Like the living embodiment of a Land Run chuckwagon mowing over a tribe of Native Americans before the starting shots were even fired, all around fraudulent pop icon Ree Drummond, a.k.a. the Pioneer Woman, has seen her pseudo-Okie Empire grow just a little bit bigger with the debut release of her sold-out rustic lifestyle magazine this past week, imaginatively titled The Pioneer Woman. (If you can’t find a copy, don’t worry, just ask the first available mom you see outside a Target to borrow her Frappuccino stained copy.)
According to her polished, hand-crafted creation myth, Ree was born and raised on a country club in Bartlesville, relocated to Los Angeles for college, and then said goodbye to city life, married a wealthy cattleman from one of Oklahoma's most powerful families, and began blogging about the sanctity of "country" living, home schooling and eating butter from her multi-million dollar compound near Pawhuska – a city where her Mercantile and Deli brings in close to $6,000 tourism dollars a day from people who just find the experience of buying one her skillets at Wal-Mart not enough.
Ree's most loved for her warmed-over Southern Living recipes that were stolen from a Bartlesville country club member cookbook. Most of them are basic and derivative and wholly unspecial, but you wouldn’t know it from the rambling preamble that proceeds that main feature and the usually tediously cutesy anecdotes about homeschooling her kids or the Marlboro Man's butt.
With my rant over, and after a bit of delegation, here are five of the Pioneer Woman’s worst, laziest and most questionable recipes that have made her a superstar and your mother an Ugg-wearing alcoholic who can in no way compete.
_
Probably the most offensively milked recipe on her website—introductory story about how the Marlboro Man wouldn’t marry her unless she learned how make this dish aside, which says an awful lot about her pre-Pioneer days—is the recipe for Egg-in-a-Hole, which is literally a piece of bread with a hole in it and then an egg dropped of said hole and fried on a skillet.
She has a net worth of $8 million dollars, by the way.
_
Why buy a pre-made bag of Chex Party Mix—the party snack no one ever reaches for so you’re left with so many useless piles of it—like an absolute imbecile when you can purchase all of the singularly much-more expensive ingredients separately and throw them together in a bowl! The Pioneer secret? Tabasco sauce-covered sticks of butter.
(She also misspelled cojones as “kahones,” and then apologized for using the word “kahones,” but, to be fair, she is an idiot.)
-
I don’t care how white you are, that’s not salsa. That’s a sexually confused fruit salad being thrown out to the blogosphere to be exploited by the culturally appropriative whoremongers who don’t know any better.
-
When those pioneers and settlers came to conquer this once proud Indian land in the 1800s, they came with only three things: fortitude, gumption and…an outstanding love of mini meatball sammies! Forget dysentery, the leading one cause of death on the Chisholm trail was choking on a marinara slathered mini-sub. Lose three days and 15 minutes in the kitchen as the Pioneer Woman’s cultural reach exceeds her grasp and comes up confusingly shorter than usual. Take that noise back to Brooklyn, ya ‘effin fraud!
_
What happens when you take a scoop of ice cream and pour some European beer on it? A few million page-views and a multi-million dollar TV deal.
What’s most offensive to me about this post, however, is that why bother to even do the whole rustic, rural motif if you’re not gonna go full Okie with it? Every true Oklahoman knows that for the perfect holiday dessert, we like nothing more than a little six-point Bud Light drizzled on top of a still frozen Field’s Pecan Pie, a few oxys stolen from grandma to help ease the pain of a life left unrealized.
_
What if…the Pioneer Woman was from Valley Brook? Follow Louis on Twitter at @LouisFowler.
