The One Recipe Ree Drummond Regrets Filming For The Pioneer Woman
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Who hasn't made a silly kitchen blunder and inadvertently ruined a meal? We've all been there, so it can feel reassuring when pro chefs and celebrity cooks admit that they mess up sometimes. From making a mistake when reading a recipe to leaving out ingredients (or using the wrong ones), not every meal can end up perfect — even for The Pioneer Woman herself.
In her book, "Frontier Follies: Adventures in Marriage and Motherhood in the Middle of Nowhere," Ree Drummond describes her one recipe regret while filming her Food Network show, "The Pioneer Woman." She made a fried chicken pizza that she envisioned very differently, but time constraints led to a comedy of errors, culminating in an unwieldy pizza topped with giant pieces of frozen chicken strips and goopy coleslaw. She described it as "my least-favorite recipe I ever filmed," and Food Network itself has immortalized it with a clip on its Facebook page.
The idea could have been a good one, but in its execution it fell flat. The store-bought ingredients weren't terribly impressive — maybe if Drummond had made her own flavorful barbecue sauce instead of using a bottled variety, and cooked up some fresh and crispy fried chicken, it may have seemed less thrown-together. As such, the reheated chicken strips ended up chunky and limp, and the saucy slaw looked like it turned everything soggy. In her book, Drummond notes, "I figured it would look better on TV when it aired. I was wrong."
Regrets, she's had a few
The pizza incident wasn't the only time Ree Drummond's best intentions flopped. In an interview with Delish, she admitted to a dessert fail that not only messed up her after-dinner treat, but also ruined everything in her freezer. When she decided to make homemade green tea ice cream, its flavor wasn't the problem; it was that her freezer didn't properly close. She ended up with green goop that never had a chance to set, as well as a freezer full of thawed food gone bad.
If getting distracted has ever caused you to burn your meal, you can be grateful that at least your blooper didn't end up on television, like another one of Drummond's mistakes. This particular incident happened on an episode of "The Pioneer Woman" aptly titled "Let's Get Toasted." Drummond puts a pan of s'mores into the broiler, but they came out on fire. The video of the incident shows her attempting to blow out the flames and exclaiming "I had no idea it was so hot!"
Drummond is not alone in burning her s'mores. Recently, Martha Stewart's s'mores stirred up a fiery debate by virtue of her marshmallows being burnt to a crisp (and her recipe also contains no chocolate). It seems like not even pro chefs can placate everyone (or themselves) all of the time.
Ree Drummond has had a happy accident, too
While cooking goofs can sometimes result in food getting tossed in the trash, there is such a thing as a happy kitchen accident. Ree Drummond told Taste of Home about a time when she misread a recipe, but it became a huge hit with her husband. She made a Texas sheet cake for him using her mother-in-law's recipe, and the cake came out delicious. Indeed, maybe a little too delicious, because her husband remarked that her version was even better than his mother's. While that's quite the compliment, Drummond couldn't figure out how the cake turned out different, as she (apparently) followed the recipe exactly.
After carefully reviewing her steps, she figured out that Mom's recipe had called for "1 c. butter," which Drummond had taken to mean one cup (or two sticks). But what the instructions actually meant by the "c." was a cube of butter — which is the equivalent of one stick in most American cookbooks, though some say a cube equals ¼ of a stick. Referring to butter measurements as cubes is a somewhat obsolete and regional designation, though you'll still come across it in old recipes. Using much more fat translated into an even richer and more decadent cake. Thanks to this opportune miscalculation, Drummond still makes this cake way the way she did that first time.