30-Minute Meals 2 by Rachael Ray

Rachael Ray combines three or more recipes into a meal which can be made at home by inexperienced cooks from ingredients available at your local supermarket in about 30 minutes, with some minimal advance preparation. She does this very, very well in her books and on her Food Network series.

Rachael's TV series is shown somewhere between Mario Batali's ethnic Italian cuisine and Martha Stewart's high end cooking / entertaining demonstrations. Herein lies the moral of the story. Rachael does not feature haute cuisine, ethnic Italian, formal entertaining, fancy pastry, high nutrition, low calorie, economic preparations, or vegetarian. She does good food at home in a short time. This doesn't mean her meals are not nutritious or fattening, or use poor technique. Her preparations use a very high percentage of fresh ingredients and a low percentage of suspect animal fats and overly prepared ingredients. Many meals are a Mediterranean diet for everyman. Her use of extra virgin olive oil rivals Mario and her use of garlic would make Emril proud.

Her techniques are sound and very achievable for anyone with at least one very good knife, a food processor, a grill pan, and a few large saute pans and a large dutch oven. The only culinary skill one needs are fairly good knive skills, plus the discipline to keep that one knive very sharp. For those critics who say they learn nothing from Rachael's presentations, I say they miss the point. She is showing you how to eat well without great chops in the kitchen.

The thing which impresses me the most is that in spite of her retro 50's décor on her show, her food does NOT emulate the 50's food doctrines focusing on assembling easy meals from prepared foods. Having lived through the 50's with a working mother, I know exactly what that was like, and this ain't it. There is a fairly heavy use of fresh foods in partially prepared form, such as deboned chicken breasts and prewashed, precut salad greens. This means Rachael's meals may be slightly more expensive than similar meals done a la Mario from prima materia, but if you're a 35 year old with a good job, working 10 hours a day, 30 minutes to prepare a meal is a real bargain. I also know that loosing the bone on meats will loose some sources of flavor, but cross your heart and hope to die, do you really notice the difference on Tuesday night after a hard day at work.

If one compares Rachael's work to those nearest to her style on the Food Network, I believe you will see the really has her act much more firmly together than the new 'Good Food Fast' show and, dare I say it, she succeeds much better at what she does than the Food Network icon Sara Moulton. Sara concentrates on techniques, unusual foods, and unusual cuisines. I routinely cook from Sara Moulton's book and I do not routinely cook from Rachael's books, but then I'm retired and cooking is my hobby. Rachael does what she does very, very well. She may just not be what you are looking for.

I started taking Rachael much more seriously when I realized her 30 Minute Meal format predated her appearing on the Food Network. She cooked it up herself and was not a creature of Food Network producers. Another kudo to Food Network for, like Alton Brown's 'Good Eats', seeing something good and running with it.

The most important caveat I would place on Rachael's menus is that accomplishing them in 30 minutes does require you to have a well organized kitchen with all foods equipment in good working order and immediately at hand. It also requires a very good advance knowledge of the recipes. The 30 minutes doesn't include the time it takes to read the recipe, do the shopping, and make sure everything is at the ready. It also helps to be thirtysomething with good knife skills. I have never caught Rachael cheating on her show (unlike Ms. Carmichael on the Good Food Fast show) but she accomplishes her goal by being constantly in motion, with not a second taken to reread the recipe or track down a missing onion.

Rachael's books are not free of errors. In one recipe, for example, a russet potato is identified as general purpose, when it is much more properly identified as a starchy potato. However, the use to which the potato was put in the recipe was CORRECT. I have found more serious culinary mistakes in a book by Emeril Legasse!