Damn You Rachel Ray

Okay, more of an introduction.

My very good friends Ms. A and Mr. M decided that they were going to buy Rachel Ray 30-Minute Get Real Meals and cook their way through the entire book. What possessed them to do this, I have no idea, because it's probably one of the worst pictures of Rachel Ray I've ever seen, she looks like she's heavily medicated.


"Dude, I'm so high right now..."



Disclaimer: I was a loyal watcher of 30 Minute Meals from probably 2002-2005, and I learned lots of important things from Ms. Ray's cooking skills, things that I still use all of the time. For example, I smash cloves of garlic with a knife to get the skin off of them, I smack the end corner of a knife into an avocado pit to twist it out, I put a pinch of nutmeg in cream sauces (not really, but I would if I made cream sauces), you get the idea. So even though I do find RR annoying and would never watch her talk show, I do give her big ups for creating the 30 Minute Meal Conglomerate.

So Ms. A and Mr. M decided that they were going to cook their way through this book (like Julie and Julia I guess? I don't know, I don't watch movies), and I of course invited myself to join them on Wednesday nights. My husband works late those nights so why not? Ms. D was also invited, and voila, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Dinner was born.

So while I was on the phone with Ms. A, she asked me to pick a number between 35-206, and I picked 147, which led us to our first meal...

Pork Chops in Spiced-Apple Pan Sauce With Roasted Broccoli Spears.

INGREDIENTS:

-1 large head or 2 small heads broccoli

-3 garlic cloves, chopped

-Salt and pepper

-2 tbsp EVOO

-4 boneless pork loin or rib chops, 1 1/2 inches thick

-2 tbsp butter

-1 Spanish onion, thinly sliced

-2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped

-1 Granny Smith apple, cored and thinly sliced

-2 pinches ground nutmeg

-1 tsp ground cinnamon

-1 cup chicken stock/broth

-handful of fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped

-the juice of 1 lemon

DIRECTIONS:

-Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

-Trim the very end off the broccoli stems. With a peeler or a pairing knife, remove the thick fibrous outer layer of broccoli stems all the way up within an inch of where the broccoli florets shoot off. Cut the broccoli lenghtwise into spears. On a baking sheet, toss the broccoli spears with the garlic, salt, pepper, and a generous drizzle of EVOO. Place the baking sheet in the oven and roast for 15 minutes.

-While the broccoli is roasting, preheat a large skillet over high heat with 2 tbsp of EVOO (twice around the pan). Liberally season the pork chops with salt and pepper and sear on both sides for 2 minutes, or until they are golden brown. Remove the chops from the skillet and reserve. Add the butter to the pork skillet, add the onion, thyme, sliced apple, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3 to 5 minutes, or until the onion and apples are tender. Add the chicken stock and bring up to a simmer. Add the pork chops back to the pan and cook for 5 to 7 minutes longer, or until the chops are cooked through. Add the parsley and lemon juice to the chops and stir to distribute.

-Serve the chops topped with the spiced-apple pan sauce alongside the roasted broccoli spears.

Before our first meeting, we decided that we were going to take turns shopping and hosting, but only once we were there (and after a glass of wine) did we decide that this venture should include a cutesy name, a blog, rating our meals and then deciding if those meals made AYP (more on that later). Strange things happen after one glass of wine during the first week of teaching.

Bottoms Up!

It was Ms. A's week to shop and we met at her house (also roommate Mr. M's home) to make our first meal. I arrived with Zooey the dog and Ms. D arrived with Ozzy the dog. The dogs drove each other crazy while we cooked, which was exactly the plan.

First of all, we were completely disorganized in our cooking process, which is really not surprising if you know us. Rather than assigning people tasks, we randomly did things and tagged each other in and out to complete tasks. It's no wonder that this 30 minute meal took us closer to an hour. After it was all said and done, we decided that even if we were really focused, you would have to 'practice' this meal a couple of times to be able to pull it off in 30 minutes.

I handled the broccoli while Ms. A chopped the garlic beautifully, a skill she recently acquired at a friend's Birthday Party Cooking Class. We threw it together with the EVOO, salt, and pepper and set it in the oven to roast.

In the meantime, we talked, chopped and assembled the ingredients for the pork chop sauce. Ms. A was convinced we were all going to die because the pork was not organic. What makes this even funnier is that 1 1/2 members of our crew are Jewish, and Ms. D, the 'full' Jew (as opposed to Ms. A's 1/2 Jew) took on most of the pork cooking duties.
We browned the chops in Ms. A's fancy LeCruset skillet. However, these chops were THICK (the recipe called for 1 1/2" thick, and these were easily that if not more), so they weren't even close to done after we browned them for 2 minutes on each side as RR suggested. In retrospect, if we would have cooked them more fully before setting them aside and making the sauce, our entire meal would have been done much more quickly.

Making the sauce went easy and exactly as described in the book. After we got the sauce together, we added the chops back in, and cooked them for at least another 10-15 minutes. Although we checked the chops just to be safe, I am proud that I have FINALLY reached a point where I can mostly tell the doneness of meat by the 'touch' method.

Sidebar: RR's obsession with adding tons of cinnamon to everything kind of annoys me, but I didn't feel it overwhelmed the sauce at all.

First of all the broccoli was YUMMO (sorry). Seriously though, the garlic turned brown and delicious without developing that burnt bitter taste, and the browning of the broccoli gave it a roasted, deep flavor.

The sauce paired very well with the chop, which was juicy and savory. As I previously said, the sauce wasn't overwhelmingly nutmeg-gy or cinnamon-y. The onion and apples cooked down to a perfect-mushy-but-still-identifiable-state, and the lemon and parsley brightened the flavors up at the end; a nice finish!

We didn't know we were making a blog until after we ate all the food, alas, there are no pictures. We hope to remedy that problem next week.

So now, we had to rate our meal. We decided on a traditional 5 point scale, 1 low, 5 high. We agreed the meal was very good, but stayed conservative as to not skew our future ratings. The breakdown was thus:

Ms. A = 4
Ms. D = 4
Mr. M = 3
Moi = 3 1/2

Our resident math teacher, Ms. A, did some quick calculations, and this meal averaged at a 3.625. Not bad for a first effort! According to federal guidelines, this meal even made AYP!

[For those of you not in the education field, AYP is Adequate Yearly Progress. Schools must demonstrate success by testing or graduation rates, and that gap must close enough each year so that by 2013-2014, each school (or meal) is 100% successful in all fields. Yes, you read that right. Every student or meal must receive a perfect score every time by 2013-2014, or we all fail.]

I made a comment to Ms. A that if we knew we were going to be judging our meal by AYP standards, we should have rated it much lower so we would have more room to grow/improve and it would be easier to make AYP. She, without a shred of joking, said "What do you think schools all over America are doing? They're fudging numbers to make AYP every year."

On that sad (or funny) note, we enjoyed this meal and are looking to next weeks adventure: Tuna Kabobs!

Happy Eating & Teaching!