Many of you have already heard of The Pioneer Woman, a woman who gave up city life and moved to a ranch in Oklahoma after falling in love with a cowboy. She has a completely fabulous website full of great photography, yummy recipes, funny stories of life on the ranch, and other awesomeness. I came across her blog last summer and have been reading ever since (along with thousands of others, I might add).
I put her recently released cookbook on my Christmas list, and my sister was excellent enough to get it for me. I finally cracked it open last night and started with her infamous linguine with clam sauce. (If you want to know why it’s infamous, you can read her story.)
First I read through the whole recipe, which in itself is impressive since I have a rather bad habit of NOT reading the entire recipe before beginning to cook something. (That gets awkward when I realize I’m all out of some key ingredient.) That’s how I knew to save the clam juice! And yes, I used canned clams. I used canned and dried ingredients mostly, which is probably not ideal, but hey — next time I’ll go for the fresh stuff.
I thought I could both cook the pasta and make the sauce at the same time, because cooking pasta is just not that hard. But it turns out I’m not so good with the multi-tasking and timing of multiple items in the kitchen quite yet. Fortunately Jose had just gotten home from class, so I gave him the pasta monitoring duties.
Shortly thereafter, it was done! And it was delicious! And look at me, I even got all inspired to take some photos, although mine certainly don’t compare to the ones in the book.
I’ll definitely make this recipe again, because as yummy as it was, I think it can be even better. First of all: more clams! I didn’t specify what size cans I needed when Jose went grocery shopping, so I only had about 2/3 the amount of clams that the recipe called for. Also, as I already mentioned: fresher stuff! I used garlic from a spice jar instead of actually mincing up a fresh clove and I used dried basil because we didn’t have the parsley the recipe called for. I don’t think this really hurt anything, but it wouldn’t hurt to use the fresh stuff — especially the parsley.
Overall verdict: YUM.
I love Pioneer Woman! All her recipes are delicious…the butter/heavy cream/bacon combo never hurts. 😉
Another good cooking website: http://crepesofwrath.net/ She searches out quick but excellent recipes, then takes pictures of the whole process and includes her notes on what worked, what didn’t, and what she’d do differently (sort of like you did, here, but in greater detail). It’s very helpful, and I’ve made several of her recipes with excellent results.