Cooking with Rachael Ray

Cooking with Rachael Ray

Last night I made recipe #10, the turkey-chili covered turkey burgers. God was it a lot of work and what a lot of dishes! Even good-natured Kate complained about all the dishes. Usually I can clean up after myself as I go along but I gave up the ghost last night and what a mess greated us after dinner. Everything turned out good, really tasty. The coleslaw had too much onion even though I used one small red onion. Also, it was too crispy and not blended enough when we ate it. When my daughter sat down to eat it a couple of hours later, it was wilted and flavored to perfection. It took longer than half an hour to make too, even with Kate helping with the cutting & chopping. It took almost an hour. Then I missed the second part of the recipe on the next page and didn't garlic flavor the french fries, but they were good anyway.

Afterwards I sat down and really went over the upcoming recipes. Rachael Ray tends to list all ingredients in one long list and I almost threw some of the slaw ingredients into the hamburgers last night! So I divided ingredients based on the dish and figured out what I'd have to do to them to make them more palatable to my family.

Tonight is Kate's birthday! I made her a coupon book for all the things I want her to have. It's almost ingenious - I didn't have to run around and buy weird stuff, the burden of that falls to her. There's coupons for everything from a massage, to a weekend getaway to a new pair of work shoes. I'm making her the T-bone recipe Di made last night. I made the Paula Deen Earthquake cake Diane described last night. It smelled SO GOOD. Kate requested a german chocolate cake, so it was perfect. I'm wondering if I should heat it up before I serve it to the birthday girl tonight. The cake smelled so good that I was up in the middle of the night looking for something sweet to eat!