Battle of the Celebrity Chef Vodka Cream Sauce recipes

For "food with liquor," I made penne with vodka cream sauce from a recipe by Giada de Laurentiis.* Wait, you might say (especially if you were Anastasia), didn't Anastasia just make that? Well, yes, but in my defense, there is not technically a rule against making exactly the same thing as someone else. Um. Also, it's exciting because we can compare celebrity chef recipes for the same thing. It's RACHEL RAY vs. GIADA DE LEURENTIIS!! Here goes:

Baseline trust level: Giada 9, Rachel 3. Rachel is a bigger star (I think), but I think it's because her inhuman perkiness makes her terrifying and thus impossible to look away from, which is not the same thing as wanting her to cook for you. Giada is Italian, which gives her cred, and while her cookbook does include an unnecessary number of pictures of her ta-tas, they do not frighten me.


Recipe reasonableness: Giada 5, Rachel 8. Sorry, G, but the whole thing of saying "use 3 cups of the marinara sauce you made earlier on page 32 (and which involves simmering for an hour)" is annoyingly reminiscent of The Joy of Cooking. However, she does get credit for pointing out that the cream has to be at room temperature or it will curdle--good tip! It could have helped Myrtle last week, perhaps.

Rachel's recipe is easier, but she gets points off for "1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, once around the pan in a slow stream"--snort--and, obviously, for the name "You Won't Be Single For Long Vodka Cream Pasta."

Taste: Giada: 9, Rachel 8. This is hard to judge, since I didn't taste Rachel/Anastasia's. The Giada recipe was really good--it looked and tasted delicious, with the promised vodka-induced "kick in the throat." I was dubious about the fact that the marinara sauce had carrots and celery in it, but that ended up being totally fine. Anastasia's sounded delicious too, but I give Rachel's recipe one point off for getting Stazio drunk--sounds like the recipe didn't give the vodka long enough to cook off.

Giada wins! Admittedly, I am not sure that that means I wouldn't use Rachel's recipe.

*I used Giada's recipe from the book "Everyday Italian," which is similar to, but for some reason not exactly the same as, this version of the recipe from her TV show of the same name. Both of them have you make a base tomato sauce first, then add vodka, cream, and Parmesan cheese, but the one in the book includes salt and pepper in the vodka sauce recipe, calls the base sauce "marinara" instead of "simple tomato sauce," and does not include basil or butter in the marinara sauce.