Cooking through Rachael Ray -- Meal 1

The first meal I tried from EVERYDAY WITH RACHAEL RAY was turkey burger drumsticks (Remember my last blog post?). This recipe caught my eye because I thought the kids would eat it and it only required 5 ingredients: ground turkey, evaporated milk, onion, cornflakes, cheese.

First, let me say that the 5-item recipe thing is a hoax. It is 9 items...apparently they don't feel the need to count salt, pepper, olive oil and the wood skewers. Not that 9 items is so bad, but it is more than 5. Let's keep it honest folks.

Second, it said I needed a medium-hard white cheese. I chose the extra sharp white cheddar cheese (black label at Costco). I don't think it was hard enough...or maybe it was too hard. Step one in the recipe was to stick the wood skewer into the chopped sticks of cheese. The wood skewers split the sticks of cheese wide open. So that didn't work. The sticks went into the garbage and we plodded on.

So you mix the ground beef with a little evaporated milk and wrap it around the cheese sticks. At this point, dinner does NOT look very appetizing. But we plod on.

Then you dip the turkey/cheese lumps in more evaporated milk and then roll them in smooshed corn flakes (only I used smooshed rice chexs). Put the lumps into a hot fry pan with olive oil (I used canola) and fry them for 6 minutes per side.

I'm pretty sure I cooked them for longer than that. I didn't want to cut into one of them to ensure the turkey was cooked all the way through, so I just cooked it 5 minutes longer. I'm glad I bought special white cheese for the recipe instead of using the yellow-orange cheddar I always have in the fridge. The cheese melts out of the turkey lumps while they are cooking and I think the yellow-orange cheddar would have looked icky oozing out.

Okay...so here's what they were supposed to look like:


And here was our dinner:


Yes, those are tater tots. Get over it.

Family rating -- everyone said they liked them (a modern day miracle at the Sanford house) and Sweetness went back for seconds. Spunky Girl and the Big Guy didn't finish their dinners, but they never do. I would say my first attempt at a Rachael Ray recipe was a success. The only downside is that it took me nearly an hour to prepare, which felt too long for me.

My Own Cooking Show...coming to a blog near you

You know those cooking shows? The ones where they whip up a fabulous meal in a half hour while saying things like "Well, I thought it would be great if I added..." Have you ever noticed that when you add stuff recipes at home, the result is not always as stellar? I thought it would be fun if everyone got to relive tonights culinary efforts with me...the good, bad, and the ugly.

It all started with a trip to the chiropractor this afternoon. A very large zuchini was sitting on the counter with a note saying "Take Me". So I did. And I thought "maybe I could make some fried zuchini to go along with tonight's stroganoff." And so I did.

I could have started at allrecipes.com and got some instructions first, but what fun would that be? Instead I started by slicing my very large zuchini into disks. I needed a bread-crumb-ish mixture, some kind of "sticking" liquid to adhere the bread-crumb-ish mixture, and oil for deep frying. Oil I had, but I didn't have bread-crumbs. So I looked into my pantry and found a box of Grape Nuts that nobody wants to eat. I used my ever-so-handy Pampered Chef food chopper to grind up the Grape Nuts and then I added Montreal Steak Seasoning to the crumbs to give it a better flavor. I melted some butter for my sticking liquid.

I put my first three zuchini disks through the steps: Dip them into the butter, press them into the crumb mixture, and drop them into the hot oil. The result? The crumb mixture completely fell off in the hot oil. Butter as a sticking mixture was no bueno.

For my second attempt, I used a couple of blended eggs as my sticking mixture. I threw those mixed eggs into the butter mixture (can't be wasteful of the butter!) and tried the next few zuchini disks. This time the crumb mixture stayed on the disks...Yeah! However, I found myself running out of crumb mixture. Back to the pantry I went, this time coming out with Rice Krispies cereal. Turns out Rice Krispies cereal is much easier to grind into crumbs than the Grape Nuts were.

I continued with my zuchini disks until I had cooked them all (half of the huge zuchini that I started with). Towards the end of my process, my oil was really dark and some of the zuchini disks were coming out with little burns chunks of Grape Nuts sitting on top.

Caption: Here's the first three zuchini disks where all the coating fell off. The fourth zuchini shows how the oil started to get dark and the Grape Nuts started to burn.

Here's what my family thought. Hubby said they were good, but don't bother to save the leftovers. Sweetness thought she'd try them with ranch dressing, but then decided to just eat the ranch dressing alone. Spunky Girl didn't bother to try them and the Big Guy whimpered when I put them on his plate. Me? I liked them, although I thought they were a bit salty.

Yeah...I'm not quite ready for prime time.