Relativistic cooking with Rachel Ray

Rachel Ray is one of those Food Network hosts who always seems to have a couple of shows on the TiVo. I first remember seeing her show $40 a Day, about the Sedona, AZ, the town where my mother lived at the time. In my experience visiting Sedona, most of the food available there was both expensive and crappy, so the show had a good hook for me. The meals she chooses typically look pretty far from filling, but our typical portion sizes are much too big anyway, and her on-screen persona is so preternaturally cheery it makes anything she does look like fun.

Recently Andrea picked a menu from Rachel Ray 30-Minute Meals 2. The premise is that she’s designed these scrumptious menus that can be prepared in 30 minutes. The’re usually good but I don’t buy the time limit — she lists her ingredients in their prepared state, and both Andrea and I suspect she starts her timer from this state — the mise en place is in place so to speak.

Here’s our menu:

Chicken Fried Steak with Creamed Pan Gravy and Biscuits
Southern Green Beans
Quick Chocolate Banana Cream Pie

When her timer starts, the green beans have already been trimmed and chopped, the bacon has been chopped, and the small onion has been minced. I don’t really object to this practice, but it means the menus in her book can be cooked in 30 minutes, if you’ve already done all the prep work and are experienced enough in the kitchen to manage multiple recipes on a tight schedule.

As for the mise en place, in the Introduction for this book, Ms. Ray admits she doesn’t precisely measure ingredients, either: “A tablespoon is a palmful to me, or for liquids, once around the pan in a slow stream.” That has to save some time! And speaking of time, she seems to know something about space and time that I must have missed: “Begin the first recipe, then, as you create pockets of time, begin the next recipe.”

These 30-Minute Meals also involve shortcuts, so if you have more time to cook and you spot a shortcut, it can be worthwhile to omit it in the name of better flavor.

I’m sure Rachel would agree and I doubt she’d mind — I do wonder how long it would take her to simmer my favorite mushroom risotto.

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