Pioneer Woman Challenge: 2010
Our love of The Pioneer Woman’s cooking blog is older than our own blog. Her eclectic home-style kitchen creations sang to our heart-songs, and we’d been devotees of her recipes long before Jennie received the Pioneer Woman Cookbook for Christmas in 2009. Emboldened by our friends and family’s warm reception of our young blog, and since we’d both recently read Julie and Julia, we decided we needed a project. In February of 2010, the Pioneer Woman Challenge was born. It seemed like a simple plan. 65 recipes in a little under 12 months seemed like a comfortable pace, and it was for a while. By Autumn of 2010, however, we started to feel the crunch. The last few months of the PW Challenge were a frenzied race to the finish line, and we loved every second of it. We learned to trust the Pioneer Woman and to trust each other. We also gained about ten pounds of butter weight. Read through the PW Challenge posts to relive the madness.
If you’d like to see the mayhem unfolding, check out all the PW Challenge Posts here.
Our last PW recipe was Marmalade Muffins, and the first I made again was…Marmalade Muffins. I needed to make something for a brunch with family friends, so I whipped these up alongside a coffee cake. We didn’t have oranges, so …
We’ve been meaning to write thank-you’s for a while, and now that we’ve had a moment to breathe, we find it a good time to say: To our LA family: Thank you for eating our food, letting us plan events …
Dear Pioneer Woman, We’ve spent the last year calling you by name almost daily, believing that you are our distant aunt, cousin, sister, friend, confidante. We have loved your book with the intensity of a favorite novel; pages are splattered …
We made you an index, because we’re VERY nice and we’d like you all to check back and remember the Pioneer Woman challenge any time you want… Angel Sugar Cookies Basic Breakfast potatoes BBQ Jalapeno poppers Beans Braised Beef Brisket …
PW’s final day found us making Pineapple Upside Down cake, which nearly did us in. When we were finishing the cake, we had to flip it over onto a plate, and nearly didn’t make it. We found ourselves laughing, saying, …
Two of our recipes that we had left were the ever-elusive Marmalade Muffins. Once in the grocery store, I remembered that this recipe was on our list, and purchased the only non-high fructose corn syrup orange marmalade in the store …
On our final Pioneer Woman challenge day we tackled the creme brulee recipe. In some ways, it was an utter failure. Our custard didn’t set quite right, and that’s sort of the whole point when it comes to creme brulee. …
