Arlene Makes Vintage 90s Low-Fat Brownies and Beef Stir-Fry

Well, hello and welcome to “At Home” today. We hope you’re having a great day. We hope that you’re not snowbound or that you’re not, you don’t have the flu. Let’s hope you don’t have the flu. None of us, we don’t want the flu this year. And we hope that whatever’s happening in your life is what you would like it to be. And if it’s not, take courage because tomorrow’s another day and things do change. They do change. I know that if you’re like me, like right about now you start to get the winter doldrums and you just think, “Oh, if I could just, if the sun would just shine and it would be warm for a day, it would make me feel so good.” You know, they did a study one time on people who work indoors all day and when they come to work in the morning, it’s dark and when they go home it’s dark, and they hardly ever see any sunlight. They found out that many of those people are depressed for a good portion of their lives because you have to have the brightness of the sunshine. There’s just something about the sun that warms you up and warms up your heart and your feelings, your emotions, and everything. And when you don’t get to have that for long periods of time, like in the middle of the winter, you start just feeling a little drowsy and a little depressed, and you just don’t have that edge that you do when the sunshine and it’s bright and it’s clear. Kind of like the way things are when the sun’s not shining in your personal life, in your emotions or in your heart, when it’s dark and you just feel like there’s no hope. You know, you just feel like I’m never gonna get out from underneath this situation. But you are. And you know, with help from God, it’s amazing. You can get out from under that situation much easier and much more quickly making the right decisions if you just ask the Lord to help you in making them. Okay? Well, today we’re gonna do another low-fat program because so much of the mail tells me that you’re enjoying this and we’re all losing weight together, right? Did you stick with that resolution that you made in January? I hope you have. I hope you’re working at it. It’s hard. I know it’s hard. But we’re gonna work at it together and we’re gonna win the battle. Besides the weight battle, we’re gonna win because we’re gonna be more healthy because we’ve cut these fats out of our diet. Christmas has passed. We all blew it at Christmas, probably, and all these other little parties and get togethers. Now it’s time to get down to serious business. And this is the best time of the year to start a diet. At least it is for me. Every time I start in January or February, I’ve gone the long haul. So now’s the time, determine it. Today we’re gonna do a low-fat stir fry and some low-fat brownies. So, see? You can have some goodies, even though you’re on a restricted diet. Stay with us. We’ll be right back after this important hint on “At Home.” Here’s today’s “At Home” hint. Replace half the mayonnaise in creamy dressings and dips with plain low-fat or non-fat 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 wanna hear from you. Send your hint to “At Home Hints” CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania. 15148-1499. Well, the first thing we’re gonna get started with today is our low-fat brownies. And stick with me now because what we’ve done is taken a 13 by nine pan, glass baking dish, and we sprayed it with Pam. Pam is a dieters or a low-fat person’s friend because it just takes a little bit of that and it goes a long way. So keep that in your cupboard and use that instead of the oils or whatever. In our bowl, we’re gonna put a cup. It’s one cup of egg beaters. Now, you know that that’s that egg substitute that you use that doesn’t have any fat at all in it. That’s great. So this is one cup. And let’s see. To that we’re gonna add some oil, which is canola oil, which is a half a cup. Half a cup. And we’re gonna whisk that together. Want to beat that and to incorporate it very, very well. I’m just going over my recipe and I see that we’re supposed to have a nine inch glass baking dish, not a 13 by nine. So we need to make that change. I’m gonna get my pan here in just a minute. Don’t use a 13 by nine because the brownies will be too thin. All right, so we’re whisking together the egg beaters, the oil. Now we’re gonna add some vanilla. Okay, there’s the vanilla. And what’s gonna make this moist is one banana that we’ve mashed. You have to mash up a banana. Okay. Mash up the banana. And it should be a pretty ripe one. Don’t try to mash up a banana that isn’t ripe because boy, I’ll tell you, it even tastes bad in whatever you’re preparing. It does not taste good. All right, now let’s stir that in. We have the vanilla and the banana, the egg beaters and the oil. Now we’re gonna add some other ingredients one at a time and we’re gonna just keep beating after each one. Okay. Now we’re gonna add some oat bran. This is about a third of a cup of oat bran. Mix that around real good. Okay. Here’s some sugar. A cup of sugar. Keep mixing it around. You really want to beat this well because that’s the key to having a good batter, is if it calls for you doing it, then you gotta do it. Here’s some cocoa. This is about a half a cup of cocoa. Here we are. Half a cup of cocoa. And about one cup of flour will go in here too. Now the loaf, these are low-fat and you can add some chocolate chips if you want to. You don’t have to. They’re an option. And walnuts are also an option. Remember nuts are very full of fat. You want to stay away from that. You only want to put them in and, if you do, use them sparingly, because it’s really, really important that we have a few nuts. Don’t put a lot in. Please don’t put a lot of walnuts in because I know that you think, well, just a few, you know, we can just put them in and it won’t hurt. Every little thing that you do to add more and more fat, definitely is going to add fat grams to whatever you’re eating or making. Then we’re gonna add about a cup of flour. One cup of flour. And again, you could probably use, I would say you could probably use a mixer for this, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Just keep whisking it. You might want to if when it gets thicker, might be important. That’s all right, Sandy’s down here getting me the right sized pan. How about that metal pan, Sandy? How about the nine inch square pan? That will be good. You can’t believe what’s going on behind this very set sometimes. You can hear the pans are going. Yeah. Oh, mysterious. There it is. Thank you so much. The elves are crawling everywhere here. That’s all right. Thanks a lot, Sandy. So you can probably catch her coming around the edge over there. I’ll tell you what. This crew does to me and does for this program is beyond belief. You can get up off your knees, Sandy. Now, that’s it. Let’s give her a little round of applause. We appreciate you, Sandy. Now that’s what I call going beyond the call of duty. This girl on her hands and knees. I don’t know why she crawled. She could walk right in. It would have been all right. But we just had the wrong size pan and she was helping me out to make sure we had the right pan to make our brownies. All right. Enough of that frivolity and carrying on here. The batter is just about, you could see if I pour this into that big pan, it would come out like a pancake instead of a brownie. So we don’t wanna do that. Okay. Now we’re gonna spray it with Pam. Start all over again. And just spray. Get the corners so that it won’t be so hard coming out when we take the brownies out of the pan. And I’m gonna pour the batter in. There we go. That’s a little more like it. And I think the oat bran in there, that’s gonna give it a flavor. And this is gonna go into a preheated 350 degree oven for… Let me see what my recipe says. I don’t wanna tell you something wrong. For about 25 minutes. There we go. Now we got it. That looks a little more like it. All right. And just for a treat, we are gonna add a few chocolate chips. I’m just gonna add them on the top, just as a special treat for Sandy because she went beyond the call of duty. And we’re gonna add this to the oven for 25 minutes. Be sure you set your timers, please. Don’t say “Oh, I’ll remember.” You walk away from it, you’re gonna forget. I mean, I know seasoned cooks and they’ll all say “Set those timers.” It’s really important. All right, now we’re gonna move along to our stir fry. And this stir fry, this is a great stir fry because how many times have you had leftover maybe a little roast beef or a roast from Sunday dinner? Not enough to really, for there to be a portion for everybody to have a portion of meat, but still more than just nibbling on it. And that’s what this particular stir fry does. We use up the leftover roast beef that we had from the Sunday dinner. First of all, while my wok is getting a little warm, we have a couple teaspoons of oil in the bottom, and this is peanut oil that we’ve used. Remember, you have to season a wok. If you’re just using it for the first time, you want to heat it up, pour some oil in it, and then just twist it, turn it around like this to coat it on every area. Thanks to Bob in the audio department, he was down here doing that for us earlier. He said it even when clear up to almost the very edge. I knew he’d do a thorough job. He’s like that, you know. Anyway, we’re gonna fire it up and warm it up. Don’t worry that it discolors because it does because it’s a metal. Anyway, what we’re gonna do is make our, a thickening for it first and we’re using low sodium beef broth. This is about a half a cup. Pour it into your bowl. Then we’re having a tablespoon of reduced sodium soy sauce. Okay? And now I’m gonna use some Dijon mustard. This is just a teaspoon. One teaspoon of Dijon mustard. That’ll give it a nice little bite. Okay. Little tang to it. And last but not least, we’re using some cornstarch. And corn starch is used as a thickening. Very good. We’re just gonna mix that around. So, I don’t want this baby to get fired up too far. And we’re gonna set this aside. This will be what we use to pour over to make it just thicken up a little bit. First of all, into the wok we’ve got our, it’s important to get your oil in there hot, but don’t let it get smoking. That’s why I turned it down. ‘Cause if it gets smoking, it burns everything as soon as you put it in. You don’t want that to happen. All right, we’re gonna first put, this is about six spears of broccoli that we’ve cut up into bite size pieces. Okay. Like I said, I turned her down. Probably should have turned her down just a little earlier, but that’s all right. And to that we’re gonna add some cauliflower. Same thing. Now you don’t cook these kinds of vegetables in a stir fry until they’re so soggy and so limp. You want them crisp. You want to be able to enjoy when you bite into them they should have some form to them and you’re biting it, it should snap back a little bit. And that’s really important to do that. And you need to do that. Okay? Now this needs to cook a little while because these vegetables you start out early because it takes them longer to cook than the others. Medium high heat, but don’t let it be smoking. Now we’re gonna add about a half a cup of onion. All right. There’s the onion. And a clove of garlic. And this is gonna really perk up the flavors too. Onion and garlic in a wok in oil is one of the most incredible smells you’re ever gonna find anywhere. Believe me, when I tell you. And this has to cook now for four or five minutes until it starts to get tender and you wanna adjust your heat. Could put the lid on if you wanted to. You want to keep stirring it because you don’t want the onion to get real brown. And I’m gonna adjust my heat up a little bit, ’cause I do want it to keep it an even consistent heat so that the vegetables all cook and you want to make sure they’re in a single layer. Don’t let them be all bunched up in the bottom. Push them up the side of the wok. Push them up the edges so that they, each piece is on the source of heat, which is on the bottom or the sides of the wok. All right. This has to cook four or five minutes. While it’s cooking, you take this break and we’ll be right back to finish our beef stir fry. Well, we’re back and as you can see, the vegetables are continuing to cook and you can tell by when you touch it with your utensil, that it still is firm. It’s not soggy. We don’t want it to be soggy because that just doesn’t taste good. And you can tell when you’re almost there, when the onion that you’ve placed in there just starts to get brown. And this hasn’t started that yet. You can see it’s nice and transparent. So we’re still gonna let them cook just a little bit, just a little bit more. I’m gonna add some sliced mushrooms too. Now mushrooms add moisture because you know, they’re mainly a fungus, which has a lot of moisture to it. So you wanna add those in. And what I would do is cook some rice to go with this. Rice is another thing that is a real help when you’re on a low-fat diet. I really, really enjoy rice. I used to like it was okay in things and that before I started watching. And now, if rice is on the menu, that’s what I’ll have. Or I’ll boil up some rice, flavor it with defatted chicken broth, add some onion to it, add some mushrooms to it, and just salt and pepper, just season it. Oh, we enjoy it so much. It’s easy to do. And what I would do is boil some plain rice to go along with this. All right, I think we’re ready to add some other goodies to the pan. Now we’re gonna stir our cornstarch mixture. Remember we made it at the beginning. Now I’m gonna pour this right into the wok. There it is. You notice that the frying stopped all of a sudden now. And this is gonna make it like thick. This is gonna bring everything together and make a thickening for the vegetables. So you’re gonna wanna make sure that the fire is even, nice and even heat. And along with that, we’re gonna add, this is leftover, about a half a pound of leftover roast beef already cooked. Remember, this is leftover from Sunday dinner or from a meal that you had. Just add the beef. And we’re gonna add just a little bit of peanuts. Just a few. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. But this is just for some crunch. Again, we got to watch the nuts. Be careful. It would be fine without them. You would not have to add that. And then I’ve learned to like this, too. These are the little red pepper flakes that are crushed. You know what? I really enjoy them. Never was one much for hot stuff, because we didn’t have it a lot at home when I was a kid. But boy, what I have found is a lot of times the foods taste a little bland. If you don’t have butter and you don’t have creams and all that stuff in there that you’re used to eating, you start feeling like, oh boy, this just doesn’t have much taste to it and I’m really missing out on it. So I’ve been perking things up with Tabasco. This little bottle here. Using this or a red pepper sauce, or these are crushed red pepper flakes. I’ll tell you, on egg beaters, you cook up egg beaters, put Tabasco in with it. I tell you what. I’m talking good. It’s tasty. It’s delicious. And basically all we do now is just let this continue to cook until it starts to thicken and you wanna keep turning it so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the wok. You can see it’s starting to thick up ’cause it’s getting glossy. See how it’s… You’ll start to get glossy. And that flavor, the beef broth and it’s reduced fat, reduced sodium, and also the soy sauce is reduced sodium. Good taste. We can grind some fresh pepper over the top of that. And if you need to keep this a little warm, you can reduce the heat on it. Again, I would push, you know, and make sure all the beef is warmed through. Push your vegetables to the side of the pan. Now I’m gonna give it a quick grind of pepper. I thought we were having a problem again, but we didn’t. And we’ll just pepper over the top. No salt in this. Now we cut the sodium back. Okay. Get it to a good roaring boil so that it thickens and then cut it back and reduce the heat. And I tell you, we’re just about there. I’m gonna turn this down a little bit. Let it cook through some more. While that’s still cooking, I wanna show you a couple of things that are secrets for me. This is one of my favorite things. Everybody’s sitting around eating all kinds of candy and chocolate. And part of being on a restricted diet, is you feel like you’re left out many times of things that everybody else is enjoying. So this is one of the things that I keep on hand. Green leaves, orange slices, anything that’s gummy like this. They have no fat. These are spiced gum drops. There’s no fat in them. You can also have jelly beans when it comes to that time of the year. Jelly beans don’t have any fat in them. These are great to have if you’re a nibbler, if you’re always looking for something to pick on. Now you can’t sit down and have a bag that’s a pound bag and just eat them all. But you can have a couple every once in a while. And that kind of whets… That supplies that a need for something sweet when everybody else is eating a big piece of a Hershey bar or something. The other thing that is always at our house is pretzels. And I don’t mean low-fat. I’m talking no-fat pretzels. There’s a couple of varieties. There’s one that we get here in Pittsburgh that is a great variety because you can have 15. They’re called nibblers?

[Woman Off Camera] Pretzel bites.

Pretzel bites. That’s what they’re called. They’re about this big. 15 of those bites, about that big around, has a hundred calories. Well, 15 is a lot. And then there’s a hard sourdough type pretzel. Now one of those has a hundred calories. So I like the lighter ones, the bites, the pretzel bites that you get 15. See, I kind of spend my fat grams the way I spend my money. I try and get the most I can for every dollar. And that’s really important to do that. And I think you’ll find out if you start reading those labels and really, you know, the first couple of times you go to the store, you think this is too much trouble. This is a lot of work to do this. You’re right. It is. But you’re worth it. You really, really are. So I think I’ve given you some ideas. When we come back, we’re gonna look at our low-fat brownies and our beef stir fry. We’ll be back right after this message.

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[Woman] Quiet in the studio!

Well, I want you to take a look at the low-fat brownies that just came hot out of the oven with a few chocolate chips on the top. Remember there’s oat bran in there, and they’re more, instead of that chewy pudding type brownie, they’re more of a cake, a dryer type, which I really like. And next to it is our leftover beef low-fat beef stir fry. We’ve added a bit of rice. You can see the glaze on there from the soy sauce and that wonderful thickening that we added to the vegetables to give it a hardy, pull it all together flavor. Delicious. Remember the little crushed red pepper flakes add some spark to it. And as always, we add a good salad. Now you’ve probably never done this, but I would like you, instead of just putting the tomatoes and the onions and in with the lettuce, try some grapes sometime. Try some Mandarin oranges. Add a little fruit into your salad instead of the cucumbers and the peppers and all the things that you normally do. Adds another flavor to it and adds just a little difference. When there’s so many vegetables in the stir fry, it’s nice to add some fruit to the salad. And again, all of the dressing that we put on that is the red wine vinegar and a couple of packets of Sweet’N Low. Sweeten it to what you really enjoy. I hope that you have sent for your, the latest copy of our “Enjoy” newsletter. This is something brand new that we’re doing, and we hope that it’s gonna catch on because it’s going to be easier for you to have all the recipes that you enjoy from “At Home”. So don’t forget to send today, if you haven’t already, send for your copy of “Enjoy” newsletter, the “Enjoy” issue number 205, and you’ll have a whole month’s supply of recipes. Everything for the month of February in that one copy of “Enjoy”. And I hope you do enjoy because we always enjoy when you’re here in the kitchen with us. And you’re part of our family. We miss you when you’re not here. When you write and tell me, “Oh, I’ve missed some of the programs”, I think, “Oh, I knew the whole family wasn’t all together.” But most of all, we’re glad when you do stop by and you spend that time with us. So 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.

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