A Boozy Dinner with The Pioneer Woman

If you're a woman who likes to cook, chances are you've heard of Ree Drummond--a city girl who meets and marries a cattle rancher in Oklahoma, with home-on-the-range adventures ensuing.  She cooks, bakes, home-schools her children and writes about all of it. I've only made one other Pioneer Woman recipe--her buttery, decadent cinnamon rolls--and found this to be a good opportunity to further explore her cooking. For our first foray into Ree Drummond's new cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier, my friend and fellow food blogger Shawnie Kelley (of Manges! Mangi!) decided to dive in head first with a meal of three dishes and a cocktail.The theme for dinner number one: recipes with alcohol in them.

To start, we whipped up a batch of frozen Mango Margaritas, pictured above. As far as frozen cocktails go, these were pretty good...but then, it's hard to mess up tequila and fruit.  They're strong...1.5 cups each of  tequila and triple sec, and are also pretty sweet, a situation we preemptively remedied by cutting back on the added sugar.  The lime zest-sugar rim was a nice touch, and helped to balance out the sweetness of the mango.  One change we made: we used frozen mango instead of fresh or jarred.  

Well liquefied, we turned to dinner prep itself: Whiskey-Peach Chicken, Pan Fried Kale and Whiskey Glazed Carrots. All of the recipes were easy to make, and Ree does not use a lot of complicated, hard to find ingredients.  In this instance, the peaches were the most challenging find (since they're not in season), but thawed, frozen peaches did the trick and turned out splendidly. (I'd stay away from jarred or canned peaches in syrup).

It's a one pot dish, which is convenient: seared chicken pieces added to sauteed onions, BBQ sauce, a splash of Worcestershire sauce, whiskey, and the peaches.  The whole thing went into a low oven while we worked on our side dishes of sauteed kale and carrots. (Also of note: she says to cook the chicken in the sauce for an hour and a half in the oven...while that does mean you're going to have some seriously fall-off-the-bone chicken, you'd have to really plan ahead with this dish on a weekday night.  We found that a half hour in the oven while we did everything else was more than adequate.) The peach-whiskey sauce was fantastic...the whiskey gave it a nice depth, and the sweetness of the peaches and the tang of the BBQ sauce  played really well together.  We had a lot of sauce (relative to chicken) and saved it for use in other ways. (Over pork chops or tossed with pulled pork?  Tossed with veggies and some hot peppers for a sweet and spicy stir fry?)

The kale recipe is not complicated in the slightest, but for those that have never worked with kale, it's a great place to start.  Ree doesn't suggest stripping the leaves from the tough stems, but that's what we did. The kale would have had to cook too long to soften the stems, and we wanted to keep the leaves bright and al dente. (Oh, and she doesn't call for it, but we added a splash of white wine to the kale...everything else was drunk, we didn't want it to feel left out.)

I think the carrots were my favorite part of the meal: buttery, sweet, and with a rich whiskey aroma and flavor.  Actually, they sort of left the realm of vegetables and moved to the world of candy, which is probably why there were none leftover at the end of the evening.

On the whole, it was a good meal, and we received positive feedback from our gentleman diners.  After reading the whole book yesterday, it's clear that Ree favors bold yet classic flavors, and dishes that are slight tweaks of traditional standards. Some of the recipes seem pretty basic (Caprese salad, rigatoni and meatballs), but if that's how you get your audience to try their hand at a balsamic reduction or make their own pasta sauce from scratch instead of using over-salted, over-sugared jarred stuff, then that's great. I do also like the fact that she has a very brief intro to canning at the end of the book, with recipes for strawberry jam and pickles. As a farm wife with no convenient grocery and what appears to be a nice garden, I'm sure she has a lot of canning recipes and I would have liked to have seen her share a few more.

It's clear that she has a large and loyal fan base out there, and I think it's wonderful that she's encouraging people to do more home cooking. I'm looking forward to exploring a few more of her dishes over the next few weeks (homemade doughnuts!) and sharing what I find. (And check out Shawnie's blog for her reviews!)