She’s hilarious, interesting, and holy jesus the woman can cook. It’s all “six pounds of butter and some Lawry’s seasoning salt”, and it is SO GOOD. I’m a total food snob - I had to go out and buy some Lawry’s seasoning salt once I started making her recipes because I wouldn’t have it in my kitchen before now - but I swear to God I’m going to go through and make the whole damned blog’s worth of food. And gain six hundred pounds.
So far I’ve made her brisket, her roasted garlic mashed potatoes, her apple dumplings, and her olive bread. They have all turned out incredible. I am even now making her lasagna, the recipe for which involves Kraft powdered cardboard. (That I could not do. Mine has real parm.) The dumplings have Mountain Dew and crescent rolls in them. (I gave the recipe to six people.) The olive bread starts out with a loaf of bread from the store. The mashed potatoes has cream cheese. I don’t care. It all turns out flawless and incredibly tasty. And you want to talk about man pleasing food!
Any other devotees? I know there were a few in the other thread - any favorite recipes I haven’t tried yet? (Seriously, guys, if you make nothing else make the apple dumplings.)
I have only made her cinnamon rolls, but I didn’t make the frosting. They were, indeed, delicious! Although scaling the recipe down from 50 cinnamon rolls was interesting. If you read through the comments someone posted an updated recipe scaled down by 4, or something.
I think I actually like the Cinnabon Clone recipe from allrecipes.com better - but I would definitely make hers again, for a change. They were flakier, for sure. But I think I’ll put brown sugar in the filling rather than granulated.
Her lasagna has made my friends bow down and worship me.
Her bacon-jalapenos appetizers have also been quite popular with my [del]guinea pigs[/del] friends. Hell, most of her recipes have gone over quite well. Wasn’t a huge fan of her #1 man-pleasing sandwich, nor the first cobbler recipe she posted (the second one is quite good though).
Love the Pioneer Woman - I’ll say it, I used to be a big fan of Dooce (not for cooking, because she doesn’t talk about cooking). I gave up on hers a while ago because I lost interest, but had been looking for something with good writing to read - something I can have come into my reader when I have time. Her main blog does the trick there.
Plus, the cooking blog? Oh my gawd. If you haven’t tried the one for chicken legs? Do it, just be aware that those suckers are not low fat in any way, shape or form - heck, you dip them in melted butter then pour more over them before cooking. But mmmmm. Good cold or hot.
And I love the pictures too.
I don’t know-I think her cooking blog is kind of horrific. I’m sure it tastes good because she makes everything with a boatload of saturated fats, salts and processed ingredients.
I’m not knocking her or her family because they live on a ranch and ostensibly manage to burn off the calories. But for the average diner? Her food is heart attack/obesity territory.
Well, you don’t have it every day. (Well, she does, but not the rest of us.) There’s nothing wrong with having a heart-attack dessert on a holiday, or every couple months making some olive bread with a whole stick of butter in it. Everything in moderation, including moderation. The only thing I don’t like is the emphasis on processed foods, but she lives miles away from the nearest town which has a tiny crappy grocery store. I like that she has a blog on how to make food that tastes good even if you don’t have access to the best ingredients.
It’s not how I eat so I’m biased. But I’m not particularly impressed by the fact that the food tastes good. Every recipe has a pound of butter. She often uses processed/pre-prepared ingredients that have a high sodium content. It seems cream is a favourite, too. Nearly everything happens to be deepfried, baked or sauteed in seven sticks of butter.
I just don’t find it particularly inspiring or creative to cook bland, unspiced food poached or fried in animal fats and salts and topped with stuff like Velveeta. Nor do I find it particularly surprising that it tastes decent-in a boring, Chili’s sort of way. I just can’t believe the average person is so hard up for ingredients that everything has to be swimming in butter-it makes me f’kin ill to think of it.
The only recipe on there that’s remotely interesting is the quasi-Vietnamese salad one and I found she actually cut down the spiciness in the dressing (I’ve been making that one myself for a while).
ETA: as in, I was making that type of a salad long before I found it on her blog.
Eh, I get my sexy stir fry on elsewhere. I mean, I make and eat tons of interestingly spiced delicately flavored stuff, but sometimes we like to have some comfort food. The last two times I’ve cooked for a crowd, I’ve made for dessert respectively: individual exquisite chocolate souffles with a whiskey truffle at the bottom, and her apple dumplings with Mountain Dew. Hey, both of them got rave reviews. So it’s not like I’m a culinary Neanderthal; I just see room for both in my kitchen.
I’m on a week of holidays starting Monday, and I will be Cooking with the Pioneer Woman. I like cooking, but I don’t like cooking when it’s 6:22 p.m. and I’ve been at work since 9:00 and out of the house since 8:16 a.m.
But I’m going to play housewife this week.
I actually went out and purchased butter. I’m going to make mashed potatoes and pie and roast garlic and other stuff.
I wouldn’t eat like this every day, but I suspect my husband will greatly enjoy the upcoming week.
Hey, I even bought a rolling pin this morning! I’m very excited about my Housewife Week.
I wouldn’t eat her recipes every day; I’m fat already. But for a treat for my husband? Well, I believed that I could not make mashed potatoes and never tried after a single disastrous attempt. Well, I just made her mashed potatoes (though I went lighter on the butter) and thanks to Pioneer Woman, I can make mashed potatoes!
I hope they re-heat okay; he’s at work today and I just made them now as I wanted to be alone with with my culinary experiment. They tasted pretty darned good, and creamy, too!
Won’t he be surprised tonight to have home-made mashed potatoes instead of Betty Crocker insta-crap.
I have a weird aversion to butter, so any other of her recipes that I try will probably have the butter cut down or I may experiment with part olive oil instead.
I do enjoy her writing style a lot, too, and the pictures are great. I’m a fairly confident cook, but there are a lot of things I never bothered to learn how to make, and having pictures for each step is really helpful for me.
I had a quick glance over her recipes and, actually, they seem pretty good to me. Her pico de gallo is authentic, her guacamole is exactly how I make mine (basically pico de gallo + avocado), her instructions on cooking steak are fine, she didn’t screw up Buffalo wings (other than I prefer margarine to butter in that application). Her chicken soup uses some prepared bullion, but that’s fine in a pinch if you need to amp up all the flavors and don’t have time to cook things down for too long.
It looks to me like pretty solid, basic home cooking, with the help of a couple of prepared products, but nothing that looks like the typical over-spiced over-MSGed over-salted frozen food type fair. If it gets people to start cooking for themselves, I think it’s actually a pretty decent introduction.
I’m going to make mashed potatoes and pie and roast garlic and other stuff.