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Unlikely Path: City girl turned country has popular blog on ranching lifestyle, cooking
City girl turned country has popular blog on ranching lifestyle, cooking
Los Angeles Times Photo
This iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing is a simple recipe in blogger’s book.
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Published: November 4, 2009
Ree Drummond likes to call herself an accidental country girl and she considers herself something of an accidental cook. But there's nothing accidental about the success she has built combining those two.
Drummond writes the Pioneer Woman blog (www.pioneerwoman.com) and gets about 13 million page views a month, enough to spin off a cookbook: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes From an Accidental Country Girl. Technorati ranks the Pioneer Woman on its list of the 100 most powerful and influential blogs in the world.
Each month, about 2 million women -- and her readers are mostly women -- flock to the blog to live vicariously as Drummond unspools her "how in the world did I end up here?" story of a city girl who now finds herself a wife and mother of four living on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. It is by turns hilarious, romantic, poignant -- and illustrated by loads of photographs that chronicle her kitchen's goings-on. (A recent cake recipe used 53 photos!)
The heart of Pioneer Woman is its food corner, the Pioneer Woman Cooks. There are canning instructions, and one perennially popular entry is a step-by-step "how to" on cooking a steak. And there are hundreds of recipes. Recipes, though, are almost beside the point.
She never intended to live on a cattle ranch. Although Drummond was raised in Oklahoma, she fled just as soon as she could, heading for Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.
Once in L.A., she discovered sushi. And Thai. And authentic Mexican food. And had a stint as a vegetarian. She was a journalism major at first, and then switched to gerontology. After leaving college in 1991, she worked for a while in L.A. before moving back home to Oklahoma. It was supposed to be just a pit stop on the way to law school in Chicago.
"In my wildest, wildest dreams, my stay in Oklahoma wouldn't be beyond three months."
She was having drinks with some old friends when she locked eyes across a crowded room with an honest-to-goodness cowboy.
Within just 10 days, Drummond knew: It was goodbye, Chicago, and hello, Marlboro Man (her blog name for her now husband).
Now, Drummond lives on a fourth-generation cattle ranch -- one of the biggest in the state -- that is about 40 miles from where she grew up. And it seems that everywhere she turns, she sees another hungry mouth to feed, including four kids, her husband, ranch hands, more than 4,000 head of cattle, 2,000 wild horses and a clutch of cows that wander up on the back porch.
The blog started in May 2006 like so many other blogs -- as a place to post family photos and updates for far-flung friends and relatives. "I had no idea that anyone would read it -- anyone except for my mother."
She started the blog in May 2006 and posts several times a week, and her style -- easy-going, self-effacing and filled with observations -- makes readers feel like they just stopped by for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie.
Her cookbook, which includes new recipes and old favorites, as well as her trademark step-by-step photography, is a natural extension of the blog. Just as Drummond never thought she'd end up back in the country, she also never imagined that she would be writing a cookbook.
"I think that's really the moral of all this. You can go ahead and feel free to make all the plans you want in life, but who knows where you'll really be in 15 or 20 years. I look around and I don't recognize anything about my life."
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