A Week with the Pioneer Woman: Day 7

A Week with the Pioneer Woman: Day 7 The Ranch

All week I've been reviewing The Pioneer Woman's cookbooks and her Mercantile in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Today, I'm posting a handful of pictures of land near Drummond Ranch and The Lodge, a guesthouse on the ranch where The Pioneer Woman films her Food Network show. It's also the kitchen where she and her kids are for the covers of her second through fifth cookbooks. 

First, though, I'm sharing three photos of versions of three recipes I made tonight from Ree's fifth cookbook, Come and Get It! 

I mentioned in the review of that cookbook that there were plenty of recipes that I'd bookmarked, but I hadn't made many. For dinner tonight, I made the Roasted Garlic Pull-Apart Cheese Bread from pages 300-302 and Mango Chile Chicken page 106-107, and for dessert I made the very easy and incredibly delicious Caramel Apple Sundaes from pages 332-333. This pairing was an absolute smash with the family! The cheesy bread was a great starter, and when paired with the Mango Chile Chicken. The juice from the kale salad was delicious on its own, but dipping the bread in the zesty lemony juice was an unexpected treat. For the mango Chile chicken I used fresh mango, and the sauce from a jar of candied jalapeños. The caramel apple sundae was so simple and so delicious! We will definitely make these again, and I highly recommend them for your house!

Roasted Garlic Pull-Apart Cheese Bread

Mango Chile Chicken

Caramel Apple Sundaes

Drummond Ranch is an enormous swath of land west of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. I road tripped to Pawhuska with my wife and daughter in March, 2017 because we wanted to eat at The Mercantile and also because we could visit the ranch. The Mercantile's Website listed dates when The Lodge would be open for visitors, and we planned the trip accordingly. At the restaurant, we asked our server about tours of the ranch and she gave us directions to the property. It's a bit of a drive, but easy to find. As you'll see in the photos, they had just finished a controlled burn on much of the land.

While I've never seen the television show The Pioneer Woman films at The Lodge, I was excited to visit simply because she had featured so many photographs of the ranch in her cookbooks.  What a fantastic place! It's a billion dollar property, and it stretches as far as the eye can see. While we were disappointed with the food at The Mercantile, we were all glad we made the trip out to see the ranch. 

Like all great day trips, the best part was the journey with family, laughter, and great music. So what if we didn't love the food. We had fun together and made memories together. It was definitely worth the journey!