I have a habit (good or bad — you be the judge) of browsing through people’s cookbooks when I visit. Picking up Amy’s copy of Rachael Ray’s 365 days cookbook from her bookshelf led us to a brilliant idea: We’d randomly choose one recipe from the book every week, cook it and blog the results. It would be a project! It would get us a book deal! And a movie, starring Alyson Hannigan as Amy and Scarlett Johansson as me! (And Rockford as himself, because he has a ScarJo crush!)
(To be fair to Amy, I just came up with the movie deal part. She’s less delusional than some people.)
Anyway, it was an awesome plan. But then Amy made the first recipe — page 141, a Crab Tortilla — and wasn’t entirely impressed. So we changed the rules a bit.
Our project (which I’m calling “Recipe Roulette” unless Amy tells me otherwise) isn’t going to be Rachael Ray-centered. We’ll take turns picking a recipe — sometimes it’ll be a random pick, sometimes calculated — and we’ll post about it every Monday. That’s pretty much the extent of the ground rules.
Oh, and about that Crab Tortilla.
It started with frozen hashbrowns, celery, onions and green pepper, chopped up in a food processer. Then you pour some beaten eggs over that, cook it in an omelet-ish fashion, add some crabmeat, flip it over, cook it a little more and eat it. That’s the idea, anyway. Mine didn’t quite work out that way.
I don’t have a food processer, so I put the veggies in the Magic Bullet and crossed my fingers. It pureed a bit of it and left the rest solid. So much for that. But that wasn’t quite as disasterous as The Flip. You’re supposed to flip the egg mass out onto a plate, then slide it back in to the pan to finish cooking. Instead of doing that, though, I decided just to flip the whole mess out onto the red-hot burner of the stove.
Oops.
Fortunately, our stove is one of those solid-surface things, so I was able to scrape it all back up and into the pan. Rather than a “tortilla,” I ended up with what Poppy called “scrambled egg mash.” Rockford ate it for lunch. He said it was decent. I didn’t try it. It looked supergross.
So, not a glowing review for the Crab Tortilla. But I know this is going to be an awesome little bloggity project. Stay tuned!
Also: There were supposed to be plantain hashbrowns. But I was too discouraged/lazy to make them.
You didn’t make the plantains? Well, consider yourself smart for saving a few dollars. It’s safe to say, I will never be making this recipe again, even though I did eat 3/4 of it!
Oh no, I bought the plantains. But they’re still sitting on the kitchen counter.
I like crab, but this recipe does not appeal to me. And I don’t consider myself a picky person. Best of luck with your challenges! I’m still waiting for the cookie-of-the-month to return! 🙂
Oh, and Nichole, are you back? To the internet?
Well let me know what you make with the plantains. Anything will be better than Rachael’s Shredded Plantain Disaster.
I have several of Rachael Ray’s books, and I really haven’t been impressed with much that she makes. I have made a few really gross things from her books, and not much stands out as great. Everything pretty much took me longer than 30 minutes, too. I look forward to reading about your challenge (and to reading your book and seeing your movie!).