Sometimes my husband and I get pretty deep into Fantasy Move Mode—our two favorites: buying a house in the countryside in the north of Italy or moving to upstate New York onto an old farm and just totally changing our lives. Of course, it’s just talk, and even when those conversations seem as serious as taxes, somewhere in my mind I think I know we’re not really going to do it. I mean, maybe; but not likely. Ree Drummond, though? She’s definitely not all talk—she really did it.
In the introduction to her great, new cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes From an Accidental Country Girl, she throws down about her former stiletto-wearing life in L.A. and living it to the fullest in the fast-and-fabulous lane. But while she eventually grew weary of the California trip, she thought maybe her future still lay in a different type of metropolis. What she couldn’t have predicted was on a trip home to Oklahoma to recharge and rethink her path, she was actually stepping into her new life as a woman who would fall head over high-heels for a cute n’ craggy rancher (she calls him the Marlboro man, and when you look at the photo on page 87, you’ll totally get why), bear four children, begin a love affair with cowboy boots, and become a spitfire kitchen guru in a complete 180 life turnaround, all on a desolate ranch 50 miles from her hometown.
And this is one of the things I really like about this book—Drummond, who began her pages via the modern-day form of the manuscript, the Blog, writes with the kind of unfettered enthusiasm that is utterly infectious. She loves to cook, she loves to feed people, and she loves giving props to her friends and family, which almost makes the book read a little like your high-school yearbook, but in the best possible grown-up way. She also photographed the entire tome herself (and quite well, I might add), from delicious pictures of the food (and step-by-step photo preparation pics, so you can see how the recipes are supposed to look as you go along), to loving photos of her husband, kids, the ranch, her friends, their horses, and her hilarious, droopy-eye basset hound. It gives the book an intimate, fun feel and makes you want to dive into Ree’s homey, crowd-pleasing, and totally not low-calorie (but seriously, enough with the low-calorie!) dishes, like rib-eye steak with whiskey-cream sauce (yum), buttermilk fried chicken (double yum!), and bacon-rich pinto beans and cornbread (seriously, now I’m very, very hungry). She doesn’t particularly try to fancify her dishes (there are recipes for jalapeno poppers and stuffed potato skins), but she uses good ingredients and, damn, if anyone’s made me want to eat a jalapeno popper in recent days, it’s her.
By the way, she’s got a slammin’ kitchen, too, which is featured prominently in a bunch of those photos, and only serves to fuel my Fantasy Move notions all the more. Meanwhile, I’m dog-earing pages and oiling up my cast-iron pans for when my stove is up and running next week. Woo hoo!
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