A Week with the Pioneer Woman: Day 4

A Week with the Pioneer Woman, Day 4: Dinnertime

Previously on "a week with the Pioneer Woman:"
The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl 2009 
Food From My Frontier 2012
A Year of Holidays 2013

What surprised me most when I opened Dinnertime to re-read it for this blog post is that Ree autographed it. It made me question my memory, for I have no memory of having ever actually met the Pioneer Woman. The autograph says, "To Jacob, Ree."  I'm pretty ambiguous with personal details here, but it's safe to say that my name is not Jacob. Thus, I realized the copy on my kitchen shelf is not even my own cookbook! It's my son's, and he left this title along with most of his other cookbooks at home while he went to college.  I suppose the good news is I get to buy my own personal copy so that when my son returns from the Culinary Institute of America and wants his cookbooks back, I'll still have the complete set. And I'd like to have the full set, even this is one of the weaker cookbooks in the series.

In Dinnertime, the Pioneer Woman’s fourth cookbook, I feel like we’re starting to see the beginning the pioneer woman getting stretched a little thin. When this cookbook was released, she had begun filming her Food Network series, was publishing other book projects, raising a family, helping to run a huge ranch, and somewhere around this time she and her family started work on what would become The Pioneer Woman Mercantile in Pawhuska. 

Her first two cookbooks were full of recipes that I found myself saying, “Oh, I want to make that!” and “Hey-- we should try this!” Dinnertime has a variety of recipes that I’ve tried, but she put so many fantastic comfort-filled recipes into volumes one through three that by volume four she seems to be searching for ways to fill some pages. There aren’t as many bookmarks and Post-It Notes in Dinnertime as there are in The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl or Food From My Frontier. I have made about as many recipes from the Dinnertime as I have A Year of Holidays -- which is more than a handful.

Drummond starts Dinnertime with breakfast -- for dinner.  Here are traditional breakfast offerings like pancakes, waffles, huevos rancheros, and frittatas, plus more creative dishes like croissant french toast and a variety of breakfast scrambles (all exclusively for dinner, of course). There are more than two dozen pages on breakfast,.

Next up on the dinner possibilities: salads and soups.  The ginger steak and sesame chicken are particularly tasty, and those recipes start the salad section. The soups feature some standards like tomato and minestrone. There’s hamburger soup and black bean soup, and there is a version of a staple of my household, potato soup. However, I was somewhat perplexed to see this particular version of potato soup that is so vastly different than the ‘sacred’ version my extended family makes every Christmas Eve. That’s not to say this isn’t a good version. After all, Drummond starts the base of this potato soup with bacon, and ends with cream. So it’s got a lot of good things going for it right there! Another surprise in this section is the spinach soup, a meal with which  I was not familiar before seeing it in this cookbook. It’s a handy one to have when the garden gets going into high gear in April and May, or if your farmer gives you a big bunch of spinach in the CSA box.

Starting on page 97, Drummond offers nearly fifty pages of recipes titled “freezer food,” a first in her cookbooks. These are designed to give you all sorts of make-ahead options when life gets even more hectic. There are four different recipes for frozen meatballs (ready-to-go, sweet-and-sour, swedish, and BBQ). Taco filling, ziti, chicken pot pies, lasagna roll-ups, and even chili dogs and chicken nachos are offered in this time-saving section.

Another first for Drummond’s cookbooks is the “16-minute meals,” which she calls “darn-tootin’ fast.”  Like the frozen cook-ahead meals, these are designed for the crazy busy lifestyle so many of us lead. A range of recipes here includes a variety of asian-inspired meals, such as orange chicken, cashew chicken, spicy cauliflower or veggie stir-fry, and chow mein, plus some burger options like Hawaiian, black bean, or supreme pizza burger.

The Pioneer Woman offers 30 plus pages on pasta, though I have to admit this isn’t a section that gets a lot of use in my kitchen. What can I say -- I’m not a big noodle fan!  Or, when I do eat Italian, I tend to go out to a fancy restaurant and really do it up big. But if Italian inspired home cooked meals get your noodles al dente, there are thirteen different recipes for your perusal. 

Drummond also offers a section titled Comfort Classics, but let’s be honest: most of the recipes in her first four cookbooks could be called that. In this section are recipes for chicken cacciatore, salisbury steak, french dip sandwiches, red wine pot roast, chicken enchiladas, and more. A section titled “new favorites” highlights recipes that Drummond says “aren’t necessarily new to Planet Earth but are relatively new favorites to my crew.” These include pollo asado, chicken marsala, tofu lettuce wraps, pork chops with pineapple fried rice, and green chile chicken. The Pawhuska Cheesesteaks on pages 269-271 are traditional Philly sandwiches, just from a small town in the gentle hills and prairies of Oklahoma.

Near the end of the cookbook are recipes for sides, such as vegetables, sweet potato fries (and other potato dishes), breads, and rice. And, no surprise, Drummond finishes the cookbook the way every dinnertime should end: desserts.

There are plenty of good things to cook here, and it’s a fine addition to the entire series. However, I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point for anyone new to her cookbooks. I'd start with one of the first two.