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I have a few extra minutes this evening since Andrea is working on another of Rachel Ray’s 30 Minute Meals.

My favorite cocktail is pretty simple – gin and tonic. I’ll try other things and certainly enjoy many of them, but it remains my steady favorite. Over the last few years, I’ve been slowly working my way through the various brands of gin available from my local small liquor store. So far, I’ve only found one, New Amsterdam Smooth Gin, that I actively dislike in a gin and tonic.

It’s been sitting in my small liquor cabinet since shortly after Christmas, unique in its nearly full bottle. I’ve been pondering ways to get rid of it that don’t involve pouring it down the drain, and I’m sure I can mix it with some sort of witches’ brew for our annual Halloween party.

This evening I decided to mix it with a martini; maybe other tastes will blunt the sickly sweet cotton candy flavor?

I started with a recipe from Aerobleu Martini Diaries:

The Last Worthless Evening Martini
4 ounces dry English gin
dash of dry vermouth
dash of bitters
shake in an iced shaker

I wasn’t willing to trust my entire martini to this sweet gin, so I used half Tanqueray and half New Amsterdam. I’m happy to say it’s a hit! Andrea and I both like it, though I admit with two young kids, it’s been so long since I’ve had or made a martini, I don’t have a recent basis for comparison. 3 stars! I’d definitely do this one again.

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.