Are you allowed to test pico de gallo recipes after Labor Day? Is there some rule like that wearing white thing? In any case, I guess I’m ok, since today is Labor Day. I decided to try out the Pioneer Woman’s pico de gallo recipe, since my magical garden-taming neighbor shared some of his garden tomatoes with me.
Image from The Pioneer Woman
There is very little in the world I like more than a garden tomato. I mean, garden tomatoes run a close second to expensive chocolate. I’m serious. I love them. But I’ve been getting a few a week from my neighbor this summer (pro tip: make friends with your gardening neighbors, especially if you have a brown thumb yourself) and I wanted to try something other than eating them plain (or with just a little bit of sugar sprinkled on them– sounds revolting but it’s heaven, I promise).
I did try to grow tomatoes one year, incidentally. This was before I had this blog, or they would have made it to the Fail Annals (heh, annals) for sure. I planted four tomato plants and got three tomatoes. Total. Those three tomatoes were damn delicious, but not worth the effort, I’m sorry to say.
I did a quick search for pico de gallo on Pinterest (after I did a quick search for salsa and realized I am too lazy to make salsa), and when Pioneer Woman’s recipe showed up, you know I had to try it. I am a blogger and, therefore, not immune to fangirling a little over the Pioneer Woman. She is blogging gold, people.
Plus, the recipe was super duper easy and you know how I love easy. All you need are tomatoes, onion, jalapeno, and cilantro. And lime juice, but we’ll get to that.
I probably didn’t need that whole onion, but it made me cry when I chopped it up and so I perversely decided its punishment was for me to eat it all. Take that, fucking onion.
I forgot to take pictures of the rest of the chopping process, but all I did was chop up tomatoes and onions and jalapenos and cilantro. It’s not that exciting, really.
Then mix it all up:
And, if you’re me, you forget the lime juice until the very last step and you use bottled instead of fresh because, well, you’re not the Pioneer Woman after all, and people pay to see you fuck things up, so there.
But this one was not a fuck-up, guys. It was pretty damn delicious. I ate almost the whole bowl myself. I also ate almost a whole bag of tortilla chips myself, but they were really just the vehicle for the pico de gallo.
Try it. You’ll like it. Pioneer Woman wins again.
47 Comments
YUM! In mine I add some pepper, salt, garlic, and a little lemon juice. Pico is so versatile. Great job on the chopping!
My husband has the greenest thumb ever. I, on the other hand, hate plants (they are not fun, or good to hug)… and tomatoes. This year he has approximately 42 tomato plants that are total sluts and so our kitchen counter is littered with tomatoes.
I should probably mention that he doesn’t really like tomatoes either.
Normally, we could force my mother to eat them but she is going out of town for 3 months.
I hate these friggen tomatoes.
Long story short (too late), if you were my neighbor, you would have the most fresh tomatoes ever, that is if my husband hadn’t also alienated you because your dog came within 4 inches of our grass.
I’m not a fan of pico de gallo or salsa in general myself, raw/chunky tomatoes are not my friend, but your last statement reminded me of a childhood memory. When we were little, my baby sister would eat a whole can of Frito Lay Jalepeño Dip with ONE chip.
I have to say that your salsa looks ,gasp, better than the original.
Your picture has better colors 🙂
My husband accidentally bought me her cookbook for Christmas one year. There were many issues with this but just lets say that I wasted approximately $100 trying her brisket (the online recipe) three times – we couldn’t even stand the smell in the house and our (I eat anything dog) would not touch it. Way too much salt. I’m glad you enjoyed it and I’m probably the small minority (and many people calling for my head cause “OMG PW”) yeah, not a fan – and not sorry. Put her cookbook out by the street and someone picked it up. Hope they lived through the copious amounts of salt used – I value my health. My husband learned my preferences the hard way.
I’m just impressed you chopped all that shit and still have all your fingers. Next time bust out the little $5 chopper from WalMart and be amazed.
All that jalapeño is gonna hurt like a bitch coming out.
Worth it.
I was sad to see you give that woman any additional attention; she’s a pretty terrible person.
I’m curious to find out why you think that? I sometimes read her blog for recipes, but I never watch her show (mostly because I don’t have cable).
I usually let you guys say what you want in the comments, but I have to say I don’t think Ree is terrible at all and I admire her in many ways.
I feel a little squicky bad talking other bloggers, but there is a whole blog dedicated to outing her as a fraud.
http://themarlborowoman.com/
I personally don’t know a WHOLE lot about the situation, but I’ve heard in many places all over the internet (granted it is the internet) that she’s a fake. Take it for what you will.
Oh my.
1. I’m not sure how anyone has enough time to do all that “outing” of a blogger.
2. I don’t think it makes you a fraud if you have an entrepreneurial spirit and some money to invest in your project. You can bet that if I had more money to invest in Pintester, I would totally do it. This blog came from nothing out of necessity, not out of some desire to be “real.” 😉
Fair enough. I personally don’t feel one way or the other about Ree (since I don’t read her blog) though I have stumbled across a few of her recipes on Pinterest that sounded yummy (like this one)! I was simply pointing out that Karen is far from the only person on the internet who doesn’t care for her. I’ll just see myself out.
Aw, don’t see yourself out. 😉 I do appreciate the link, since I was fairly dying of curiosity about why anyone would hate on Ree, who seems like a nice person to me! Thanks for sharing it!
When I first heard there was a “pioneer woman”.. I thought it was more like someone who was living off the land.. churning her own butter from her own cows and weaving cloth to make her own dresses…lol. I went to her site and saw that her thing was really more of a down home/ranch vibe with accessible recipes (not a lot of frog legs or fish eggs right?). As I see more of her blog, it is very apparent that she and her family have money. She isn’t (or didn’t) get rich from just this blog.. they already had the ranch and the cattle and the lucrative business. Her clothing tastes run to blouses that cost over 200 dollars.. nowhere near what I would spend! She has made her “brand” into a lucrative business..it does help that she started out with money to help make that happen. Probably had contacts that helped too. I know it is pretty unrealistic for me to achieve that.. even if I had the time to do it! But the Marlboro Woman blog.. it’s well a little petty.. I mean is she envious of her success? I mean, I could get all huffy because Jennifer Aniston looks better than me and there are a bazillion sports stars who make a ton more money and are arguablly not ver nice human beings. I just can’t waste that much effort on that type of thinking. So, I checkin on the PW somettimes.. but I know I will never live her fabulous life:)
I think that’s what a lot of blogger bashing boils down to, is jealousy. That’s my opinion, though. I can’t remember if she came from money, married into money, or both, but yeah she had money before the blog. But hey, as Pintester said above, she poured it into something she enjoys doing, so live and let live, right? (Wow, I did not mean for this to turn into a whole big thing. Sorry for filling up the comments with something off-topic, Pintester).
No, I’m totally loving this conversation. No need at all to apologize. 🙂 And, yeah, it struck me as jealousy, too…
I’m kind of a Pioneer Woman fangirl who’s read a lot of her stuff (okay, her recipes are pretty amazing) so that’s where I’m coming from when I say:
1. I think she came from money and also married into money. Hey, good for her, like KimJ said.
2. I do see why her “aww shucks, I’m just a lucky ‘ol blogger” persona can put people off. You came from money, you married into money, and you put a lot of your time, effort, and money into the Pioneer Woman empire (the cookbooks, the other books, the TV show, etc). Own that, girl.
I love the Pintester too. I wouldn’t even attempt half the crafts on Pinterest because I’d cut my thumb off on the first try.
The person that created an entire blog trashing this woman is pretty sad, in my opinion. What will be gained by it? Does the blog writer have a personal vendetta against Ree? Stupid. Her recipes are yummy. That’s all that should matter. And her dimples! Love those. 🙂
I had not heard of this, so I used the link to figure out what the problem was with The Pioneer Woman blog. As far as I can tell, the issue was:
a) Some people don’t like her looks and fashion sense
b) She has used recipes published elsewhere
and
c) She is a redneck/uses butter in her recipes
You can’t copyright a recipe. Lots of people publish recipes used elsewhere on their blogs – the point is to share a recipe that works for you, or show the cooking process, not necessarily to create new dishes.
I grew up in Alabama; a lot of people who live in rural areas are nostalgic for a style of cooking that is rich in butter and sugar. If you don’t like eating this way, read a different blog.
I didn’t really see the issues the Marlboro Man had with her as being substantial. Maybe I’m missing something?
I didn’t do too much digging into that site, but from what I got of it was 1) OMG SHE’S NOT A PERFECT DRIVER (are any of us? Really?) and 2) WHO THE FUCK WARMS BLACK PEPPER??? Seriously, does this person have a life besides dissing on another person based on what she wears and what she cooks? Yeesh.
Lol. It is strange what people will get worked up over on the internet.
Oh my, the author of that “blog” sounds like an unhappy, jealous, I can’t even think of any other words to describe them. What does speeding tickets have to do with anything and they way they make it sound like she committed armed robbery just because she got a few speeding tickets. I just can’t with some people…
Yeh. She says ‘every time you click on her site, your hard-earned cash is contributing to the delinquency of the black grandpa lovin’ Queen of Ketchup’.
Pardon? That’s a whole bunch of crazy.
Yum! I have a ton of garden tomatoes to use up right now (and I would totally share if you lived anywhere near me). I wonder if this would freeze? Probably not, I presume, since the point of pico de gallo is for everything to be fresh and crunchy.
That’s how I make mine except I use a bell pepper an only 1 jalapeno because I am a wimp.
And now I know what I am having for dinner for the rest of the week.
I’ve made something similar, and it rocks! I usually use bottled lime juice, too, because fuck it, and I leave out the cilantro because I’m one of those people that thinks it tastes like soap. It’s genetic or something.
It’s gotta be, because personally it’s my favorite herb, and I’ve never heard of anyone middle of the road over cilantro. It’s a love or hate thing, and I think it has to do with those bitter strips you had to lick in biology. Or something.
It actually is genetic!
I love learning things!
Like asparagus wee. Truly. Scientists did tests because some people think their wee smells after eating asparagus, and others don’t, and they wondered why some people had stinky wee and some not. Then they made the people sniff each others wee, and it turns out everyone does stinky wees after eating asparagus, it’s just that some people can’t smell whatever chemical compound it is that makes the stink. So there.
Wee. Hee hee. Wee.
I love pico, this sounds delicious! I’m impressed that there were no injuries. Though I’ll be using my food processor, myself. 😉
Is salsa harder to make than this? I thought it was mostly cutting stuff up too.
Salsa involves actually cooking things…
YUM! Who really uses fresh limes? I mean, other than Ina Garten.
I use fresh limes.. but only because we always have them in the house to put in our beer.. lmao
i cut up jalepenos for the first time the other day.. and ended up rubbing the juice on my face.. i was not a happy camper.. lets just say that sour cream works wonders to stop your face from burning off 🙂
What on earth is cilantro?
Is tht an American thing, because I’m one confused Aussie. I always thought cilantro was an alcoholic beverage. And I would be ok with that in a salad.
It’s a hispanic herb lol 🙂
It might be called fresh coriander in other countries? (It is the leaves of the plant that is sold as a dry spice, coriander.)
In North America for some reason in the past few decades, they’ve decided to drop the proper English language name for fresh coriander, which was, um, fresh coriander, lol, and go with the Spanish name instead of “cilantro”, likely because of Mexican cooking influence, etc. Not a week goes by that I don’t heard 10 confused people at a veggie counter here in Canada.
YUM. This looks awesome. 🙂
Ok, I can’t help it. This whole post makes me think of the Trout Fishing in America song. (Guess who has the CD playing in the car for her two-year-old nonstop.) Pico De Gallo — don’t get it in your eye-o, unless you wanna cry-o, even if you’re from Ontari-eye-o, etc. http://www.amazon.com/Big-Trouble/dp/B000S5B0CY/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_mus?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1379472518&sr=1-1&keywords=trout+fishing+in+america
Hi! You’re my fav blogger, by the by! For a less tear filled experience, try a shallot instead of the onion. Plus garlic. If you like garlic. Now I need tomatoes… and jalapeno… and cilantro… and chips….