it starts to shape it’s own loaf. It looks pretty good, huh? I think so too. Okay, so there’s one. Okay, this is a little large one and we need to make it a little rounder here because she’s not gonna fit in the pan. I think she will now, okay. And we take the rest of the meat. We’re gonna make another one. Now, you can, if you really want to make a gravy like other things that you could make with this would be a baked potato if you didn’t want to make gravy ’cause some people don’t know how to make gravy. You can make twice baked potatoes, you could have potato salad. Now my husband likes meatloaf when it’s cold better than when it’s hot. So we always have to make enough so that he has some for the next day for his lunch or for a little snack of some kind. So I have the two meatloafs. Okay, side by side in a pan that you have sprayed with PAM. Remember that’s important because if you wanna get these out without them adhering to the bottom of the pan, it’s important to spray something on the bottom. Okay, next what we would do, we’ll take the ketchup. You notice I didn’t add any tomato to the base. I didn’t add any tomato to the meat mixture itself because sometimes I don’t like that flavor all through it. I like it on top because it bakes so nice when you have it on top ’cause it almost comes out like a barbecued flavor ’cause it picks up that baked flavor. Okay, so here we are. Just back and forth. Some people pour tomato sauce on the top. Tomato ketchup is fine. Okay, what we’ll do is we’re gonna put these in the oven. I start them at about 350. Sometimes a little hotter, maybe 375. I don’t cover them, but I let them bake for a good hour, hour 1/2. You can tell when it starts to get that real brown look to it and when you put a fork in it, if it does not run clear liquid, you know that you need to let it go some more for it to be well done. If you like it a little bit on the rare side, you can do that too. Personally we like ours very well done. Let me check and see what these carrots are doing over here. They look like they’re coming along fine. See, they keep their nice, crisp color. I think maybe I’ll just lower the gas on that a little bit. Okay now, accompaniment with this is very good because scallop potatoes are something that people for a long time think, oh, that’s so hard to make. I don’t know if I could ever do that. Well, I believe that you can and you can do it quickly and if we can prepare all of this in a short amount of time, then I know you can at home too and I wanna show you that we have some very quick tips for you, quick ways of making scallop potatoes. My mother used to make it and when she would make them, she would always make a white sauce because she felt that, that was really important. Is that eleven minutes, Larry? Okay, thanks. It was important, she’d think, to have that thickening in there so that the scallop potatoes would not be watery. However times have changed and there’s quicker ways than making the flour and the butter and all of that stuff. Again we start with PAM and you know I like this PAM because this is the light, healthy way to go. It doesn’t have the calories. This is something new on the market that really, really works well. Just a light spray with it in the bottom of your casserole and you need kind of a nice size casserole. This is a wonderful dish with a nice lid to it. I think the containers that you’re putting the foods in are so important. If you just put it in any old thing, just some dish that’s cracked. Number one, it’s not healthy to use cracked dishes. Bacteria forms in the cracks. If you go through your plates and you find dishes that have been cracked, they look old, they look terrible, discard them, you don’t need them. Buy something new, there’s a great line of cookware, great line of baking dishes, casseroles. They can handle a lot of abuse in and out of dishwashers, kids banging them around, whatever. There’s a good line that you can purchase now. So, I would suggest to discard any broken or cracked plates, okay? Now to start with our scallop potatoes. We’re going to layer, these are just plain. I like to use the red potato because the red potato is a more tender potato to me. When I make potato salad or anything like that, I always use the red potato and we have just sliced them, peeled them and sliced them. Keep them in cold water if you’re not going to assemble this immediately because they need to be nice and crisp and basically what we’re doing is putting just one layer on the bottom of our baking dish, a single layer, okay? Now over that we are going to use something that is a little unusual. Everybody likes Ritz Crackers, right? Well I saw this done at a camp one time when I was a kid and I thought this is the most unusual, wonderful thing. You can take a package of Ritz Crackers and you crush them all up. You take a Ritz Cracker meal, okay? And not so pulverized it looks like meal, but just crumbled up pretty good, okay? ANd we’re just gonna sprinkle some of that on top of those potatoes, okay? Then we’re gonna dot some butter. Not a lot, just a little piece here, a little piece there. You don’t want too much. Okay. You have to have butter to go with the potato. Just seems like it’s the normal thing. Then we’re gonna add salt, not a lot. ‘Cause the crackers have salt, now remember. And then, of course, the fresh ground pepper which is wonderful. Okay. Then we’re gonna start a layer again. And we’ll layer another layer of potatoes. You say, “Arlene, I don’t have time to do that.” It just doesn’t take time, it’s just a matter of putting a few potatoes here, a few potatoes there and sprinkling it with some good ole Ritz Crackers. Okay. And again we dot it with a little bit of butter. I want to say today while we’re working here, we had some folks drop in to visit At Home with us from Florida. We appreciate them being here. The Sols are here, we’re glad to have you. Welcome to our home. Okay and again we go with a little bit of salt. A little bit of pepper. Okay. Now some people put onion, if you like to do that. You just layer your onion in with the potatoes. Some people put cheese. I tend to stay away from cheese in a scallop potato ’cause I think that it’s nice not to have cheese in everything. Sometimes you get carried away and put cheese in everything. It’s, oh, this all tastes the same. And I have found that cheese will overpower almost any taste. Anything else will be overpowered by the cheese that you use. So you wanna keep that in mind when you’re making things like this. Okay, again, we’re gonna put some more of our Ritz Crackers. Now, depending on how thick you want that broth on the potatoes is how much of the cracker you would use. Okay, if you like it real thick you would use more. If you like a more milkier broth on the scallop potato, then that’s what you’d go with. Okay. And our last layer. Whoops, forgot my salt and pepper. Little bit of salt, whole lot of pepper. It tastes good. Carrots sound like they’re still cooking away over there. Okay, this is our last layer though. Okay. Just spread it around, wonderful. We will now add the last bit of our Ritz Cracker crumb. Okay, we will dot it with butter. Okay. I know a lot of the time that it takes in preparation is in assembling the ingredients, getting everything cut up, getting the potatoes cut and I understand that but do you realize that once you have it all done, it takes no time to put it together? It really doesn’t. Larry, why are you smiling at me over there? Okay, now we have warm milk. The important thing is if you pour cold milk on this, it’s gonna take that much longer to get started once you get it in the oven. So you warm the milk, take the chill off it. It can even be real, real warm. You could almost bring it to the point of scalding just so that it can get a good start once it gets into the oven and I’m just gonna pour milk all over this. Okay. Can our viewers see this picture, Larry? Can they see? Steve, can they see? I hope so.
- [Man] If they’ve got their TV on, they can see, Arlene.
- Okay. Great. All right, always good to hear the director have a part in the program, all right. Glad for your remarks up there, Steve. Okay so now what we’re gonna do, I believe I put some more pepper on this top of this. This goes into the oven for about an hour, an hour 15 minutes until when you put a fork in it, the fork will come out and it will be fork tender. Okay. I’m gonna put the lid on this. You could either bake them with the lid on or with the lid off. It depends on how brown you like them. I like them brown on the top, but you may not, so this will go into the oven. Right along with the meatloaf. I think we’ll just take the lid off this one since it doesn’t fit in the oven. Anyway, they both bake at the same temperature so you can put them in together. They’ll both come out about the same time. One of the other things that you can make with this would be a nice, creamy coleslaw. That would be something that would be very enjoyable. You could make, what we’re gonna serve today, which would be the corn on the cob, you can steam that. Sometimes if you’re running late, that can be done in the microwave. Keep the corn in the husks, take the silk out. You gotta take that silk out. Put a little bit of butter in there, wrap it in a paper towel. Put it in there for just a couple of minutes. It’s amazing how wonderful that tastes when you bring it out because it tastes like it’s really been steamed and it’s very quick to be done. Other people sometimes they would like a tossed salad or something like that with this or something with a vinegarette dressing. Any of these suggestions are wonderful and this could be very easily taken on a picnic because potatoes hold their heat for a very long time. So if you bake them right before you left the house and you kept them in the oven until you were leaving, once you got to your picnic, they would be fine. I don’t think that there’d be any problem with them keeping warm. This is something you don’t think of is something you take on a picnic, but it’s a very good picnic lunch. Okay, let’s take a look at the carrots and see where we are. I think these are wonderfully done. I need to find my strainer here because I’d sure like to drain them. Okay, I don’t have my strainer. Let me just go ahead and take the water off the carrots. Okay. You wanna drain them real well, okay. And what we add this to this now is after they are fork tender and they’re beautiful. Look how beautiful the color is with these. Then we’re gonna add our little chunk of butter. And I made these just last Sunday for my family and they loved them, okay. And then this is fresh dill. This is not the dill that you get in the supermarket. This is fresh dill and you cannot believe how wonderful it is. Sometimes you go into a produce market and you see the whole stock of dill that you can purchase. Buy that, put it in your electric, if you have an electric oven, it doesn’t work, but a gas oven with that little pilot, just lay a piece of wax paper on the wrack and after you have cleaned that dill, spread it out on that paper and let it go overnight and it will dry out and you will have, look at this wonderful dill. Isn’t it beautiful? And it’s fresh green and I use loads of dill when I do my carrots because that flavor you cannot, you cannot believe how good it is. And all you do is just mix it up. Look at that beautiful green in with those carrots and the taste is so fresh and so good. Just, something that you’re gonna really enjoy. I’ll tell you, if you would like to have the recipes that you’ve seen today, I wanna tell you how to do it. Just stand by and when we come back, you’re gonna see our whole meal that we’ve prepared just for you here At Home.
- [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-sized envelope to At Home CTV Wall, PA 15148-1499. You’ll receive Arlene’s heartwarming newsletter Enjoy featuring an entire month of At Home recipes including today’s mouth-watering dishes. Be sure to include the Enjoy issue number with your request.
- Please do send in for the recipes. We are so happy that we can make them available to you. And if there are some things you’d like to see us make or that has intrigued you for a long time and you wonder how do they make that? Now that we’re great cooks or I’m a culinary genius, but I sure like to try. So be sure to get your self-addressed, stamped envelope in the mail today. Well here we are at our table and I think this is a meal fit for a king. We have fresh, wonderfully steamed corn on the cob. We’ve got our baked meatloaf with our dilled carrots and you’ll be amazed at how sweet those carrots taste. Try, get that dill in there, you’ll love it. And, of course, these are the scallop potatoes that have a wonderful brown crust on the top and they’re delicious. I know you’re gonna enjoy them. This hasn’t been hard, it’s not difficult. It’s just doing some things that are special. So you be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same here At Home without you, bye-bye now.
- [Narrator] Fresh produce provided by Jordan Banana, wholesalers of fresh fruit and vegetables in Dravosburg, PA. Groceries from Scozio’s Shop N’ Save, the family stores that love serving you. Cookware provided by Wholeys, your favorite gourmet deserves the best for less At Wholey Balcony Cookware. Some of our guests stay Al Monzo’s Palace Inn, your home away from home in Monroeville, PA. Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
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