My New Cookbook-- The Pioneer Woman Cooks

In my last post I said how excited I was to get my new cookbook. Well it came, I read, and I loved it... for the most part. Here's a quick run-down on the book.

The Bad

• Not a lot of recipes. The book is a good inch-inch and a half thick, so when I first saw it (after Andy had lovingly opened it for be before I got home) I had dreams of reading and perusing my new cook book for a few hours. Then I opened it and looked through it and was a little disappointed by how few recipes there are. I expected somewhere between 50-100 recipes, but I would be willing to bet there was only 25-30 recipes. For a first cookbook this wouldn't be bad, but considering she has a blog where she has been posting recipes for a year or two I expected a lot more. How hard could it be to add some of those blog posts? I know they need to be original recipes, but I would expect her to have more original recipes on her site.
• Long introduction to herself and her family. Like her blog, this book has more than just recipes. She has photographs of her family and the ranch, which is great... but I'd rather have more recipes. If you've read her blog, you already know the whole story about how she got started and I just don't see anyone buying the book who hasn't read the blog.
• Not spiral bound. This may be silly, but I think the best cookbooks are spiral bound... not hardback. It's a lot easier to keep a spiral bound book open on the counter while you cook. And it stays cleaner because you're not trying to find ways to keep it open (like setting your bowl on top of the book).
  

The Good

• Lots and lots of pictures! Like in her blog, Drummond illustrates each step of the cooking process. And she took all the pictures for the book as well, so as a beginning cook it's nice to know that an actual human being made the actual food I'm looking at (and that it hasn't been enhanced by a food artist). However, the downside of the pictures is that one recipe can take up 2 or more pages (which leads to the thicker, more expensive book with less recipes).
• Real recipes! Growing up in the Midwest, these are foods I grew up with! Although my mom may not have made all these foods, I knew what they were and I loved them. She doesn't use a lot of fancy, expensive ingredients that you can only get if you live in a big city, I can get any of the ingredients I need from my local supermarket.
• Lots of variations... even on the recipes that may call for more expensive ingredients, Drummond has lots of different variations for making a more traditional (cheaper) version of the food... or for making a more exciting version.
  
• Hands down the best part though... this is just good reading. Even if you don't have time to make the recipes, it's a funny book. Drummond's character and sense of humor comes through in her recipes. There are some instructions where I just had to laugh out loud.

So, overall, this was a good book. I don't know that I would've bought it for myself, but that's just because I'm cheap and it's $27.95 (or something very close to that). If you've been an avid fan of The Pioneer Woman for awhile I'd be sure to look through it before you buy it because I've read a couple reviews that say she did take some of the material from her blog and they didn't like that (personally I would love if she did more of that! who really wants to hunt through a blog to find all your favorite recipes??).

The best thing about this book though, is that it gave me some inspiration for helping my sister make a college cookbook for my brother for Christmas (or if she decides not to do that then I'll make it for a graduation present for him). After trying to get some family favorite recipes from my mom I've decided that my brother needs a step-by-step compilation of recipes so he doesn't have to try to get my mom to explain how to make something (chop up some of this, add some of that, stir until it looks right... we all know people with those sorts of directions and measurements).