McCRAY: Nachos get a smackdown

Dear Rachael Ray,

I love your show. Especially your funky refrigerator and your vintage yellow stove.

My kids love your show, too. They put on princess dresses, drag out all the pans in the house and pretend to be you. Mommy sits on the couch and pretends to be the audience. (This is one of the rare times Mommy gets to sit on the couch — and for that, I love you even more).

Even my husband, who shuns the convenience food you use — like lettuce in a bag and grated cheese in a tub — likes you. Must have something to do with you being cute and inventing "meat muffins." (Yum-O!).

But we do not love your super nachos. I picked them for this week's column because I have a thing for nachos.

To be honest, I have a thing for cheese sauce. I especially crave the cheese sauce at El Pollo Loco. I love it so much, I'm sure it will launch me into the next pants size if I'm not careful.

El Pollo Loco's sauce is the best — spicy, creamy and gloppy. I searched for a recipe approximating it, and the sauce for your super nachos seemed to come close.

At first, I was just going to make the sauce, but your entire recipe intrigued me. Black beans on nachos? Black beans are healthy. Could this be a way to justify eating a plate full of chips covered in cheese?

The easiest thing about this dish was the shopping. Like a lot of your recipes, the ingredients are easy to find, although our store didn't have blue or red corn chips.

The worst thing was the prep. It took some 30 minutes to chop the ingredients for the salsa alone. Making the beef and beans mixture wasn't tough, although this also took time.

Putting together the cheese sauce was, well, horrible. My kids grated the cheese and ate some along the way, which they promptly spit out because it had tiny flakes of peppers in it. Mess No. 1.

They measured the flour and milk for the roux. Mess No. 2.

At first, I thought they got too much milk and too little flour in the pan, because the cheese sauce was watery. But I see that testers ran into this problem, too.

Oh, and the salsa. Now, this isn't your fault, Rachael, but you really need to wait for tomato season to make good salsa. Even if they are vine-ripened, tomatoes in April are just not the same as they are in, say, July.

Hope I didn't hurt your feelings, Rach, but your super nachos aren't super.

Still, I love your show.

— Kerry

My husband says these give restaurant nachos a run for their money. They were not difficult to make but did require a bit of prep and some time. The cheese sauce came out a bit grainy and not as creamy as I like, but the flavor was good. The kids would have preferred it with just the cheese sauce.

Who in the world needs a complicated recipe for nachos? Make your own pico de gallo? Here? In California? I can buy it at the store! And cheese sauce? Where is this recipe from ... South Dakota? Just grate and melt 100 percent real California cheese on top! At any rate, the meat was flavorful but not too spicy and the black beans were a nice change from refried pinto beans, but I was totally turned off by the cheese sauce. We frequently eat nachos at home ... sometimes they are just plain cheese plus toppings and sometimes they are meat and beans plus toppings, but they are always simple to throw together. In fact, I think that's the point! These just seemed too complicated. When I go the distance and make super nachos, I fry up the tortillas ... now THOSE are worth the effort.