Every few weeks, my husband and I host his parents, his youngest sister, and our two nephews for dinner. On the most recent occasion, I decided to break open one of my Christmas gifts from my sister-in-law, a cookbook by Ree Drummond. You may already know Ms. Drummond as The Pioneer Woman. She has a fantastic blog that I started following late last year after I tried her Apple Dumplings recipe to great ease and success. Ree is from the same part of the world as I am and her cookbook is filled with recipes of foods I grew up eating. Flipping through her cookbook is like taking a walk down memory lane.

Feeling nostalgic, then, and always looking for recipes starring beef for my meat-and-potatoes husband, I decided to make the pot roast recipe in The Pioneer Woman Cooks cookbook. I was curious how it would stack up to the Company Pot Roast recipe from Barefoot Contessa’s Back to Basics cookbook, which I had made a few weeks before.

On the surface, each pot roast had its similarities. Both require searing the meat before letting everything stew up and cook. Ms. Drummond’s recipe browns the carrots and onions before searing the meat, whereas Ms. Garten’s recipe holds off on adding the vegetables until after the meat is browned. Ms. Garten’s recipe also has more vegetables to add, which means more chopping but it also seems to mean more flavor.

Once the meat is seared on all sides, each recipe follows a similar line of thinking — add some liquid to deglaze the bottom of the pan, pulling up the brown bits which will add another layer of flavor. This liquid for both recipes goes on to keep the meat moist during the cooking process and later becomes the sauce. Ms. Garten doesn’t rely as much on the brown bits to add flavor because she has so many other ingredients which will do that. Both use alcohol to deglaze, but in different amounts, and Ms. Drummond suggests that only beef broth is needed to deglaze the pan if not cooking with wine.

Looking at the recipes side by side, the Pioneer Woman’s recipe has slightly fewer steps and a lot fewer ingredients. Ms. Garten’s recipe, however, is a bit more complex overall in the sense that it has more ingredients to keep track of and she adds one more step at the end which nearly stopped me in my tracks.  Honestly, the additional chopping and ingredients in Ms. Garten’s recipe is not a big deal to me. Really, it’s just adding a few minutes more to the prep time and more stuff to the pot. The most intimidating part of Ms. Garten’s recipe was toward the end when it calls for blending half the veggies and sauce to create a thick sauce which is textured by the cooked vegetables. At this point in Ms. Drummond’s recipe, you are sitting down to the table and eating, although her sauce is much thinner and soupier than what I find appealing.

Scooping out those veggies and liquid into a blender is definitely something that makes me nervous. That dutch oven with its soupy contents has been sitting in a hot oven for several hours. Moving all that to a blender seems overly messy and slightly dangerous.

Thankfully, at the beginning of this past winter I bought myself a Bamix Immersion Blender from Williams Sonoma. So many soup recipes call for blending half (or all) the ingredients after they have cooked and while they are still steaming hot. I had never had good luck moving hot liquids from one place to another in the past when I made soups and so I usually didn’t even try them anymore. It probably goes without saying that if I didn’t have the immersion blender then, I would probably never have made Ms. Garten’s recipe in the first place. I would have been quite content making Ms. Drummond’s version for the rest of my life.

BUT…I do have an immersion blender, so it was very easy to mix up those veggies and sauce together. The end result? All meat-eaters at the table preferred Ina Garten’s recipe over Ree Drummond’s. They all enjoyed both, don’t get me wrong, but the taste testers were unanimous in saying that the Company Pot Roast was more complex and had more flavor than the Pioneer Woman recipe. And so it is that Ina Garten again wins the hearts of those who sit around my table and, in doing so, gets my vote when it comes time to planning a hearty dinner menu including pot roast.

Next time? I take a look at the Morton’s Steakhouse recipe for Macaroni and Cheese!

Chicken with Morels

About three years ago I discovered Ina Garten and her “Barefoot Contessa” series on the Food Network. Her show and her cookbooks speak to me in such a way as to make cooking seem easy and important. So it is with gratitude that I humbly prepared her “Chicken with Morels” recipe from the Barefoot in Paris cookbook for a friend of mine who just had a baby.

The most difficult part about this recipe is finding some of the ingredients. This recipe comes out of her Barefoot in Paris cookbook, so some of the ingredients are more exotic to those cooking in the States. I live in the Phoenix metro area and we have access to places like Whole Foods and a local store called AJ’s, which specializes in gourmet ingredients. The Madeira wine, clarified butter, creme fraiche and morel mushrooms were ingredients I couldn’t locate in more common grocery stores like Safeway and Fry’s, but I did find them all at AJ’s. You can make clarified butter and creme fraiche, but it is much easier if you can locate them in a specialty foods store nearby or online.