The Costco Connection - December 2013

48 ;e Costco Connection DECEMBER 2013 cooking

creative
By Hana Medina

HOT OFF THE plane from her latest children’s book tour, Ree Drummond (aka “The Pioneer Woman”) is as gracious by phone as she seems in her award-winning blog ( thepioneerwoman.com), her top-selling books and her popular Food Network show. She’d been back on her family’s cattle ranch for only an hour when The Connection caught up with her. Despite her admission that she was hungry and fantasizing about her next meal, her humble nature shined through as she answered several questions from this reporter, who just can’t get enough of her pumpkin-spice muffin recipe.

A top name in popular food media, Drummond says she aspired to be Jane Pauley one day and a child psychiatrist the next as she grew up in suburban Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She may not have known what life had in store for her, but she followed her big-city dreams to Los Angeles for college and began a professional career working for a marketing firm.

On a brief trip back home, she had a chance
meeting at a bar with her future husband, Ladd, and
decided to stay. They eventually married and moved
to his operating cattle ranch outside of Pawhuska,
Oklahoma, nearly 60 miles north of Tulsa, where
she became “an accidental country girl”—the prem-
ise of her “Pioneer Woman” alter ego. While she
credits her culinary and entertaining skills to her
mother and mother-in-law, Drummond says she
learned “carnivorous cooking” from her husband,
because she was actually a vegetarian when they
met (which didn’t last much longer).
Garnering tens of millions of hits each month,
The Pioneer Woman blog began in 2006 as a place
to share Drummond’s budding photography skills
with family and friends. Despite being known for
her culinary prowess, she didn’t focus her writing
on the kitchen until eight months into launching
the site. “I started sharing things I was cooking, and
[that] part of my blog really took off, partly because
of the step-by-step photos I posted,” Drummond
says. “I did that because that’s just the way I like to
learn things. I’m very visual.”
Today, her blog details life on the ranch, and, of
course, all the traditional homemade goodies she
feeds her four kids (ages 9 to 16) and her husband.
Ree Drummond