Okay, so there’s no brick.
Anyways, I stumbled across this recipe on an episode of 30 minute meals I left on while doing something more important. It looked tasty so hell, why not? I’ve never tried a Rachel Ray recipe, and you know… we’re kind of kindred spirits!
We both have no formal training as a cook, we’re both horribly under qualified should we attempt to work in a serious kitchen, we both have relatively chipper personalities, everything we plate looks like horse shit, and we both babble incoherently.
I think the only difference here is that I don’t really descend into baby talk while explaining recipes.
“Just drizzle a galoosh of E.V.O.O. over your chow-DAH sammie and then it’s just yum-o!”
Seriously, talk that makes me want to revist my stance on sterilizing the mentally handicapped.
In the end, I don’t hate her as much as the rest of the known universe seems to. She never bothered me THAT much, (I find Michael Smith’s patronizing delivery to be far more insufferable), and sure her meals look like they were plated by a four year old, but so do mine. In the end, she’s just a mildly irritating face on the food network that for no conceivable reason has become a superstar.
Anyways, it’s Saturday and the first snow of the season has finally settled on the ground. I was yearning to make something with obscene amounts of cheese, and since my discovery of chipotle chili powder I’ve wanted to do more with chipotle. I had seen the episode with the mac & cheese in question several months ago, and had always wanted to give it a shot, so here we go!
As a note, I couldn’t find smoked cheddar, so settled with smoked gouda. Not very good smoked gouda, but whatever. It’s going into macaroni and cheese for chrissake. I’m also using cavatappi pasta, which is just infinitely cooler than macaroni.
So, we’re already hungry when I start cooking (never good) and so I get right into it.
Big link of chorizo, sliced up, thrown into a pan with olive oil to brown. Second pan, dice an onion, toss that in with more olive oil. Toss both, and then put on a pot of water with more olive oil and salt. Here’s some shots Tracy took of the onions and pasta.
After I brown the chorizo for a bit, in goes a can of tomatoes.
In our second pot, I open a tin of chipotles, and toss them all in….
Oh dear.
I look at the recipe, and it calls for TWO chipotles, diced up nicely. I grab my tongs, fish all the chipotles out, throw all but two into the fridge, and dice the two offenders up before tossing them back in. I’m now worried it’s gonna be VERY spicy since all the sauce in the tin went into the onions. Oh well. Water boils, I toss in a bunch of cavatappi (best pasta EVER for macaroni & cheese), and turn into an octopus as I watch over all three pots. Chorizo and tomato get pulled off, and cheese sauce goes on. If I can make ANYTHING in the kitchen, it’s a cheese sauce. I do up a roux, add milk, and after it’s smooth, I grate in an obscene amount of the smoked gouda. I taste pasta, which is al dente, pull it off, and wait for the cheese sauce to finish.
Cheese sauce is heated through and cooked enough to lose the flour taste, and we’re done! I simply throw EVERYTHING into a big pot, season heavily, and take a shot!
Total cooking time… half an hour!
The Verdict:
This turned out pretty much exactly as it did on TV, (and looked about as good as a typical Rachael Ray dish) which is a first for me, and wasn’t too spicy (as I had feared). The catch here is that the recipe itself was only so good. It was great comfort food for a cold, snowy day, but there was something it needed to truly change up the flavour. A high note of some sort, but unfortunately, I have no idea what. Maybe some lime? The trick, however, is that it was incredibly addictive. I just couldn’t stop eating the damn stuff. I think I understand Rachel Ray’s popularity now. A cook of extremely limited skill could make this without too much hassle in the stated thirty minutes while giggling insipidly at the term “Yum-O”, and it’s still a cut above average household cooking. I’ve certainly made better food, but for what this was, it was pretty tasty. Good, quick, comfort food.
I went with an English pale ale (NOT a bitter as it claimed) which was a good enough compliment for the pasta. One of the great strengths of beer is that it actually can pair quite well with spicy food. This poured a nice coppery colour with a giant head that quickly went away to nothing. Had an aroma with nice warm malts like apricot, bits of lemon, oaky undertones, and a general feel of uh, toast maybe? Smelled nice. Quite flavourful without being overpowering, but kind of thin on the palate and I might go so far as to say undercarbonated. Whatever. In the end, it matched the dish perfectly. Nothing exceptional, but competent and tasty.
The word “brick” makes anything funny.
The dish was really good, but far too spicy for me. I don’t do well with spice. Rather than beer, I had Coke with mine, which didn’t do me any favours. I can still feel the burning.
very Interesting, nice to see you blogging. And keeping it more up to date then mine. We should get the gang together for a cook off sometime cook in advance and hold a potluck.
Dylan! That sounds fun, I’m not in Edmonton and won’t be there in the near future, but once I’m in I’ll see if I can’t get a hold of you for such evil plans.
Hi Rachel,
I watch your cooking programmes and record them.
Quite often I cannot make out the ingredients used from the bottles . I or we would appreciate if the camera is
forcused on the bottle so that we can read the name
on it. We cannot get the name right when you say it.
Thanking you
Best regards
Roossevelt
Hey Roosevelt, thanks for commenting! I’m not Rachael Ray, I’m just a cook in Canada who tried one of her recipies. However, go here:
http://www.rachaelray.com/food.php
You can look up every one of her recipies here. So if you see a recipe and you’re not sure what she puts in it, you can look it up on this site, and get the full recipe.