Episode AH2051. Hello. Thank you, it’s so nice. I’ve just been standing here waiting for you to get home, you know. We’re glad that you join us every time that we’re on the air with these programs. We trust that they’re a blessing to you. I’ve just been looking through my cookbook, I’m always looking for recipes. And I thought that it would be time maybe to make a Sunday dinner, something special, or maybe you want to have some company and I think one of the things that I go through every time I plan a meal for something special or for company, is will everybody like this? Is everybody gonna really enjoy this? What can I make that I know everybody will like? So, as I said, I’ve been looking through the cookbook. And I thought, roast beef is a sure winner, but it has to be good and tender. My dad is a stickler for tender meat. He tells me all the time, Arlene. If the meat is tender, the meal is delicious. If the accompanying dishes are wonderful and the meat is not good, the meal doesn’t taste good. Well, that doesn’t make me feel too good sometimes as a cook because I’ve slaved and labored over some of those side dishes, but anyway. One sure found way of getting a good roast beef is to cook it slow on a low temperature, and we’re gonna do that today. But let me tell you something about how you pick a good cut of meat. There are three different grades of beef. Number one, this is from my cookbook, it’s telling me, number one, there is the USDA prime which is top of the line, which is very, very expensive. And then that’s the very best grade and then there is the choice, which is kind of the middle class, which is a good cut, sometimes you have to cook them a little longer, but it’s still a very good cut. And then we have the select, which is the lower price, and you really have to cook it long. It seems that the higher grade of beef that you use, the shorter cooking time it takes because it is the prime. It is the top of the line, and it’s usually mostly marbled with fat which is not always the best in the culture that we’re living today where we’re all very concerned about not having too much fat in our diet. Today we’re going to be doing roast beef. Easy. What else can we call roast beef, easy right? And with that, we’re going to round out the menu with some wonderful fresh mashed potatoes. We’re gonna do old fashioned stewed tomatoes. How long has it been since you’ve had old fashioned stewed tomatoes like mama used to make or maybe grandma used to make? And then we’re gonna do creamed cucumbers. There’s not one bit of sour cream in these cucumbers, but they’re so flavorful and cucumbers are very very good for you. So this is a suggestion. Get your papers and pencils and if of course you can’t get it all, we have the recipes available. We’ll tell you about them in just a little bit, but you know Dale, Dale’s our floor director. Dale, I understand that you’ve just had an anniversary, maybe Denise could cook this up for you sometime. That’s a good hint. We’ll be right back to start the whole process in just a moment. Stay with us now. Here’s today’s “At Home Hint”. Look for firm, well-shaped cumbers with good, green color. Over mature ones are dull or yellow, and look overgrown and puffy. If you’ve got a helpful hint that you’d like to share, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to “At Home Hints” CTV Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well here we are and to get started, I wanted to show you what my roast beef looked like. This is a wonderful roast beef. It is a rolled rump roast. I would say about between three and four pounds. And what they do is take the prime meat, and they cord it off, they roll it into a roll. And then they wrap it with a string. And they, it keeps it secure so when you’re cooking, the meat isn’t all falling apart from, you know, in the pan, and it makes it very easy for you to slice it. So like I said, this is about a three or four pound roast. And you see that there is a little layer of fat here. Now, most people in the olden days would tell you, Arlene, now when you cook that let the fat layer be on top because that will keep the meat moist as it’s baking. I don’t do that anymore. I used to but I don’t do that anymore because I put the fat on the bottom because we don’t need all of that grease going through the meat. This is the best cut for long, slow cooking. This is a rolled rump roast from Scozio’s who provide the meats for us for our program. Well, what I’m gonna do with that first because with this, I want to have a wonderful gravy. Rich, real brown gravy. My dad usually calls it mahogany gravy. He likes dark brown gravy. But in order to do that, you’ve got it’s a process and what you have to do with this meat, first of all, we’re gonna get some flour, because I like to take the flour and cover it with a little flour. I add some, just a little bit of pepper. Okay, and maybe I’ll just go ahead and turn my pan on. I mix this together. And I just sprinkle it, rub it all over. Now, if you want to do garlic at the same time, this is good time to put the garlic all over the meat. You can either use garlic salt, I tend to stay away from that, or garlic powder, that’s fine, any of that is all right. I’m not big on garlic and roast beef for some reason or another, I mean you can do it. That might be something that your family really enjoys. Sometimes I’ve done I’ve just taken a clove of garlic and rubbed it over the surface of the meat, rather than mixing it in with the flour or another way, and it just gives it a hint of the taste of the garlic, ’cause it’s a pungent strong flavor. Sometimes I like just to have something without the garlic flavor for a change because we do use garlic in a lot of the dishes. Now cover it very very well. Okay, that’s about what you’re looking for. Now, the next step is we’re gonna put some oil into our skillet. And you want, remember, the key is you always have a hot pan, and you put the oil in a hot pan, then your food will never stick. You put it in a cold pan, for sure it’s gonna stick. And all we do, we’re gonna put that roast in there. And it has to sear. It’s called searing because this step ensures you of that wonderful brown gravy that you like. And basically, better turn the fire up there a little bit. Basically if you don’t sear in the juices, a lot of it will be lost in the long cooking period of time. And I like to add a little more pepper at this point, just as it’s getting started. Okay. Very little salt, in fact i don’t think I put salt in this at all. But just pepper. Okay, a good kind of olive oil, a good brand is very good to have. It helps out so much in keeping a good flavor. Now, the key is to have this oil very hot. Okay. And the browner that you get this meat at this point, the better your gravy will be, and the better flavor your meat will have because you have seared all the juices in. So far it’s very easy. You have a wonderful piece of meat. You don’t have to buy the best, buy the second best. If you can’t afford that, buy the third best, but it will all taste good because you have prepared it, and you can use the same procedure on any kind of a roast, basically. So we’ve got this goin’ pretty good here. Don’t rush it along, this might take a little longer than we anticipate but we’re not gonna rush it along because we want this, this little bit of flour that’s on this roast will have to be real, real brown and the browner it is, the better your gravy’s gonna be. So, you turn this and you cook it on all sides. Whoops, you might even feel like, oh you know that’s really gettin’ too brown there. I don’t think that that’s right, don’t worry about it, you can’t get it too brown. You just absolutely can’t do it. So we’re gonna continue to brown this on all sides. I think I need a little bigger spoon here, something more sturdy. Here we go, see how brown that is? That’s what you’re looking for. And this skillet is getting hotter and hotter but don’t worry about it. These nonstick, they’re fine. That’s what they’re made for, to withstand high heat. Unfortunately, they’re not made to withstand cooking broccoli with no water. I tried that, you know, we’re having dinner and I was steaming broccoli and forgot to add some more water. And pretty soon, the pan was on fire, and so you just have to keep the liquids in these, but you keep rolling this back and forth, making it good and brown. Can you see the drippings in the bottom of this pan? Maybe you can and maybe you can’t. This is what’s going to end up making your wonderful gravy, do you see that? That’s what will make the gravy. All these little drippings here. Now, when you have browned it well on all sides, you see that? That’s what it should look like. Take your casserole, or if you have done this in a Dutch oven, you can do it that way too. What I do here is, pick it up and put it right into your casserole. Just like that. Now you say what about all these little drippings? That’s right, what about all this? ‘Cause this is where the good is. Take some water from your tea kettle. Be careful because it will steam up. That’s all right. Don’t worry about, just keep adding more and more, okay? Now I would add enough here for scraping and scraping, make sure all those little bits get thoroughly loosened from the bottom of the pan. An iron skillet is wonderful for this too because the iron skillet, they’re finding out now that the iron actually comes into the foods and therefore into your system. What I do now is I pour this over top the roast. Okay, make sure it all gets out. Okay, that’s a little bit of the flour, that’ll be fine, don’t worry about it. No problem at all. Then I will take a few onions, and I put the onions just around the side of it. If there’s not enough water in there what you might want to do is keep checking it as it cooks because this needs to go into a 325 degree oven, and this needs to cook between three and three and a half hours. Okay? Put it in our oven, that’s been pre heated. It’s important for that to be pre heated. Okay, and basically, you forget about it. You absolutely forget about it. You might want to check it one time for water but other than that, you don’t have to check it for anything. It will be perfectly done, we’re gonna show you a little bit. Let’s go on, we have our potatoes, cooking wonderfully there. Nice new red potatoes and they’re just going to town. They’re doing their thing, they’re peeled, but we’re gonna talk about… Let me clean up, a little housekeeping here. How much time do we have Linda? Where are we with this? We okay, we have 12 minutes. Oh we have a lot of time. This isn’t hard is it? It’s very easy, good. I’m glad everybody’s gonna try this. Just give it a try one time, if it doesn’t work you don’t have to make it again. If your family doesn’t like the flavor, but give it a try. There’s nothing is too hard that you can’t give it a try at least once. Okay. I have to do a little housecleaning here ’cause I can’t stand this right where I want to work. Okay. Next we’re gonna do the tomatoes. Let me, whoops, get my fire on here. Now I buy crushed tomatoes in puree, normally, sometimes if you can’t get them in the puree, you can buy whole tomatoes and crush them yourself. Okay? And you put them in a pan, I can remember my mother making this when I was a little kid and I never cared that much for tomatoes. Now, I’ve heard a person who is Italian say this. So, this person said you know tomatoes were not made to be cut and put in a salad or to be sliced on a sandwich, they were made to be put in sauce or ketchup or something like that. You know, never eat a raw tomato, but I don’t feel that way. I used to. And my mother would make this when I was a kid and I’d think why in the world does everybody like that? And then I found out I liked it too. It tastes real good. Basically, you put your can, this is a very large can of tomatoes because I’m having company. But you can do with the regular can. Have a little bit of onion, that I’ve added here just so we can get it a head start. And basically that onion has to get soft. When it gets soft, what you want to do then is we’re gonna add a couple, let’s do this first, we’re gonna add our butter, little chunk of butter. Okay, this thing likes to perk up here and bubble all over the stove. We know what that’s like. It’s a mess. But that’s what tomatoes do. Put a little butter in there. And we’re going to add some sugar. Now this sugar is just a couple of tablespoons. That just takes a little bit of the tartness out of the tomato, and you need to let this cook, long enough so that the sugar melts. Okay, wanna add some pepper. Okay, lemon pepper would be real good in here too. I just like the regular pepper, the fresh ground pepper. Believe me, if you don’t have a fresh pepper mill, you need to get one. They don’t cost that much. And the difference of the taste of the pepper. You can’t believe it until you try it. So I would suggest you do that. Okay, it’s worth it, and the smell is so good. The fragrance is good. And there’s something about fresh that makes it taste better, taste more alive. Okay, when we get to that point, we’re gonna add a couple of pieces of dry bread. And this is, I like crust and all because I think that there’s nothing like that taste of the toasted crust. So we’re gonna add that in there too and I would say probably, well maybe two or three slices of bread here and you say what’s the bread for? I don’t know, that’s what the recipe calls for. That’s the way they always made it so that’s the way I make it. I don’t know why but I’ve heard whoops, a little bit big there. One of my friends said oh we used to make that too and I said, well, was it called stewed tomatoes? She said, no, my mother used to call this tomato butter when she would make this for us. I thought, tomato butter? But here she made it one time when my husband I went there for dinner. And it was so stiff, it was a little different than this because this is stewy. So there’s some liquid. Hers was very thick, ’cause she had added that much bread and that’s fine, if that’s what you like, but that’s why they called it tomato butter. Okay, so basically once you add some bread. Don’t forget too you can buy the stewed tomatoes in a can that have peppers and onions and celery. I, my family isn’t real thrilled that much with celery, so I tend to stay away from it, which is probably not real good because we should always be trying things. But, so I don’t put the celery in but you certainly could. And you could also, like I said, buy the cans that have that in there already. Okay, that’s basically pretty much it. Very easy to do. You can let these cook on a very low temperature, while you’re preparing the rest of your meal, which is what I wanted to do now. We’re gonna go over. We’re gonna do our cucumbers, which I have been letting soak here in this saltwater. Basically, this is a couple of cucumbers, that have been cleaned and pared very well. And wipe this off here. And this is a wonderful salad if you’re tired of the lettuce route, you just want something different. Get your cucumbers and slice them. Now, this can be done very far in advance because this will hold up like this if you slice them. Cover them with water. Add just a half a teaspoon of salt, put them in your refrigerator, they’ll hold all day. And then right before your dinner party, you can make the dressing for them. And what we’re gonna do now is drain the water off them. Okay. And a little bit of that moisture on there is not gonna hurt that at all so don’t worry about patting them dry or whatever, because that’ll be fine. Don’t worry about that. Next, I’m gonna take an onion and the onion and the cucumber together makes a very good taste, particularly in this salad because I like the crunchiness of the onion and the crunchiness of the cucumber, and we’re just going to slice. Make them in pieces. I always say I like to make them in pieces so if people are not, if they don’t care too much for the onion, they can pick it out or choose not to put it on the spoon. Sometimes if you get it real small it’s all over the dish and then people who don’t particularly care for it, they’re stuck and say oh that tastes like onion, that’s all I can taste in that. Probably true because that little bit of onion can go a long way. All right, next to this, we’re gonna make our dressing. We have our onions in there and the dressing is a very simple dressing. It’s called creamed cucumbers but like I said, there’s really no cream in ’em. Take our bowl, let me get some mayonnaise. Someone told me they thought I needed some little gadgets on my refrigerator over here so we were looking for some things. I said, oh, you know, Arlene, in everybody’s kitchen they have stuff hanging all over their refrigerator and I thought well I don’t. And then I went home and looked and I had so much stuff on that refrigerator, I thought, how could I think I didn’t have anything on the refrigerator? I had stuff all over too. So that’s part of being at home right? All right, we’re gonna take about a cup. I think it’s about a cup. Yeah, that’s about a cup. Linda, I’m so precise on these recipes, you have a wonderful time writing them down so our viewers can have them. And with this, we’re gonna add some vinegar. Okay. And that’s just a little bit of vinegar. Please don’t, that’s about two tablespoons I would say. Yeah, probably. And, to make it sour, and then we’re gonna make it sweet. Now if you don’t want to use sugar, you can use Sweet’N Low. Couple of packets of that. Need to get some milk. Because we’re gonna make this creamy. Okay? And here we have vinegar, mayonnaise, sugar. Put a little pepper, we don’t add any salt because we’ve had ’em in the salt bath, remember. And now we’re gonna add just enough milk to make this creamy. And you have to work with this, I tell ya, these little tiny whips are so wonderful when you’re doing something this in a small container, because you can keep control of it. Okay, so basically we’re just adding it all together and we’re mixing mixing mixing blending. No lumps please. We don’t want any lumps. If everything is real real cold, like the mayonnaise, the milk, if it’s all real real cold, like this milk has been out for a little while. And then I just had it refrigerated, it’s not real cold so that tends to blend better than if it’s real cold because if it’s cold, it makes the mayonnaise real lumpy. So you might put a little bit in a cup and sit it out. Wouldn’t suggest you keep your whole container out. But once you have made that, you see how creamy that is? That’s the right consistency. It’s just about little thinner than regular pudding. Okay? All right, now what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna pour this, let me get these things out of the way. I have a hard time just trying to keep the housekeeping going. I need some help over here. I mean I have stuff everywhere. Okay, I usually, you know, do you cook like I do? If there’s five pans in that cupboard, I will use all five pans. I can’t discipline myself to just using you know one or rinsing out. It feels like when you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll and you just gotta keep going with it so I am glad for dishwashers. Believe me, I’m thankful. I used to tell my husband, you know, you can have anything in this kitchen. Take the stove but leave the dishwasher, please. But that’s not really true, it’d be hard to cook without it. All right so what we’re gonna do is we’re just gonna mix these up. Now remember the moisture that is still on the cucumber will coat this and thin this down a little bit more so if you want to make a little thicker, you can. But basically, that’s all there is to it. And if you think it might be a little bit sour, or you think it might be a little sweet, just adjust it to your own taste. Maybe I’ll just have a little taste here. Hm, that’s right, very good. Not bad, Arlene. Okay. You always want to be sure your plate’s nice and clean. Cucumbers are done. Let’s go back to the roast and the gravy ’cause I really would like to show you how to make the gravy. Okay, I have been roasting this roast beef. Okay. And I’m going to show you. We’re gonna take this out. This has been in the oven. Go and get it out without it breaking. This is your roast beef. It beautiful? Nicely browned. Wonderful, wonderful juices in this pan that I’m gonna be putting back on the stove. And these onions are here, they have flavored the broth and this, let’s see, Steve, do we need to see this? Is this better? How’s that, can you see that wonderful brown that you have, that has been collecting there as this has been cooking. That’s going to be the base for your gravy. And when you have that, you can make the most wonderful gravy you ever wanted to taste. And when we come back, I’m gonna show you how to do that. Stay right here with us now there’s one more step to this wonderful dinner idea, and we’ll be right back in just a minute.
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I’ve been busy as a bee since you took that little break because I wanted to show you the whole prepared meal. But the one thing I really wanted you to see most of was how to make a good creamy gravy without a lot of lumps. And so what I’ve done is taken the juices from the roast that we roasted for a long period of time, I added some of my potato water. If you’re cooking any other kind of vegetables, add that water to the pan with your drippings. That all enhances the flavor so you don’t have a watery taste. If you don’t have any of that, of course you can use water, maybe add a few bouillon cubes or something like that. But anyway, this is what we have. I’ve added a few mushrooms there. And basically, added just a little bit of salt, not much because remember we have not used salt, and now I have flour and water used as a thickening. Some people use cornstarch and water. I don’t like that consistency when it makes the gravy. Some use half and half, that’s fine. But the key here is not to have any lumps. This should not have any lumps at all. If you have a lump in this, you will have lump in this. So, you keep stirring and stirring. Use cold water all the time. Always use cold water. And now, this liquid has to be boiling, you always have to have this boiling and this cold. And when you do that, get yours, your whisk working in there, you do not stop, and you pour until you see the consistency that you think boy, that looks pretty good. You might want to add just a nip more, and let it boil just a little bit to get that floury taste out of it. Look what wonderful no lump gravy you have. Wonderful fresh mushrooms in there. That’s all there is, if you have a problem, and you get lumps, put it through a strainer, the flavor will still be there. I want to take you to the table so you can see everything that we’ve prepared. We’re gonna pour our gravy. Because we have no gravy boat, we’re just gonna pour it here in our serving dish and come to the table with me, I want to show you the finished product. Okay, here we are. The perfect accompaniment for the gravy, mashed potatoes, and what more could you want? Until next time, be sure to join us because it really wouldn’t be the same without you right here at home, bye-bye.
[Narrator] Fresh produce provided by Jordan Banana, wholesalers of fresh fruits and vegetables in Dravosburg, PA. Groceries from Scozio’s Shop ‘n Save, the family stores that love serving you. Cookware provided by Wholey’s, your favorite gourmet deserves the best for less at Wholey Balcony Cookware. Some of our guests stay at Al Monzo’s Palace Inn, your home away from home in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Cornerstone television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
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