From Recipes
Posted by The Pioneer Woman, April 1, 2008 at 8:00 AM
And the Pioneer Woman is back with one of her patented visual recipes—this time for a classic steakhouse side. —The Serious Eats Team
I love creamed spinach. Have I mentioned that? I do. I think I first developed a love for it during my vegetarian days back in L.A., when my carnivorous friends would drag me out to steak restaurants and I had no choice but to order all the sides on the menu lest I starve. And creamed spinach was always my first choice, followed by sautéed mushrooms, roasted asparagus, garlic mashed potatoes, and carrot purée. Gosh, I was weird.
Today I’m married, it just so happens, to a cattle rancher and I’ve long since learned to love a good, juicy rib-eye. And while I look at my very brief (OK, seven-year) stint as a vegetarian as a youthful indiscretion, I have carried with me a deep, abiding love for steakhouse side dishes. I still love my creamed spinach.
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From Recipes
Posted by The Pioneer Woman, November 15, 2007 at 8:00 AM
And the Pioneer Woman's back with one of her patented visual recipes—this time for sweet potatoes so rich and decadent that they're almost dessert. —The Serious Eats Team
OK, so they’re my mom’s sweet potatoes. And OK, they weren’t even hers to begin with; she picked up the recipe in New Orleans more than 30 years ago when she was pregnant with me or my brother or someone in my family, I’m not sure who. I don’t remember those days very clearly.
Known originally as "Soul Sweet Taters," this dish is so deliciously divine, my sibs and I would gobble up the entire pan every Thanksgiving and meet our annual beta carotene requirements in one sitting. And really, folks, when you look at the list of ingredients in this dish, you’re going to laugh at me. No, really. You’re going to laugh and ridicule and mock and criticize and laugh again. Because while I’m passing this off as a Thanksgiving side dish, it’s every bit as decadent as a dessert. Still, I think it needs to stay on the plate with the turkey, dressing, and mashed potatoes, as you wouldn’t want to do anything to upstage Aunt Bessie’s pecan pie. That would be really rude.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Here’s what you’ll need: Sweet Potatoes, Milk, Sugar, Vanilla, Eggs, Salt, Butter, Pecans, Flour, and Brown Sugar. How bad can THIS be?
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From Recipes
Posted by The Pioneer Woman, October 8, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Editor's note: This column marks the debut of Ree, aka The Pioneer Woman, on Serious Eats. Many of you may already know her from her own blogs, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman and The Pioneer Woman Cooks. As she describes herself there, "I’m a former city girl. I used to live in Los Angeles, where I wore black pumps, ran into celebrities, and ate sushi, Thai food, and Mediterranean cuisine every time I turned around. Then I met and married a hunky cattle rancher, moved to his ranch in the middle of nowhere, and spent the next decade figuring out how to cook for men who think the sun rises and sets in a steak and baked potato. It’s been a hilarious culinary journey." You can find out more about her here, but for now, let's cut to the chase. —Adam
Does the quality of baking chocolate really matter? As a former food snob, this question has always plagued me.
I stirred up a tiny bit of ire on my own cooking site when I dared to suggest, in a post about lasagna, that it was permissible to use processed Parmesan cheese in the recipe. I would like to state for the record that it was not my intention to personally offend anyone with this suggestion. But when you're a former city girl living in the middle of nowhere on a working cattle ranch, you learn to improvise with the ingredients you can get.
Baking chocolate is no exception. My local grocery store carries one brand only, and I generally use it with a smile. Still, sometimes I hear the voices in my head—the voices of many a pastry chef who came before me (well, I'm not a pastry chef, but follow along here)—who've always said that the quality of baking chocolate makes all the difference in baking. This has bothered me for awhile, so while my husband was working cattle over the weekend, I decided to get to the bottom of The Great Baking Chocolate Debate. I decided to make brownies.
I dug up a basic brownie recipe—one my mom used to make. My plan was to incorporate two different baking chocolates into two different batches of the same brownie recipe, and I wanted it to be a recipe I was familiar with so I'd focus solely on the flavor of the chocolate itself. I made plans to conduct a blind taste test with some people in my life and possibly a couple of cows, since I don't have any neighbors. My objective was simple: to find out, once and for all, if there was any merit at all to this baking chocolate hype. Come along and see what happened!
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