Pulling latest Category post into website. . .

Greeting all,
I’m new to WordPress, but I’m blown away by it’s ease of use and killer support!
That being said, I need to do something a bit more advanced and while I’m not a PHP noobie, this one is over my head.
Basically, I’ve got a site, let’s say http://www.somesite.com. I’m running a WP blog for that site at http://www.somesite.com/Blog.
On the homepage of my site, I needed to pull the 3 most recent blog posts into the homepage as preview versions of the posts. Easy enough, got that taken care of.
However, I also need to pull the latest post from a specific category, called “Recipes” into the home page as well. On the homepage, this will mean I’m displaying the 3 most recent posts, and also displaying the most recent post from the recipe category.
How can this be achieved without:
1) Without pulling the most recent recipe post in w/ the other 3 posts when it’s updated.
2) Filter the recent posts by category and pull the most recent recipe post into it’s proper place on the homepage.
Is this possible?
If it takes alot of coding, I’m willing to pay someone for the code!
I need this asap.
Thanks in advance to any and all for your help!
Huck