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.