Review: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
As a fledgling food blogger, I sit in admiration of the story of Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman. She’s got a great angle – a city girl who fell in love with a cowboy, then moved way, way out into the country because, as the inimitable Gladys Knight said, she’d rather live in his world than live without him in hers. And although she’s not a professional chef, she’s got plenty of culinary street cred, considering that she has a ton of kids (well, four), and the responsibility of feeding what seems like at least 20 family members and/or ranch hands at any given time.
Ree started as a humble hobby blogger. She distinguished herself from the masses by doing something on her blog that I’d never seen before: she painstakingly photographed every single step of her recipes. I mean, every tiny little detail is chronicled with an accompanying image. Sometimes this can venture into overkill territory, such as a picture of milk pouring out of a measuring cup to show what “add the milk” looks like. Yes, about 90% of those photographs are superfluous information for a person with even the most rudimentary cooking skills, but it’s what Ree does and she does it beautifully.
All this extra photography also makes for a gorgeous cookbook. The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier is a vision. Every single page is a luminous full-color feast for the eyes. It must have cost a small fortune to publish. (Ina Garten once said she refused to do a cookbook unless she could have a color picture for every recipe. Ree’s publishers were convinced to have about ten color pictures for every recipe. Nice.)
But this cookbook isn’t just a pretty face. The 100-plus recipes look scrumptious and have lots of family-style appeal, the writing style is casual and humorous, the directions are solid and laid out in a column format that is easy to follow, and there are no wacky ingredients or fancy kitchen gadgets required. But most of all, flipping through The Pioneer Woman Cooks will make you hungry. You’ll be inspired to go straight to your kitchen and start creating something delicious for your family. And I’m sure for Ree, that was the point.