The Pioneer Woman Cooks (2 page)

Then, after living and working in L.A. post-college, I took another leap of independence by choosing not to follow my longtime college love to San Francisco and instead, to briefly move back to my hometown. I sold my futon and my Rollerblades, waved goodbye to the ocean, and headed back home. It’ll just be a brief pit stop, I told myself. A pit stop on the way to the rest of my life. I had no idea how prophetic that would be.

Once home, I immediately began making plans to move to Chicago, where I decided I’d work while applying to area law schools. Then, late one night during the Christmas holiday, I met a group of childhood friends for drinks at a local dive. That’s when I saw him—the cowboy—across the smoky room. We exchanged several glances, a few nervous stares. Soon we found ourselves talking into the night, my knees growing weaker by the minute, my gaze fixed on his icy-blue eyes. He was like no one I’d ever met before—serious, sexy, quiet. Certainly nothing like the golf-crazed, Izod-wearing boys I’d grown up with—and definitely nothing like the surfers of Southern California. We parted ways that night, and my plans for Chicago plowed forward. But his image was burned into my psyche.

Two weeks before my move to Chicago, the cowboy, the Marlboro Man–esque character I’d met in the smoky bar, called and asked me to dinner. That date turned into a second, which before too long was a fifth, then a sixth. By the seventh date, I’d canceled my move to Chicago, and before I knew it we were married and having babies on his isolated cattle ranch fifty miles from my hometown—and a million miles away from anything I’d ever envisioned for my life. I had no idea how I’d gotten there.

More than a decade and four kids later, I’m still adapting to life as a ranch wife. I have cows in my yard daily, piles of horse manure on my porch, and a dusty pile of clothes that reaches the ceiling. I still can’t saddle a horse. I freak out during tornadoes. And I haven’t eaten sushi in ages. My life in the country has been one long transition.

Food has been a huge part of it.

A former vegetarian and food snob, I’d spent my years in Los Angeles sampling all of the diverse culinary options the city had to offer: Italian food, Thai food, Indian and Greek food. Every meal was an adventure for me—a life experience. Culinary boredom was never a problem.

Once married and living in the country, it was a rude awakening to find out that cowboys don’t eat Ahi tuna. They don’t eat ginger-sesame noodles. They wouldn’t touch sushi with a ten-foot pole. Cowboys eat meat—lots of meat—with an occasional potato thrown in for balanced nutrition. What have I done? I asked myself, as I whisked my first skillet of sausage gravy. I can’t cook like this. I can’t live like this!

I spent a month mourning my old life. And then I decided if I couldn’t beat ’em, I’d join ’em. And I set out to create delicious food—food that would allow me to tickle my cooking fancy, but still make the cowboys’ hearts go pitter pat. These are the recipes I share in this book.

My food is flavorful, simple, and abundant—that’s the style of cooking that works in my life. It’s decidedly not noncaloric—cowboys work too hard to warrant that. And it’s always, always crowd pleasing—the recipes I’m sharing with you are tried and true, and have made many a person’s taste buds sing.

I love cooking. I love raising a family. And I love country life. It isn’t worry free or cushy. It isn’t seamless, easy, or without challenges. But it’s perfect for me. As someone who grew up smack dab in the middle of modern society, it’s a daily reminder of a simpler time—a time when folks worked the land, when take-out food was the exception, not the rule; and when decency, kindness, and hard work were the measure of a person’s success…. and when Starbucks didn’t exist on every corner.

(Not that I’d mind a Starbucks in our north pasture.)

I hope you get a kick out of this book of mine. It’s not overly polished or glossy…but then again, neither is my life on the ranch. I didn’t have a staff of assistants to help me; I took all my own photos for this book, and used nothing but the natural light in my kitchen. I had friends do the illustrations, and used clip art I’ve collected through the years. It’s nothing fancy. But it comes straight from my heart. Thank you for allowing me to share my world with you.

I’m still waiting for that staff of assistants to fall out of the sky, by the way. I’ve been holding my breath for years, and I still like to think they’re coming.

—Pioneer Woman

NEWS FLASH: ISOLATED RANCH WIFE ENTERS THE DIGITAL AGE

Marlboro Man and I had been married ten years when he took our kids—including our small baby—with him to work cattle one morning. In my pajamas, I stumbled to the computer and had the random thought, Maybe I should start one of those blog things. I really didn’t know much about blogs, but my mom lived in another state and I thought it would be a handy way to share photos of my kids with her. Using free online software I could barely navigate, I had a blog up and running within ten minutes. I posted a handful of photos of the kids, wrote a thought or two, then went about my day.

Within a week, I’d turned the blog into an online catchall for photos, random musings, and funny stories from my past. And the strangest thing had happened: strangers—folks I’d never met before—had stopped by and read my site, and had even left a few comments. I scratched my head, unsure why anyone would care about my silly little stories, but plowed ahead, continuing to chronicle my transition to country life, the ins and outs of raising children in a rural environment, and romantic tales of how I’d first met my husband in a smoky bar years earlier. Slowly but surely, people stopped by and read, and three years later, ThePioneerWoman.com is still a daily source of enjoyment and expression for me. It’s a place where the middle child in me is fed.

A few months after I started my blog, I posted a step-by-step pictorial entitled “How to Cook a Steak.” The response to the online recipe was favorable, mostly because I used no fewer than twenty detailed photos to describe each step of the process. A couple of weeks later, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I posted lessons for cooking lasagna and chocolate sheet cake. Folks tried the recipes and emailed me before, during, and after, sharing their success stories and expressing gratitude for my attention to the photographic, step-by-step detail that most people aren’t crazy enough to bother with.

Before long, I’d created a whole separate section on my website devoted entirely to cooking, and continued sharing many of my favorite recipes: pot roast, beef tenderloin, tiramisù, Asian noodle salad, and grilled chicken sandwiches. I shared food that had withstood the scrutiny of not only a ranch full of cowboys but also a house full of hungry kids. And folks came and read, continuing to thank me for showing them the step-by-step instructions. Today I’m still sharing my recipes online; it’s become a regular part of my week.

For me, it’s simple: I like to teach cooking the way I like to learn it. I want to see it happening in front of me, and I want to see what the dish looks like before, during, and after the cooking process. For this cookbook, I chose several of my favorite step-by-step classics from the website—those that have received the most raves—and have included many new recipes I love. All of the dishes in this book are very easy to prepare, and use widely available, simple ingredients. The dishes are not fancy, and they’re certainly not low-cal. But they’re always flavorful, hearty, and crowd pleasing.

I hope you love ’em!