She was a big city girl (although originally from a small town in Oklahoma) who fell in love with a gen-yoo-wine cowboy and now lives with him and their four home-schooled kids on a vast, isolated working ranch. She cooks up grub from down home recipes and always seems to have a smile on her dimpled face.
How much for real is she?
I know she started out with a blog, then a cookbook. Now she has a cooking program and all the behind-the scenes shows I’ve seen about Food Network programs reveal a huge back-up staff for shopping, prep, and cleaning.
I don’t expect her to do everything herself. But I’m thinking of when the Martha Stewart Phenomenon first happened Way Back When… you only ever saw Martha in the pictures, in the kitchen, in her manicured gardens. walking among her thousands of rose bushes. Then it came out that she had a huge army of helpers. Well, it made perfect sense-- you would HAVE to have a huge army of helpers to do what Martha did.
So does Ree have lots of unseen helpers? Does she really do everything by herself in her kitchen with only one camera operator to record her activities?
And while we’re on the subject… what exactly are her circumstances? Tonight’s show (a rerun) had her making dinner for “Cowboy Josh” who “lives on the ranch.” She made the dinner, which looked absolutely *delish *(to quote Rachael Ray) in the kitchen where she usually cooks on the show, then got in her SUV and delivered dinner to Josh at his house, and went on to where her husband and kids were at *their *house. So… where was the kitchen? How many residences are there on this ranch?
Paula Deen’s show was also filmed at her actual home but of course she had a production team getting everything set up and read (and cleaned). PW is no different.
I don’t know much about her, though when I’ve used her recipes I always have to cut back on the butter and sugar. Butter and sugar is delicious, but if 1 stick of butter is perfect, having 2 is getting into gross territory.
I know she is widely accused of being a fraud, but I haven’t been interested enough to follow up on that.
I read her blog and tried a few recipes. Back then at least I think she was a bored city girl stuck in the middle of nowhere on a ranch with a hungry husband and screaming kids.
Her life today is probably much different with traveling and tv appearances.
I certainly don’t consider her a “fraud” – I’m sure she really lives on this ranch and drives many miles to the grocery store and her husband works cattle and he’s teaching the kids to be great with horses as well. I’m just wondering how much help she has.
So… what is The Lodge? Is that for guests or something? When she drove up to the house with the dinner, the house looked quite modest. The Lodge looks palatial.
I wonder how many other households live on the ranch like Cowboy Josh.
There’s a lot of PW haters out there. There’s even a website – the name of it escapes me at the moment – which claims to debunk the whole “city girl stuck in the country” theory.
She married into one of the wealthiest families in OK. Her husband’s family were homesteaders in that particular area. They’ve been ranching for many, many, many years.
I don’t want to get into details/rumor mongering here. Let’s just say that “Pioneer Woman” is a very clever branding strategy, and she hit the blog scene right before it exploded.
There are stories floating around the web about her treatment of some of the guest bloggers she had in the early days. They are not complimentary.
I used to read her blog years ago. She detailed the building of The Lodge (my first reaction to the dimensions and such were, “I bet she’s aiming to get on TV”, and I was right), and I loved her “slice of ranch life” posts because, as a bona-fide city girl, I have absolutely no experience with that kind of lifestyle. For me, her blog lost that innocence once she published the cookbook because you just knew she was aiming for something bigger. You can’t fault her for that – I daresay it was one of her bigger goals all along.
I’ve made a few of her recipes, but honestly they’re nothing special IMO.
I can see where she would push people’s buttons. Any time you “go public” and get a little success under your belt, you might as well paint a target on your forehead. The internet just magnifies the plusses and minuses.
So what if she’s not 100% “authentic”? She’s funny, entertaining, gives great prizes (though through some oversight, I have never won one) and is a good photographer. I do miss the days where it was more blog and less marketing but I still enjoy it. It’s free entertainment, unless you choose to buy her cookbooks and it’s pretty fun IMHO.
I never thought her recipes were groundbreaking but they do make great holiday fare (my family begs for Creamy Herbed Potatoes every Christmas) and for myself, a home cook who wanted some variety, they gave me several simple guides to dishes I can competently make now such as risotto, braised short ribs,chicken parmesan, etc. I never thought they were purely original recipes but they did say “Hey, you can do this!” to me.
It helps that Ree is close to my age, and I’m a horse-y kind of person that also has hung out with cowboys (and not team ropers- the type that actually live in a bunkhouse and make their living on a ranch). It was obvious to me, even before the tv show, that the Drummonds lived on a VERY wealthy and well-established ranch and I never thought she tried to portray it otherwise.
I think she’s very supportive of other bloggers- at least she regularly has showcased one or another for several years so not sure how she could be that viciously competitive with her fellow bloggers.
Lastly, I think this story, which had my entire vet office in stitches for about a week when it came out on her blog, justifies any “non-authentic” aspects of her life:
I have the original when it came out and the (slightly) revised, I’ve read EoCL more than I’ve read the Bible! But Carla Emery never had a TV show or blog, always struck me as one of those old-fashioned super-energetic farm wife types. How is it you don’t think she did everything herself?
It depends. If (note I’m saying if) she plagiarizes other people’s recipes and claims them as her own and then profits from them, I have a problem with that. If she’s just a liar or whatever about her circumstances? Couldn’t care less.
Recipes have been passed around and handed down for a hundred years. Great grandma’s wonderful pineapple upside down cake recipe may have come from her local newspaper. Years later, her daughter submits it to a local church cookbook. The granddaughter shares it with Ree in 2011. By this time nobody has a clue where in the heck the recipe came from. All that matters is it’s a great cake that thousands of people cook.
I can’t get shook up about recipe copyright unless people are ripping off current cookbooks. Even then I don’t believe every Martha Stewart recipe was invented by her. Shes using old recipes that were passed down through the generations just like everybody else.