The Pioneer Woman vs Reality

Things I am not going to do in this post are as follows. I am not going to talk about the Pioneer Woman’s aka Ree Drummond’s personality even though it irritates me more than Rachel Ray, which is saying something. I will not be discussing any aspect of her life only her recipes, even though many unsavory reports abound. And finally, I will try to assume that people who like the Pioneer Woman have a valid reason for doing so, although that may kill me.

I first was made aware of the Pioneer Woman a few years ago. Since food blogs are always a good idea in my eyes I took a look. Now there are others parts to her website other than food but since none of them held any interest for me I only perused the cooking section. I left her webpage around 5 minutes later feeling rather nonplussed. Her recipes just seemed so…basic. So…boring. Ok, I thought, nothing to hold my interest, she’ll probably fizzle out in a short amount of time.

Cut to the present day. PW is bigger than ever. Book tours, a movie in the works, a food network show, and hordes of devoted followers, including many of my friends. Baffled I looked at some of her newer recipes thinking I had perhaps missed something, perhaps she had developed into a chef in those few years and had really started to do actual cooking. Once again I found nothing of interest, I delved deeper, and it was then I started to get irritated. I used Google relentlessly, reading articles and blog that were for and against PW. Many of her detractors focused on parts of her life that held no interest for me. I cared about one thing only. Bad food.

I began my foray into Pioneer Woman cooking by perusing her website. I read through her recipes for the past few months to get a feel for her style of cooking. PW generally posts a recipe around every three days. Thirty recipes later my eyes were tired and my head throbbed. There could be no possible way that anybody thought this was amazing food. Yet each recipe had over one-hundred mostly positive comments, some upwards of six-hundred rave reviews. Was I that off in my culinary tastes? Was I the only person in America not to get PW’s awesomeness? (Since there is a website called thepioneerwomansux.com, obviously not!) I however do not like to assume that people are food dumb, so I closely read the glowing reviews. All this footwork over the past few days led me to some solid conclusions.

The Pioneer Woman is most definitely not a chef, not even a cook. As the author of a very popular blog and a self proclaimed cook one would suppose that PW would be offering recipes to her public that she herself had some hand in creating. Or at the very least perhaps taking classic dishes and putting a twist on them. Instead she appears to be content to copy and paste recipes that any person with Google could find. I did Google all of the recipes I looked at and found identical versions on other recipe sites such as allrecipes.com. Well I do not have an issue with her presenting genuinely good recipes to her followers; PW often tries to pass them off as family recipes or barely acknowledges the person she took them from. Good cookbooks such as Nigella Lawsons, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, are very upfront about where they first had a recipe and what changes they made to the dish. An example of this would be her “Grilled Chicken Salad with Feta, Fresh Corn, and Blueberries”. Now PW says she had this salad at a dinner party and then just had to make it, that this is her own version. She never tells us however what was different about the original version and what changes she made, in fact she barely credits “Katie the Caterer” in her post. This is just sloppy cooking, by all means change a recipe but tell us why, that is the only right thing to do. Especially when you have over one-hundred seventy-seven comments praising you for your creativity and for “kicking it up a notch in your gifted way”. Actually PW didn’t do squat, it is “Katie the Caterer” who deserves their accolades since PW can’t quite seem to say how she changed the recipe from the original.

To make it all the more infuriating when PW does rip off recipes to post they’re generally bad ones, or so basic as to be pointless. In April she posted a recipe for a Club Sandwich…you have got to be kidding me. As usual the recipe posted seemed merely a backdrop for her to tell a cute childhood story about herself. Also on her website is her recipe for BBQ sauce that she featured. It was one of the most basic I had ever read. As a building block for something maybe it could work, but you would have to go about ten steps beyond where she stopped to make a truly good recipe. But the recipe that ticked me off the most was the “Pig Cake” recipe that PW posted in January 2011. The list of ingredients includes yellow cake mix, margarine, cool whip, vanilla pudding mix, crushed pineapple, and mandarin oranges. Regarding the use of margarine PW said “Not butter…margarine. It brings out the flavor of the cake mix.” How do I begin to count the number of things wrong with that statement? If I could somehow ensure that this recipe would never be made I would! The worst part is that PW could have taken this recipe, “a potluck staple” and transformed it by making real yellow cake batter, using butter, actual whipping cream, and making authentic vanilla pudding. Instead she chooses laziness and to promote unhealthy chemical laden food.

Now that I think about it there is a recipe of hers that tops the “Pig Cake”. The “Milky Way Cake”, posted May 23^rd, 2011. The recipe contains eleven Milky Way Bars and three sticks of margarine, which PW tries to pretend is cute by saying it is “vintage” (kill me now). Each serving contains 839 calories, 41 grams of fat, 113 grams of carbs. Yes please serve your family that for dinner, after all the Pioneer Woman does and she is perfect!

Moving along I looked at other clearly common recipes such as “Shrimp Scampi” and “Risotto Primavera”. I then decided to look at one of PW’s most beloved recipes, her “Best Lasagna Ever”. This recipe has been on her site since 2007 and since she credits no one for this recipe I assume that she came up with it all her own. This lasagna contains ground beef and breakfast sausage, sliced mozzarella and powdered parmesan, dried herbs, and cottage cheese. It’s assembled like any basic lasagna and cooked the same way. Now I have had lasagna nearly identical to this one and it was decent. But why not try to elevate the recipe? PW says that part of the greatness about this lasagna is that the ingredients are easy to find almost anywhere. Guess what? You can find ricotta cheese almost anywhere and that is better than cottage cheese. Also widely available is real shredded parmesan, fresh mozzarella and sweet hot Italian sausage, not to mention fresh basil and parsley. By just changing a few items the lasagna would become a masterpiece and the recipe made no more difficult. But I have noticed in PW’s recipes and in the comment section a rather odd and ugly class war going on. Commenter’s who dare to suggest how a dish might be improved by a substitution are beaten down by others as snobs. Gourmet is used as a negative word, NO ONE MUST DARE TO ELEVATE THEIR COOKING ABOVE THE PIONEER WOMANS!!!!!!!

So please, if you would like to sift through ten-thousand pictures and read self absorbed blather before you get to a mediocre recipe go right ahead. I’ll just be in my kitchen, looking through ACTUAL chef’s cookbooks and improvising some gourmet meals. Bon Appétit.