Searing meat may cause it to lose moisture in comparison to an equivalent amount of cooking without searing. Generally, the value in searing meat is that it creates a brown crust with a rich flavor via the Maillard reaction.
Setup is fairly easy for both Blogger and WordPress, especially if you go with the default templates. Both are intimidatingly feature-rich at first glance. Hmm, I set the Blogger title pretty easily at setup; I missed it for WordPress.
Both support WYSIWYG and HTML editing. WordPress is supposed to have Markdown support somewhere not too far behind the scenes.