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
The Costco
Connection
The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A
Year of Holidays is available in
most Costco locations.
Accidental country girl turned accidental Food Network star
The
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