Ree Drummond
Encyclopedia
Ann Marie "Ree" Drummond (née Smith, born January 6, 1969) is an award-winning American blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

ger, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, food writer, photographer and television personality who lives on a working ranch outside of Pawhuska, Oklahoma
Pawhuska, Oklahoma
Pawhuska is a city in and the county seat of Osage County, Oklahoma, United States, and the capital of the Osage Nation. The population was 3,589 at the 2010 census, a decline of 1.2 percent from 3,629 at the 2000 census. The ZIP Code for the city is 74056...

. In February 2010, she was listed as No. 22 on Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...

' Top 25 Web Celebrities -- one of only three women. Her blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

, The Pioneer Woman, which documents Drummond's daily life as a ranch wife and mother, was named Weblog of the Year 2009 and 2010 at the Annual Weblog Awards (The Bloggies).

Drummond has appeared on Good Morning America
Good Morning America
Good Morning America is an American morning news and talk show that is broadcast on the ABC television network; it debuted on November 3, 1975. The weekday program airs for two hours; a third hour aired between 2007 and 2008 exclusively on ABC News Now...

, the Today Show on NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

, The View and The Bonnie Hunt Show
The Bonnie Hunt Show
The Bonnie Hunt Show is an American syndicated talk show hosted by Bonnie Hunt. It premiered on September 8, 2008. It is the second show featuring Bonnie Hunt to have that title. The first was a sitcom that ran for one season in 1995 and was retitled Bonnie when it returned after a mid-season hiatus...

. She has been featured in Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal is an American magazine which first appeared on February 16, 1883, and eventually became one of the leading women's magazines of the 20th century in the United States...

, Woman's Day
Woman's Day
Woman's Day is aimed at a female readership, covering such subjects as food, nutrition, fitness, beauty and fashion. The magazine edition is one of the "Seven Sisters", a group of women's service magazines....

, People Magazine and Southern Living
Southern Living
Southern Living is a widely read lifestyle magazine aimed at readers in the Southern United States featuring recipes, house plans, and information about Southern culture and travel...

. Her first cookbook
Cookbook
A cookbook is a kitchen reference that typically contains a collection of recipes. Modern versions may also include colorful illustrations and advice on purchasing quality ingredients or making substitutions...

, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, was published in October 2009. Her second cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier, is scheduled for release in March 2012.

Early Life

Ann Marie, nicknamed Ree, grew up on the grounds of a country club in the corporate town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma
Bartlesville, Oklahoma
Bartlesville is a city in Osage and Washington counties in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The population was 43,070 at the 2010 census. Bartlesville is located forty-seven miles north of Tulsa and very close to Oklahoma's northern border with Kansas. It is the county seat of Washington County, in...

, with two brothers, Doug and Mike, and a younger sister, Betsy. Mike is developmentally disabled. She graduated from Bartlesville High School
Bartlesville High School
Bartlesville High School is a public high school located in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Built in 1939, it was originally called College High School, and until 1950 housed a junior college as well as the high school. Its Streamline Moderne building was designed by Tulsa architect John Duncan...

 in 1987 after which she left Oklahoma to attend college in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. She graduated from the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

 in 1991, having first studied journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 before switching to gerontology
Gerontology
Gerontology is the study of the social, psychological and biological aspects of aging...

. After graduation she planned to attend law school in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, but her plans changed unexpectedly when she met and married her husband, Ladd Drummond.

Her father, William Douglas Smith, an orthopedic surgeon, and her mother Gerre Schwert divorced. "Bill" Smith, as he is more commonly known, later married his current wife, Patsy.

Ree was raised Episcopalian. She is an alumni member of Pi Beta Phi
Pi Beta Phi
Pi Beta Phi is an international fraternity for women founded as I.C. Sorosis on April 28, 1867, at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois. Its headquarters are located in Town and Country, Missouri, and there are 134 active chapters and over 330 alumnae organizations across the United States and...

 sorority.

Blog (ThePioneerWoman.com)

Drummond began blogging in May 2006, initially using the subdomain
Subdomain
In the Domain Name System hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain.- Overview :The Domain Name System has a tree structure or hierarchy, with each node on the tree being a domain name. A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain, the only domain that is not...

 pioneerwoman.typepad.com within the Typepad
TypePad
TypePad is a blogging service from company Say Media . Originally launched in October 2003, TypePad is based on Six Apart's Movable Type platform, and shares technology with Movable Type such as templates and APIs, but is marketed to non-technical users and includes additional features like...

 blogging service. She registered her own top-level domain
Top-level domain
A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...

 - thepioneerwoman.com - on October 18, 2006.

Drummond's widly successful blog, titled The Pioneer Woman, was originally titled Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. The latter is now the title of a section within the site. The site is hosted by Rackspace
Rackspace
Rackspace US, Inc. is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008...

.

Drummond writes about topics such as ranch
Ranch
A ranch is an area of landscape, including various structures, given primarily to the practice of ranching, the practice of raising grazing livestock such as cattle or sheep for meat or wool. The word most often applies to livestock-raising operations in the western United States and Canada, though...

 life and homeschooling
Homeschooling
Homeschooling or homeschool is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school...

. About a year after launching her blog, she posted her first recipe and a tutorial on "How to Cook a Steak". The tutorial was accompanied by 20 photos explaining the cooking process in what she calls "ridiculous detail". Her stories about her husband, family, and country living, and her step-by-step cooking instructions and elaborate food photography, proved highly popular with readers. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman won honors at the Weblog Awards (also known as the Bloggies) in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. In 2009 and 2010 it took the top prize as Weblog of the Year.

As of September 2009, Drummond's blog reportedly received 13 million page views per month. In May 9, 2011, the blog's popularity had risen to approximately 23.3 million page views per month and 4.4 million unique visitors. According to an article in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, "This is roughly the same number of people who read The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast is an American news reporting and opinion website founded and published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as well as the short-lived Talk Magazine. The Daily Beast was launched on October 6, 2008, and is owned by IAC...

". An article in the Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

 Globe and Mail described it as "[s]lickly photographed with legions of fans . . . arguably the mother of all farm girl blogs." The blog has been referenced in the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, and BusinessWeek
BusinessWeek
Bloomberg Businessweek, commonly and formerly known as BusinessWeek, is a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P. It is currently headquartered in New York City.- History :...

. In 2009 TIME
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....

 Magazine named Drummond's Confessions of a Pioneer Woman one of the "25 Best Blogs" in the world. Estimates for her site's income suggest she is making a million dollars or more per year from display income alone.

Drummond's blog is especially noted for its visually descriptive recipes and high-quality photography.

Food Community (TastyKitchen.com)

In April 2008, Drummond held a giveaway contest in the cooking
Cooking
Cooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training...

 section of her blog The Pioneer Woman in which she asked readers to share one of their favorite recipes. The response was an unexpected 5000+ recipes in less than 24 hours. She realized that she had not only grown a community of loyal readers but a community of food lovers as well. She immediately sought a way to catalog the recipes and make them searchable for all.

A little over a year later, on July 14, 2009, Drummond announced the launch of TastyKitchen.com - a simple and free online community website with the tag line Favorite Recipes from Real Kitchens Everywhere!. The site was built for her food loving readers as a place where they could easily contribute, search for and print recipes. In addition to sharing recipes, users can create personal membership profiles and communicate with one another via posts and direct messages. Users also have the ability to rate and review recipes.

Tasty Kitchen quickly rose to become a favorite among food bloggers who could link their recipes back to posts on their own websites, thus exposing themselves to a wider readership.

Books

The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl

Drummond's first cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, was published in October 2009 after reaching the top spot on Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

's preorder list for hardcover books. A New York Times reviewer described Drummond as "funny, enthusiastic and self-deprecating", and commented: "Vegetarians and gourmands won’t find much to cook here, but as a portrait of a real American family kitchen, it works."

Black Heels to Tractor Wheels

In 2007, Drummond began writing a series on her blog titled From Black Heels to Tractor Wheels. In the series, she chronicled her personal love story detailing how, in the process of relocating from Los Angeles to Chicago, she wound up settling down with a cowboy on a cattle ranch in rural Oklahoma. In February 2011, the series was compiled into a book and published by William Morrow
William Morrow and Company
William Morrow and Company is an American publishing company founded by William Morrow in 1926. The company was acquired by Scott Foresman in 1967, and sold to Hearst Corporation in 1981. It was sold along to the News Corporation in 1999...

, an imprint of HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

. It quickly rose to No. 2 on both The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover nonfiction and The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

's list.

Charlie the Ranch Dog

In April 2011, Drummond published a children's book titled Charlie the Ranch Dog, featuring her family's beloved Basset Hound
Basset Hound
The Basset Hound is a short-legged breed of dog of the hound family. They are scent hounds, bred to hunt rabbits and hare by scent. Their sense of smell for tracking is second only to that of the Bloodhound....

 Charlie. According to Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...

, “Adult readers will recognize in Charlie’s voice the understated humor that has made Drummond’s blog so successful; kids should find it irresistible.” The book was illustrated by Diane deGroat, an illustrator of more than 120 children's books.

The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier

Drummond's second cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier, is scheduled for release in March 2012.

Television

Drummond made her first major television debut on an episode of Throwdown! With Bobby Flay
Bobby Flay
Robert William "Bobby" Flay is an American celebrity chef, restaurateur and reality television personality. He is the owner and executive chef of 12 restaurants: Mesa Grill in Las Vegas, New York City, and the Bahamas ; Bar Americain in New York City and Uncasville, Connecticut; Bobby Flay Steak...

when the celebrity chef challenged her to a special Thanksgiving face-off. Flay traveled to her Oklahoma ranch for the event. The episode aired on the Food Network
Food Network
Food Network is a television specialty channel that airs both one-time and recurring programs about food and cooking. Scripps Networks Interactive owns 70 percent of the network, with Tribune Company controlling the remaining 30 percent....

 on Wednesday, November 17, 2010. Drummond's home cooking beat Flay's gourmet-style spread in a tight contest. Garth Brooks
Garth Brooks
Troyal Garth Brooks , best known as Garth Brooks, is an American country music artist who helped make country music a worldwide phenomenon. His eponymous first album was released in 1989 and peaked at number 2 in the US country album chart while climbing to number 13 on the Billboard 200 album chart...

' wife, country music
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...

 artist and fellow Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...

 resident Trisha Yearwood
Trisha Yearwood
Patricia Lynn Yearwood, professionally known as Trisha Yearwood , is an American country music artist. She is best known for her ballads about vulnerable young women from a female perspective that have been described by some music critics as "strong" and "confident."Trisha Yearwood signed with MCA...

, was one of the judges.

In April 2011, the Food Network
Food Network
Food Network is a television specialty channel that airs both one-time and recurring programs about food and cooking. Scripps Networks Interactive owns 70 percent of the network, with Tribune Company controlling the remaining 30 percent....

 announced that Drummond would host her own daytime television series on the network. Pioneer Woman premiered on Saturday, August 27, 2011.

Film

On March 19, 2010, Drummond confirmed media reports that Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

 had acquired the film rights to her book From Black Heels to Tractor Wheels. The production company was reported to be in talks with Reese Witherspoon
Reese Witherspoon
Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon , better known as Reese Witherspoon, is an American actress and film producer. Witherspoon landed her first feature role as the female lead in the film The Man in the Moon in 1991; later that year she made her television acting debut, in the cable movie Wildflower...

 to star as Ree in a motion picture based on the book.

Personal Life

On September 21, 1996, Drummond married Ladd Drummond, a fourth-generation member of a prominent Osage County
Osage County, Oklahoma
Osage County is a county in the northern part of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. Coterminous with the Osage Indian Reservation, it is the home of the federally recognized Osage Nation. As of the 2010 census, the population was 47,472 a 6.8 percent increase from 2000, when the population was 44,437...

 cattle ranching family. They spent their honeymoon in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. They live on a remote working cattle ranch approximately 25 miles north of Pawhuska, Oklahoma
Pawhuska, Oklahoma
Pawhuska is a city in and the county seat of Osage County, Oklahoma, United States, and the capital of the Osage Nation. The population was 3,589 at the 2010 census, a decline of 1.2 percent from 3,629 at the 2000 census. The ZIP Code for the city is 74056...

 with their four children - Alex, Paige, Bryce and Todd. Drummond refers to her husband as "the Marlboro Man
Marlboro Man
The Marlboro Man is a figure used in tobacco advertising campaign for Marlboro cigarettes. In the United States, where the campaign originated, it was used from 1954 to 1999. The Marlboro Man was first conceived by Leo Burnett in 1954. The image involves a rugged cowboy or cowboys, in nature with...

" in her books and her blog. They homeschool their children.

Awards

External links

  • The Pioneer Woman blog
  • Tasty Kitchen food community
  • Pioneer Woman cooking show on Food Network
    Food Network
    Food Network is a television specialty channel that airs both one-time and recurring programs about food and cooking. Scripps Networks Interactive owns 70 percent of the network, with Tribune Company controlling the remaining 30 percent....

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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