Sunny Gets Clever With Peppers, Plus A Rant About Meat Handling

Cooking for Real with Sunny Anderson
Real Comfort, Real Good
Spicy Macaroni and Cheese
Pan Fried Meatloaf in Tricolor Peppers
Shake Shots

I liked Sunny’s first show, which I saw some time ago, but not her timeslot. Sunday mornings are not my first choice for food tv. But I saved a bunch of Sunny’s shows and I like the menu on this one – one dish in particular I thought was very clever.

Sunny’s doing comfort food. She starts with her mother’s spicy mac and cheese. She adds 2 cups of elbow pasta to boiling salted water.

She goes on the meatloaf. Maybe since they’ve renewed her show, she could have a separate segment for each recipe. Sunny shows us an interesting way to present meat loaf AND use up extra peppers as well. She cuts them into thick rings and stuffs each one with the meat loaf mixture to make individual servings.

That’s smart and makes an attractive dish, as well. She gets about 3 one inch rings from each pepper. It doesn’t matter if they vary in size, the servings can too. She places the rings on a baking sheet. I wouldn’t do green, but yellow and red are pretty.

For the meat loaf mixture, Sunny adds white(!) bread cubes. I haven’t used white bread since…well, I do add it to my Thanksgiving stuffing sometimes, but that’s it for the year. Sunny dices the bread and adds it to a big bowl. She rough chops garlic, my least favorite way to use it, but she wants a strong garlic flavor.

She mixes turkey and beef into the bowl with lots of salt and a cup of canned tomatoes. Okay, hold on just a sec. I like you Sunny, I really do, but I have to mention one thing. This is what drove me nuts about Ingrid, although Sunny's transgression is not nearly as serious. I’m talking about meat handling. I know you’re making this for television, but SOMEONE is eating it, I suppose.

After every encounter with meat, particularly RAW meat or poultry, I ALWAYS wash my hands. Sunny added the ground beef to the bowl while resting the sealed ground turkey package on the wooden cutting board, then stuck her hands in the salt dish and used the pepper mill. That means if she uses that same pepper mill for a salad, she risks getting raw meat gunge on ingredients that aren’t going to be cooked.

She never actually handled the meat directly - not yet anyway - but that doesn’t stop me from my paranoia. She opened the package and absolutely could have come into contact with it. I would wash my hands then too. (I also have a small spoon in my salt, so I don’t pollute the entire batch, while I’m cooking. I can always throw the spoon into the sink.)

I never let any part of a meat or poultry package touch a cutting board, counter or anything, without cleaning it immediately after or putting it in the dishwasher. I never store meat directly on a refrigerator shelf. It goes in a plastic bag or a plate or dish.

I don’t think it’s that complicated. Raw meat or poultry cannot touch anything else, except when it’s inside a pot or pan and will be cooked. If I use tongs or a spoon to turn raw chicken or meat, I wash them before using them again in the cooked dish.

Anything coming into contact with raw meat or poultry has to be washed: hands, cutting boards, knives, counters…before you can proceed. That’s why I try to have my vegetables prepped first and then I deal with meat or chicken.

There are no shortcuts here. Sunny wasn’t awful, but it takes only one small lapse to have an unfortunate incident. But this is how I think about it: You can’t be sort of ok in this department. It’s an A+ or an F. There is no in between.

Back to this very cool recipe…Sunny adds the canned tomatoes, Worcestershire, hot sauce and an egg. (Oh, she cracks the egg on the board…I think you can guess how I feel about that.)

She chopped onions and added them during the commercial with some sage. Sunny mixes the whole thing up with her hands. Then she makes a tiny patty and fries it up to taste the seasonings. Good idea. AND she washes her hands at the appropriate time.

Back to the pasta. She takes it out a bit early because it’ll go in the oven.

Her little test mini-meat patty is ready. She tastes it. She’s “not mad at that at all.” That’s her expression for liking something. Kind of cute. She stuffs the meat mixture into the pepper rings really tightly. Don’t worry about overstuffing, because the meatloaf shrinks away from the sides. (More hand washing.)

This is a totally new twist on meatloaf. I like it. Sunny sears the meat loaf patties on both sides in some oil. She wants color on them before they go into the oven.

Sunny moves on to the mac and cheese. She adds flour, dried mustard, cayenne and nutmeg (not fresh) to bowl. She stirs in sour cream, salt and pepper. She stirs in an egg, milk, half and half and cream. This is an unusual way to proceed - not cooking the flour in a roux.

She adds cheese cubes to the cooked macaroni and adds that to a baking dish. She pours over her sauce, adds some more cheese, grated this time, and puts it in a 350° oven for 45 minutes. Hmmm, will that sauce really get thick without cooking it first?

Sunny flips the peppers. They look good. She pours the rest of her can of tomatoes around the pan and it goes into the same oven as the mac and cheese.

She prepares croutons for the top of the mac and cheese. She cubes 3 slices of bread and adds them to a pan of butter to sauté them. They’ll top the mac 10 minutes before it comes out of the oven.

For a garnish for the pepper dish, Sunny likes fried sage leaves. She heats oil to 350° degrees. That looks like a lot of oil. She adds washed and dried sage leaves and fries them until they’re crispy – 10 or 20 seconds later.

The mac and cheese is ready. Sunny serves herself a big scoop and a meatloaf pepper ring. Looks good and tastes good.

Her last offering is a little vodka in the blender with ice cream, which is softer than it needed to be, and a little cinnamon and nutmeg (not freshly ground) plus a squirt of chocolate syrup. Sunny blends it together and serves it in shots. I love that. I don’t think it even needs the chocolate. She tells us we can have it at the beginning or the end of the meal. I vote for both.

Some nice ideas here, even if there was a little raw meat issue. I normally hate stuffed peppers, but just a ring of them around the meat loaf is a great idea.