Creative Living; 202; Merle Ellis and Connie Moyers

Create a living utilizing the technology of the 80s with the best of the past to bring you innovative ideas and up-to-date information for creative lifestyles in today's active world with your host, Cheryl Borden. Welcome to Creative Living. Today's show features two segments and two very interesting guests. I'm sure all of us do more candy-making during the holidays than we do at other times of the year, but when you see how fast and easy these microwave candy recipes are, you may want to prepare candy occasionally throughout the year. My guest is Connie Morier. She's a marketing home economist with an electric utility company and her recipes have become some of my favorites and I'm sure you'll want to try them too. The microwave oven is ideal for candy-making and cleanup is very minimal. The first part of our show is going to be very educational and very entertaining. Would you believe it's possible to cut up a whole fryer in 13 seconds? Well, I don't suggest you try it, but my guest, Merle Ellis, will actually cut up a chicken

in about 13 seconds. Then fortunately, he'll repeat the demonstration in slow motion for those of us who may have missed part of it the first time. The idea behind this, of course, is to show one way to save money at the meat counter. Merle Ellis is commonly called the butcher and he serves as a spokesman for the presto company. He's a butcher by trade and he definitely believes we should all save money by buying large cuts of meat and then cutting them up to suit our own needs instead of paying a butcher to do it for us. All right. You can smile. Merle, I know that when you use a presto cooker, you save a lot of time, but you can help us save money, too, by cutting up our own chickens, but how many people know how to do that anymore? That's really a shame, too, because you can save an awful lot of money. I mean, if you go into the market, always the chickens that are unceremoniously dumped in these plastic bags are always 15, 20, sometimes as much, 25 cents a pound, less than the one that the butcher has already cut up for you. And then when you get into the parts, you know, the chicken breasts and the chicken thighs, you really can save a lot of money. That's a law start.

People just don't know how to do that anymore. I know, I know. And it's really, it's not all that difficult. Chicken dinner used to start back in grandmother's day, you know, when you went out at 8 o'clock in the morning, cut off the head, you know, and then they had scald it and pluck it and do all that. We don't have to do that anymore. Well, at least you can do to save a little money is learn to cut one up. No, a lot of people, a lot of creative women are really, they don't have time to do that. At least that's the story I hear. You know, yeah, they are willing to pay the butcher that extra, what? On the three pound chickens, they 20 cents a pound, three pound chicken, that's 60 cents. They're willing to pay the butcher that extra 60 cents because they don't have a lot of time. They want to get home and they don't want to mess around cutting up the chicken. They want to get into something more comfortable, you know, maybe watch television and have a martini and spending a lot of time cutting up a chicken is just not very creative thing to do. And if you don't have a lot of time, then you probably would want to pay the butcher the extra money because it was pretty costly. Well, stop and figure that out, you know, I mean, if that couldn't have taken more than 15 seconds. If it did, I'm slipping. That's 60 cents I saved in 15 seconds, that's a dollar and 20 cents and 30 seconds,

two dollars and 40 cents a minute, time 60 minutes in an hour, times eight hours a day. If people would pay me what they're paying butchers to cut up chickens, I'd make almost as much as you. I mean, the improvement. No, we were showing off here a little bit because but it doesn't take a lot of time and you don't have to learn, you know, you have to cut it up that fast to save a little money. I brought along another chicken. You'll show us in slow motion. A little bit. Yeah. Actually the butcher doesn't charge you all that much money to cut it up because he does put it back together for you, you know, they'll put this little package package of giblets down in the bottom of a nice styrofoam tray. We have to digress here for a second, if you ever examined what's inside on these packages. Butchers get their kicks in strange ways. Look at what's in here. There's one liver, two liver, one gizzard, two gizzard, three gizzard, no heart, no wonder it died, you know, I was just, anyway, don't laugh, the cameraman cat laugh, anyway, the butcher puts the thing down on the bottom and then he puts the bony back pieces on top

of that. Yeah, it looks nice. Right. And then he takes the breast piece and plumps it up on top of the bony back pieces, you know, kind of gives it sort of a dolly part in appearance, you know, so then he talks to the legs and this is a women's show, I'm going to, they'll be after me, women's lib kind of thing, yeah, anyway, the wings get put back and he, he, he took, he puts that out in the case and charges just 60, right, maybe puts a little piece of parsley in between the legs or something there, anyway, you can save a lot of money if you cut it up yourself. And you're going to show us that. Yes, right. But not in 15 seconds. No, no, no. We're going to watch. This is how we would buy it at the store. Right, right, and take it out of the package and, you know, tie it off a little bit. You need sharp knives, that'll do this. Yes, so good sharp knife, really, actually, a doll knife is a real hazard. And you don't have to be, you don't have to work at it.

This is a good sharp knife. It's been running or kicking around in my briefcase for a while and it's probably not as sharp as it should be, but it's, it's a good sharp knife, okay. But I can't push the knife through the meat, you know, a lot of people cut themselves or a lot of people think they're having trouble because they try and force the knife through the meat. I can push the knife into my hand with considerable force, but I didn't cut myself. Thank you. Thank God I didn't cut myself. But if I'd moved the knife in either direction, it would have been all over. So I have a good sharp knife and just, you know, it doesn't take any strength. Just glide it. I usually start up here where the wing is hooked onto the, and if you kind of just wiggle it around a little bit, you can see where that joint is. See the, so where it's wiggling, just cut down to the joint and expose the joint and cut through the joint. You've taken off the wing. Now the next target is back here where the thigh hooks onto the back. See that movement? That's where the joint is. So just take a hold of the leg and lift it up so that you've got the skin raised there. And then just cut down through that loose piece of skin down to the joint on one side.

And then cut down to that joint, just turn it around, cut down to that joint on the other side, gliding the knife in. Then you can even bend, lay the knife down and bend it back and you literally separate the joint. Yeah. Don't try and cut through the bones. If it's, if you've hit the bone, you can't cut through the bones. So you've, you've, this isn't the joint, you know, just find the joint and then cut through the joint. Now if you allow that up, you practice on the other side, you know, just just take off the wing. And then after a couple of chickens, you've got that part down pretty path. Well, now I can always do that part. This is where it gets a little complicated. Yeah. Just lay the chicken down on its, on its back. And there's just this loose skin here in the middle of the back. Just cut down through that loose skin to about right in the middle of the back, just like so. Again, put your knife down and separate the vertebrae. And then this is just loose skin. So just cut up through the loose skin to take off that half of the back. Now right where that wing came off, there's a little piece of, of cartilage there, a little dot of cartilage where the wing came off. Right above that is a space.

On both sides, there's a little, little space. And if, yeah, right, you just, you know, there's a joint there. So if you'll put your knife in with the sharp side up, in one side and out the other. I don't know if the camera can see it, but on the inside now, there are, there's a little, the ribs from the back come up and join the ribs from the breast. And at each juncture where they come together, there's a little dot of white cartilage. And if you just find that, find those dots, it's like those dot drawings used to do when you were a kid, you know, just, just connect the dots. That's good. That's a, Dave's a genius. He's following focus all the way in there to die shots. You can see that little cartilage is there. And you haven't cut through bone. You just, you've cut through cartilage, so there's no ragged edges. Then bend this back and pull apart and you've cut up a chicken every bit as much. That's the butcher. That's as far as we get. That's as far as you get it when, when you take it home from the meat market. And you've saved 60 or 75 cents, depending on the size of the chicken. Now you still have to, when you buy it like this, you still have to separate the leg from the thigh.

And that sometimes causes people problems because they can't find the joint, you know, there. But chickens are like butchers. They're really nice guys, you know, if you just give them a chance. But if you'll turn the chicken over and push the skin back, every chicken I've ever known marks the spot where the joint is with that line of fat. So just push the skin back, find that line and cut through the joint. Every leg is like that. Not just every once in a while, it's all, all the time, every once in a while. That's the one. Now when you get around to the chicken breast, that's where you really can save a lot of money. Boneless chicken breasts can cost you a small fortune, you know, chicken sometimes are 49 cents a pound, and the boneless chicken breast or what the French call supreme's are 239. At that price difference, you could take home whole friars, cut them up yourself, bone out the breasts, and if you threw everything else away, you'd still be saving money. Boning out a chicken breast is really not all that difficult once you've learned to cut up a chicken. Again, you take the bone out of the meat and you don't cut through the bone, you just, you cut through the cartilage. Right here where the, where the, between the, you kind of in the wishbone area there, there is a little piece of white cartilage, see it there?

Just cut down through that, to you, you hit the bone, then put your knife down and take the breast in one hand with your fingers against this breastbone and push one hand against the other. And you can pop up that keel bone, they call it a keel bone because then, then, then run your fingers along the edges of it and you can, you can loosen the meat and lift that guy out. Oh, you take it completely out there in that way. And there's not a stitch of meat on it, see it looks like a little keel of the meat. This one broke, but that's, now the rest is a snap, you just, just lay it down on the cutting board. And because you're working with a whole breast instead of the halves that the butcher, when they cut them, they, they leave that bone in and they run it through the saw and you've got to kind of pick the meat off the bone. This way you can lift the bone, the meat out really easily. Just, there's two long parallel bones extending back from each ribcage and if you'll just run your knife under one of them, make a little handle for yourself and cut back against the ribcage, you can take off half the ribcage and turn it around, take the lids, access off there, make a little handle on the other side and run it back in the other direction and make the other half of the ribcage or take off the other half.

Now, the only bone that's left in there is the wishbone and everybody knows what that slight, or it looks like, this one broke and I won. That used to be very important when I was a kid growing up, you know, having the pulley bone. And there you've got a bone that's chicken breast. Now, to make those supremes that the French use for cordon blue and Kiev and all those wonderful dishes that are high, what is it? Cullion, collesterated, monosodium, something or other, they're really lean or something, they're good for you. Real good for you. Yeah, or something like that. I've never worried about that too much, I guess I enjoy eating too much and I figure it's. Anyway, there you have two French supremes. Now, most recipes, we've got a great recipe that we're going to show you how to make in the pressure cooker here. Most recipes tell you to put these between two pieces of white paper and pound them, so if you study the guys a little bit, there's a big muscle on the top and then there's another little muscle on the bottom and if you'll just cut along the inside edge of that little second muscle, you can roll those over and you've got a nice, flat, chicken cutlet that are marvelous with what we've got them for here. Which is nice for folding or rolling.

Yeah, you can put a little, what is it? Kiev is herb cheese in there, herb butter, herb butter rolled up, cordon blue, little ham and cheese. Or we made it in the pressure cooker with the bill sauce. Anyway, cutting up your own chickens can save you an awful lot of time. And it just adds a little bit of practice when you show this that. I usually buy chickens when they're on special and chickens are one of those things that markets use is what they call loss leader items. That is in most markets in order to get you in, they'll offer something at a real hot special and chickens are often that thing. They'll sell them for very little more than they paid for them in order to get you into the store so that you'll buy the rest of your groceries and so it's keep an eye open. When you see them on at a good price, buy four or five of them, take them home and process them, cut them all up, you know, take the breasts and put them, you know, bone them out for whatever and put those in the freezer. My family likes the legs and the thighs for frying or for chicken with orange sauce or whatever. So those get packaged up separately and wrapped for freezing. The bones and the...

You don't throw those away, I don't do it. No, no, these things, there's a lot of meat left on them but there's also a great deal of what they call Jewish penicillin in there, you know, decarman cold, cure, chicken soup. And that's where the pressure cooker is really handy. You can take the bones from your... I usually take the wing tips and the backs, whoops, just throw that around. All of these save the wings, I'll show you a neat little trick for that. Take the stuff that comes out of these. Yeah, things that you might normally throw away. The neck and by all means the gizzard because there's a lot of good gelatinous substance in the gizzard that makes a real rich stock, good soup, I don't use the livers because that kind of... They don't work too well in a stock so I save those either for the cat or if I can get to them before the cat does for some sauteed livers on toast for breakfast in the morning else. So those don't get thrown away, they go into the freezer. Now with some chicken bones and pieces like this and again just like making any kind

of stock, an onion, a carrot, a stock of celery, a couple of cloves and a few bay leaves and then cover it with water. And in about 25 or 30 minutes, once you want a really rich stock, you know, 45 minutes in the pressure cooker, you just put it on, bring it up to heat until this thing starts to rock and then turn it down and let it simmer for about 35 minutes or so. You've got a great pot of stock and what I do around our house is package it up. I mean, after you have two or three quarts and so forth, you're messaging the stock. Yeah, yeah, strain it off. Pick off any meat that my hands are all slippery, can you pull that apart? Pick off any meat that you have on there and there's a lot of meat on the neck and on the backs and use that for a chicken salad or something or set of the side and put it in a little bit of the soup and make a chunky chicken soup, you know, whatever. And then what I do is package the stuff up, just measure off a couple of cups depending on the size of your family, one or two cups or a quart or two in one of these Ziploc bags and then zip it up.

These work wonderful for all kinds of freezing. But don't zip it all the way up because if you do, it's like a cushion, it takes up more air than it needs to. Take the air out. I use sometimes use a drinking straw or just take the suck the air out and then you can stack the stuff up and out of one pressure cooker full of chicken stock, you can stack this up in the freezer and then when you recipe calls for a cup of stock or you're making some sort of a wonderful sauce and it calls for chicken stock instead of opening a can of Campbell's or Swanson's or one of those that are costing you 45 or 50 cents a can, you've got your own stock. My grandmother used to have the stock back going on the back of the stove all the time. So it's a neat way. You don't have to do just the boy pieces of chicken in the pressure cooker. We did a dish that we have a recipe for with chicken breasts that were cooked in the pressure cooker. This is a tarragon, a chicken breast that are cooked, I think for what's the recipe call for, I think four minutes.

You've literally bring it up to pressure and it's almost done. Is there tender, did they've only taken you four or five minutes to prepare? And they're absolutely fantastic. There's a whole bunch of recipes that we have available. One of them is for a little Chinese chicken wings, which are kind of cute. We have a minute or so to, Chinese chicken wings are, well, my wife is part Chinese and we do a lot of original cooking and to the Chinese do a neat thing with chicken wings, they take the whole wing and take the wing tip off, put that in the stock pot and then cut the other part in half at the joint, if you can find it, there it is. And then cut around the joint and turn the thing inside out, you know, just cut down so you can get a hold of it and take a napkin or a corner of your apron or something and just turn it inside out. And you're pulling that skin back over your meat, man. And that's a little Chinese chicken wing, what the, be good for sweet and sour. Exactly, yes. Or I just came back from a trip to Hawaii before I came here. And in Hawaii they do these, they call them poo-poo's, the poo-poo in Hawaii is hors d'oeuvres. You know, it's something you dip these in a batter and deep fry them in the serving

with a mustard mix to your maytai. It's marvelous. Absolutely marvelous. You can make another one out of the center section of the chicken wing, only as you discover when you get tuned into chicken cutting up here, there are two bones in the center section so you have to cut between the two bones and then when you get it, when you get it cut so you can tug it down between the two bones, then cut between those two bones and take the little one out, the smaller of the two, pull that all the way out. Taking the little bone all the way out. Yeah, just if I can get a hold of it. Take that guy out and put that in the stock pot. And then turn the other one inside out and out of one chicken wing, you get two little two little poo-poo's, aren't those cute? Mm-hmm. No, there are several recipes for these also, in a chicken and every pot. So if you'd like to have those, you can try your views how you get them. So learn how to cut up your own chickens and get a pressure cooker, and you can save a lot of time and a lot of money. And let's see, a pressure cooker cooks three to ten times faster than you can be. Yeah, how about three to ten times faster? Well, a lot of people are, you know, they have one, but they don't use it, they're a little bit apprehensive about using it because they think they've heard about grandmother

having accidents or, you know, things exploding, it doesn't happen anymore because of the way they've been built. Pressure happens so much back in those days because a pressure cooker, even back in the old days, was kind of like a knife, you know, if you did, if you used it right, you didn't get hurt, but if you got careless with it, you could hurt yourself. They've taken that problem away. There's a safety device on here now. When the pressure builds up, this little guy pops up and locks it. So it's virtually impossible to get to open it accidentally. And if it really, you know, if you let the water burn down or something, there's a little plug over here that will pop out and let any excess pressure escape. So there's just no way that you can, it's just a wonderful old-fashioned tool that's been kind of brought up to date and it deserves to get back out from under the cupboard and onto the stove. Yes. Perfect for today's lifestyles. Well, thank you. We'll try some of these recipes and we'll make the booklet available from your company available to our viewers. Thank you, Murrow. Connie, I think sometimes we forget that we can use our microwave oven for things like

candy making. But that's a little bit hard for those of us who've not had as much experience with it as you have. Are there certain recipes we should look for that work better for making candies in the microwave? If you can find a recipe that is a microwave candy recipe, I think it will help you down a lot because it gives you times, as a general rule, microwave cooking is four times faster than other kinds of cooking. But sometimes with candy, you still need to boil it so many minutes or something along that line. Now, the ones I've picked today are some things that are just melting chocolates together and different things like that and the microwave is just perfect for that. Fast and easy. We don't even need a candy thermometer then for any of these three, you're going to prepare. No, we don't. Okay, let's see how quick and easy these are to prepare. This is the first one that we're going to do, it's really fun and it's real cute. I can't wait until we get it. I'll put it together. What I did is I had white chocolate that little drops or you could use almond bark like you get in the grocery store. I bought these from a bakery that carries this kind of supply. So it's white chocolate or almond bark, either way? And I melted it together with a chunky peanut butter and what we're making is tiger

butter. Oh, okay. Then when we get that spread out, I'll let you put this in the microwave for about a minute, we're going to put chocolate over the top of it. Sometimes when you buy white chocolate, you have a little bit of trouble with it being kind of crumbly and this isn't, but some I made last night was and what I did is I added just a little bit of shortening to it, oh, the solid shortening. Now you don't put water or milk or something because it will curdle and sometimes people have that problem, but this was real creamy and we melted this in the microwave for about two minutes. Okay. And now we're going to be going to spread. Could we always want to put it on foil? I'm putting it on foil because it helps, it's, you can lift it up and break it a little easier. That works better in this case than say wax paper or some other thing. You might have noticed that I did this in a measuring cup, which is nice because it has a handle so I can work with it. When you put it in the microwave, the handle doesn't get hot and I really like that

so I'm trying to look for that and all the kinds that I do. This probably takes longer than the whole recipe, doesn't it? Just to get it all spread out. No, use a rubber spatula and see if we can help us get it spread out to thickness. Yeah. You want us to look glossy, Sheryl, though. I'm not sure that because that's very important and we can tell they're just real glistening or glossy as you mentioned. I think sometimes we tend to over cook things like chocolate chips or some of the chocolate candies and things. Okay, now they still have their shape when we take a spoon and stir them. See, it's gone. They're starting to be creamy. Now sometimes some of them aren't quite ready and if you want it real liquidy, which we need it pretty soft to be able to do what we're fixing with it, we can just put it back in for maybe 30 seconds. 15 seconds. 15 seconds. Probably will be plenty. A lot of those people don't realize that just a few seconds like that really are important in the microwave. We want that real soft and then we're going to take a knife or a spoon or something and

drizzle that through there and make it look like a tiger skin. Uh-huh. Yeah, did you want this, do you want this fairly thin in there? Fairly thin so that it will be able to break into clumps. We're going to get ready to do another recipe also. This is one that's called coconut pastel bond bonds and this one's just a food process or recipe. This is perfect now. Okay. Look out. See here. This is the funny part now, huh? Okay, we're going to just kind of drizzle this back and forth over here. These are our tiger stripes. These are our tiger stripes. Probably if you do this in the schools, I bet the kids really like this. Doesn't have done this yet but I think they're really thin because it's a neat recipe. Then if you do this too. They kind of go the other way and that looks like a tiger stripe, kind of all mingledy like a tiger.

Then we just want to put it in the freezer or the refrigerator and let it get hard so that we can break it up. Okay. Just a couple of hours, Connie. If you put it in the freezer just a 30 minutes, it's a point. Okay. Okay. We're going to use cream cheese and this is a recipe that if you wanted to double or something that you could because it's kind of small amount, it's three ounces of cream cheese. The food processor is so nice to get that blended and mix that instead of having it just blobbed up. Well, that's really quick. We're going to add powdered sugar and the recipe calls for sifted powdered sugar but that's really not even necessary in the food processor because it creams it so well. Okay. We can add the little bit of vanilla and a little bit of green food coloring, the color. Now, this would be a neat thing if you wanted to do for like shower or something a little bit different because you could do the colors, spit the thing back in so that it, anyway,

just get all blended together and I've done some already that I rolled and coconut, take it out and roll it and say if you wanted to use a mint flavoring or something to kind of make mints or any different color, really use your own imagination for it. Okay. That's two of them. This was the coconut pastel bond bonds and we'll go ahead and finish this one a little bit later. Okay. And now we have chocolate clouds. Everybody likes chocolate and marshmallows and that's the kind of recipe this is. This is a little bit different mixing bowl I'm using this time. It's by rubber made and it's real handy because things exaggerate the boiling and stuff. We're going to mix and do chocolate chips this time and this is water and corn syrup in this container and also then we'll put the vanilla in later. Now, I want you to put this in the microwave and cook it for about two minutes and then all we have to do after that is just stir in the marshmallows and the pecans and the vanilla.

That makes a very easy recipe. I brought some of these things that we've already chilled and cooked so we can look at them and watch us look at. This is how the tiger bread better turns out and you can see it just makes a thin firm piece of candy and then the different coconut bond bond. And again, we could use any color we want and rolling, maybe even in chip nuts or something sometimes. And then this is the chocolate clouds and it makes it so shiny because of the corn syrup and stuff that you put into the chocolate chips and also the butter. So these are ready to serve them for that special event we're playing for. Right. Well Connie, thank you very much. It's nice to have these types of recipes that are tested and ones that they're easy and not very much clean up at all. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the show. You might be interested in knowing that all of Connie's recipes and several recipes for chicken are included in the Creative Woman booklet we tell you about at the end of each show.

Our next show will feature three very diverse topics and I think you'll enjoy each one of them. One part will be on Liders Designer Fabrics and the president of the company will be one of my guests. We'll show you some beautiful fabrics and talk about how the company originated and became a mail order business. We don't usually think a fried tortilla served with ice cream do we? But we're going to prepare a delicious dessert dish next time using flour tortillas. My guests will talk about deep fat frying and emphasize safety pointers and you'll definitely want to try a recipe after you see it. It tastes as good as it looks. And the final segment on our next show will be a real money saver for you. Have you ever thought about how many of your recipes call for sweetened condensed milk? I know I use it often. One of my guests will show us how to make our own homemade sweetened condensed milk and she'll do a cost comparison for us too. And guess what? It tastes just like the real thing. All of this will be next time on Creative Living. Won't you plan to join me? The Creative Woman Volume 2 booklet contains 52 pages of information, recipes and instructions pertaining to the various segments shown on the Creative Woman. To order your copy of the Creative Woman Volume 2 booklet, please send a check or money order

for $5.95, which includes postage and handling to the Creative Woman, care of KENW TV, Eastern New Mexico University, Portalas, New Mexico, 88130. Please allow three to four weeks for delivery and we would appreciate knowing the call letters of the station, which carries the Creative Woman Show in your area. Thank you. Hello, I'm Cheryl Borden.

Next time on Creative Living, we'll feature three very interesting topics. One part will be on Liders Designer Fabrics and we'll see several beautiful collections. And what about fried tortillas and ice cream? Does it sound strange? Not when you see the one my guest will prepare next time. It tastes as good as it looks. And the final segment will be a real money saver when we learn to make our own homemade sweetened condensed milk. We'll talk about this next time on Creative Living.