PAWHUSKA, Okla. — Growing up in an Oklahoma town she considered too tiny, Ree Drummond sought the bright lights of a city and headed west for Los Angeles.
She never dreamed the journey would send her back to the plains of northeast Oklahoma, to a place with even fewer lights where she’s become known and built a brand as “The Pioneer Woman.”
Visitors from all 50 states, Canada, South America and England have come to The Pioneer Woman Mercantile, a store-bakery-restaurant she and her husband opened after starting a popular blog, then writing New York Times best-selling cookbooks and children’s books, hosting a Food Network cooking show and, her most recent venture, The Pioneer Woman Magazine. The magazine is the first of two planned editions released this month and available at The Mercantile and at Wal-mart, where she also has a signature line of cooking, kitchen and dinnerware. Her digital and print catalogues are all full of her quips about motherhood and quick-and-easy meals mixed with musings on her late basset hound and comparing her current life in cowgirl boots to one where she used to wear pumps.
Simply relatable
Recent blog entries covered everything from taking her home-schooled children to see the musical “Hamilton” on Broadway to finally finishing the TV show “Breaking Bad” and a forthcoming cookbook. Sony Pictures holds an option for a possible movie on her book “Black Heels to Tractor Wheels,” in which she recounts how she met her husband, who isn’t a smoker but whom she often calls “Marlboro Man.