Rachael Ray And Keeping Time

by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when [everybody sang sea shanties](. It was the week when a hero perhaps moved closer to [getting her statue](. And it was the week when we said [farewell to Joanne Rogers]( — yes, Mrs. Rogers of Mister Rogers, but also a force in her own right. Let's get to it. Opening Argument: Rachael Ray And The Meaning Of Time [Rachel Ray at the kitchen counter] Food Network There’s a new streaming service called Discovery+, which will be good news not only to those of you who like certain categories of content, but to those of you who worry that we do not yet have enough separate streaming services seeking your subscription money. This one gathers together a bunch of stuff: Headings include “Relationships” (where you’ll find 90 Day Fiancé), “True Crime” (where you’ll find JonBenet Ramsey: What Really Happened?) and “Paranormal And Unexplained” (where you’ll find Ghost Adventures and Ancient Aliens). But what caught my attention was the “Food” heading, which has lots and lots of Food Network and Cooking Channel stuff (and some other stuff). There have been on-demand apps for a while that give access to some of this if you have a cable subscription, but as far as I know, this is the first time I was able to access all 29 seasons (!) of 30 Minute Meals, Rachael Ray’s flagship show that’s been on since 2001. That show will be 20 years old in November. The basic structure is that Ray cooks a meal in 30 minutes — although, if you’re watching commercial-free on an app, it takes about 20 minutes to watch. When she goes to commercial breaks, she keeps working in the background, so you’re roughly supposed to see a real-time creation in half an hour. She loves to make burgers, she loves to make stuff with rice and vegetables, she loves a chicken thigh — and she usually has some kind of vegetable side dish or salad or something. Occasionally, she makes dessert. A recent episode, for instance, found her making a version of Szechuan beef and what she called “messy corn.” It’s usually not super-fancy food, but it’s also not all frozen and canned and boxed stuff — she uses chicken stock in boxes, for instance, but she chops onions and might use more fresh herbs than any TV chef I’ve ever watched. I’m not sure why this show hit the spot so hard over the last week or two, but I came to believe I might have loved it for the same reason I used to love watching old episodes of Law & Order: There’s a rhythm. Rachael Ray gets all her ingredients out of her refrigerator and pantry (she loves to bring everything to the counter in one trip), just as some unsuspecting New Yorker comes across a dead body. She puts the pasta water on, she gets a pan with olive oil heating up, she grates garlic (she mostly grates instead of minces garlic, because it’s faster), and she unwraps some chicken thighs; the cops find a suspect who won’t turn out to be the right suspect, they hit a snag, they find the right suspect, and the suspect goes to court. There’s a familiarity to what’s going to happen, and all you’re doing is seeing it done in different ways. She has her patter and her established persona, where she talks about how she always burns bread she’s trying to toast or explains that she doesn’t like to use too much fresh oregano, because it can get perfume-y. Her salutes to the freshness of herbs or good cheese take the place of the impassioned Jack McCoy speeches about justice. She preps, she cooks, she plates. It’s in sections, and you know what’s basically going to happen at the end, even if you don’t know what the details are going to be. And that’s with the added benefit, of course, of education. I do not recommend learning about the justice system from Law & Order, but Rachael Ray can help you become a pretty good cook. She’s pleasantly flexible about the fact that a lot of greens can be subbed for other greens, a lot of herbs for other herbs, a lot of proteins for other proteins. She tries to demystify the process of making food a little bit, so that when it comes time to make your own dinner, you’ll think something like, “Well, I don’t have any chard, but I can probably use spinach.” (You probably can.) There’s just something about knowing that a show will pay off in a particular way in a particular time that makes it the right thing for me on days when nothing seems sensible at all. I have no idea how long I’m going to be stuck inside, but chicken will brown. Garlic will cook, tomatoes will shrivel and burst, and no matter what anybody tells you, a watched pot will eventually boil. Many things will not be okay, but dinner probably will be. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend: Friend of the show and Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall has a new podcast out called [Too Long, Didn’t Watch](. The setup is that a guest each week who has never watched a particular TV show watches just the first episode and then the last episode, and then Alan talks to them about the show and what they think. It seems like a complicated arrangement, but if you start with the first episode — in which Jon Hamm watches Gossip Girl — you’ll get the gist. Filmmaker Stacy Title, who was nominated for an Oscar for her short film Down on the Waterfront and who also directed the indie film The Last Supper, died this week of ALS. I was acquainted a very little bit with her because I was acquainted a little with her husband, Jonathan Penner, who competed on Survivor while I was covering it. She was a fierce advocate for women directors (she appears in the documentary This Changes Everything), and I recommend [reading a little about her and her life and family](. I talked this week about some of the “startup problems” podcasts I’ve been listening to, and another one I didn’t talk about is called [Boom/Bust: HQ Trivia](. I was late to the HQ phenomenon, and I found it fascinating to listen to the story of how something can grow and collapse and sort of come back with such unpredictability. What We Did This Week: [Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree, Kingsley Ben-Adir and Aldis Hodge in One Night In Miami.] Courtesy of Amazon Studios Aisha and I [talked about]( Sylvie’s Love, a movie we both really liked, on our Monday show. On Tuesday, she and I [talked to our friends]( Kathy Tu and Tobin Low (both of the much-missed podcast Nancy) about the 20th anniversary of Bring It On. On Wednesday, [Glen and friend of the show Margaret H. Willison]( tackled Dickinson as it airs its second season. On Thursday, I had the [pleasure of talking]( to two of our friends from Code Switch, Shereen Marisol Meraji and Karen Grigsby Bates, about some of the books in this year’s [Book Concierge]( that talk about life in the United States. And on Friday, Aisha, Glen and I [were joined by]( Joelle Monique to discuss Regina King’s marvelous feature directing debut, One Night In Miami. I [wrote about]( the new adaptation of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great And Small books, which started airing on PBS last weekend and is available in its entirety on demand if you have PBS’s Passport feature (which is available if you are a donor to your local PBS station). Aisha [wrote about]( the very good new documentary MLK/FBI, which explores the surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (and incidentally reminds viewers of how unkindly he was received in many quarters, contrary to some whitewashed versions of history). Glen [wrote about]( the Disney+ show WandaVision, which brings the Marvel Cinematic Universe further into the realm of television. What's Making Us Happy (and other show notes): Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - What’s making Glen happy: [Blow The Man Down]( - What’s making Aisha happy: [Kim Cattrall]( living [her best life]( - What’s making Joelle happy: [“Suspect” by No Gimmicks]( - What’s making Linda happy: [Foundering]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. 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