`Express Lane Meals’ by Rachael Ray, the ‘30 Minute Meal’ diva does `pantry cooking’ right where almost everyone else gets some important part of this concept wrong.
I always feel the need to justify my liking Rachael Ray’s books and TV Show, since my personal taste in cooking runs to masters of the serious and elaborate recipes of Julia Child, Paula Wolfert, and Marcella Hazan.
First, Rachael has a twist to her ‘30 Minute Meal’ shows which I have seen no one else do. That is, like a printed recipe, Rachael starts by ticking off the ingredients she will need for her. Then, she gives more than the average information on how she preps and how to do it for the 30-minute meal objective.
Second, Rachael uses very few gadgets and tricks in her prep work. I usually see no more than a very good Santoku knife, a microplane, some wooden spoons, a spatula and a vegetable peeler. She occasionally uses the food processor she rarely uses the microwave. To be sure, she uses a lot of pots and pans, but one would probably be able to do everything Rachael does with two large skillets, two large saute pans, an 8 or 12 quart stock pot, and a two burner grilling surface.
Third, Rachael manages to carry out her 30-minute strategy with relatively few prepared products. And, one can always easily make your own versions of those prepared items such as stocks, salsas, and sauces if you wish.
Fourth, Rachael rarely gets into the `weekend prep ahead’ mode popular with some quick cooking advocates. I suspect that if you really have not much more than 30 minutes to cook on a Monday, your weekends are probably also pretty well booked up, so you don’t really have much time to do 3 to 4 hours of prep work, labeling, and freezing.
Fifth, I really believe that most of Rachael’s recipes can be done within 30 minutes, IF you have good kitchen skills and a well organized kitchen and you can move around the kitchen quickly AND you know the recipe by heart. That’s a lot of ifs, but if you are serious about good cooking quickly, these are things you must have.
I have seen many cookbooks claim to present whole chapters of pantry only recipes, where every recipe includes at least one ingredient I, who cooks every day, would not imagine keeping in my pantry. Rachael solves that problem by billing her message in this book as how to shop and cook based on the two or three items you can buy quickly on the way home to supplement what you will have in your pantry. Rachael also avoids the stance that you must run out and buy all the things in her pantry list. She is much closer to the sage advice from Madhur Jaffrey who said that you build your pantry by buying what you need for each recipe. What Rachael’s list gives you is the assurance that a particular pantry item such as capers or shallots is a genuinely useful thing to have around for recipes in her books.
I have mixed feelings about Rachael’s advice on the spice cabinet. I once read a distinctly minority opinion claiming that the value gained by throwing out spices over 6 months old is misplaced. This writer said she commonly checks all her spices by smell before using in a recipe and if they seem just a bit weak, she simply uses more of them. I submit that this makes sense especially if you avoid dried herbs and spices that simply don’t work very well, such as basil and parsley, and if you get the whole spices such as nutmeg and black pepper. I have a bottle of whole nutmegs which is easily a year old, and my freshly ground spice from this bottle would put ground nutmeg fresh off the supermarket shelves to shame. But I still endorse her suggestion of getting the smallest size available (except for the really frequently used stuff like salt, pepper, cinnamon, and thyme).
Overall, I think Rachael’s list of pantry items is one of the best I have seen, although I have a few suggestions. For example, I would not buy pre-grated Pecorino Romano. I’m also just a bit surprised that Rachael calls for two bunches of parsley in the fridge, yet she makes no provision for backup storage (what the bookstores call `overstock’) of extra (usually unrefrigerated) unopened containers of mustard, mayonnaise, capers, hot sauce, and Worchestershire sauce. I also think the suggestions from the `wine rack’ could have been better. Instead of 750 ml bottles of wine, I get the 3 liter (4 bottles worth) `wine in a box’ packages which last me for about 3 months of cooking and `sampling’.
My biggest arguments with Miss Rachael concern canned tomatoes and her `diced fire roasted tomatoes’. First, every serious Italian cooking writer recommends using canned whole tomatoes rather than diced, crushed, or pureed product. I confess that the time taken to mush up the whole tomatoes may take a bit from the precious 30 minutes, but I suspect the difference in quality of the final dish is worth it. And, I have been listening to Miss Rachael for about a year now putting `diced fire roasted tomatoes’ into her recipes and I have finally located a Muir Glen product in the Health Foods section, thanks to reference from my far flung correspondents!
The very best thing about this book is that Rachael mantains her pantry / express line shopping technique throughout the book, by for every recipe citing the things you will want from your pantry and the things you will want to pick up on the way home.
This is one of Rachael’s better books.