Frontier Follies

by Ree Drummond

  Then there was the Great Dane that showed up at my back door one day when it was storming and Ladd and the kids were all gone for the day. He was so tall, I thought he was a Peeping Tom for a minute, and then I thought he was a horse. Once I determined he was neither, I let him into our mudroom and wrapped him in a very large blanket. We fell in love and spent the whole afternoon getting to know each other, but when Ladd got home that evening, he said we couldn’t keep him.

  “Why not??” I cried. “Look at him—he’s so happy here, and he can keep me company on long, lonely days.”

  “But you have five other dogs,” he quite correctly pointed out. “And I didn’t know you were lonely.”

  “I’m keeping him,” I said defiantly.

  “You can’t,” he replied.

  “I’m older than you,” I reminded him.

  “You can’t keep him, because . . .,” he began.

  “Yes, I can,” I interrupted. “You’re not the boss of me.”

  Ladd took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “You can’t keep him because he belongs to my cousin Joe,” he explained. I guess Ladd recognized the Great Dane, who’d wandered a little over two miles from his cousin’s ranch until he finally happened upon our back porch.

  “We could just not tell your cousin Joe?” I suggested. Ladd laughed, then loaded the big guy onto the back of his feed truck and returned him to his rightful home. I wasn’t actually kidding; I didn’t understand why he had to go back to Joe’s. I thought it was very rude of Ladd not to allow me to keep him illegally.

  Walter’s still with us, and he’s a big lug of a Basset hound—perhaps the biggest big lug of a Basset hound that ever lived. When Walter was very young, I let him outside to go to the bathroom and five minutes later, a torrential storm hit—including golf-ball-size hail. Poor Walter started running away from whatever was hitting him over the head, and kept running until it stopped hitting him. We didn’t find him until the middle of the next day—three pastures over (about a mile from the house), lying down and taking a nap. Poor Walter had to be wrapped in swaddling cloths and comforted for two weeks, and to this day destroys the house if it even sprinkles outside. That’s what I get for putting him outside right before a hailstorm in 2011!

  It’s probably obvious that dogs have factored prominently in our lives—but no dog in my past (or, I’m certain, future) has ever made a dent in my heart like Charlie, my late Basset. I got Charlie “for my family” one Christmas, but he and I linked souls on day one. He was my constant companion and my friend, and became a cult figure on my blog because of the sheer volume of content I devoted to him. I took pictures of him sleeping. I took pictures of him eating. I wrote stories about his inflated sense of self-worth and his paws, which smelled exactly like Fritos. He was incredibly lazy and emotionally manipulative. I would sometimes lay individual Li’l Smokies breakfast sausages right in front of his nose when he was napping and count the seconds until he woke up. (My dad is so proud of the college education he provided me.) Charlie was a complete nutjob and I was an even bigger nutjob, so we were the perfect pair.

  Charlie wouldn’t get up from a nap unless he heard Ladd’s spurs jangling through the house; then he’d snap to attention and follow him out the door. He loved me for the dysfunctional interpersonal connection we shared, but he loved Ladd for the constant activity. He’d ride in Ladd’s feed truck, help him gather cattle, and keep the horses in line (at least that’s what he told himself). He thought he was a cattle dog, and to be honest . . . he was close. Then he’d come home and cuddle with me.

  When Charlie was almost nine, he was diagnosed with lymphoma. I wasn’t the least bit prepared for this and prayed for him to have more time to be a ranch dog. And because of the great care he received right after his diagnosis, that’s exactly what he got to do. He got well enough to chase rabbits, herd cattle, and get showered with love and Li’l Smokies for almost another year before he started going downhill again.

  As he got sicker, I prayed for the discernment to know when the right time would be to end his suffering. After all, how do you know when a Basset hound isn’t feeling well? How do you know when a Basset hound is lethargic? Their middle name is lethargic. But one Sunday in late January, it became crystal clear that the time had come, and our local vet came out to the house so Charlie Boy wouldn’t have to leave the ranch. The girls and I were there, but Ladd and the boys couldn’t stay; it was too sad for them. His death was peaceful and quiet, except for my sobs . . . and I cried for a month over all the memories of the best dog a family could ever, ever have. He was the dog of a lifetime for me, and I’m so grateful he was a part of our lives.

  Yeah, he was a nutjob. But he was my nutjob.

  Dogs are a gift from Heaven, and we don’t deserve them.

  Dogs and Cats on Drummond Ranch

  Dogs (in no particular order)

  Charlie

  Duke

  Lucy

  Walter

  Lady

  Nell

  Annie

  Rufus

  Gus

  Henry

  Hamilton

  McCormick

  Buster

  Sam

  George

  Hooker

  Bob

  Birdie

  Susie

  Jett

  Scout

  Nandy

  Rusty

  Fred

  Presley

  Cocoa

  Maggie

  Professor

  Charlie (he’s worth a second mention)

  Cats

  Kitty Kitty

  Kitten Kitten

  Maybe I’ll switch to cats for the rest of of my life . . .

  Cowboys Are Real

  A cowboy, by definition, is a person who works on a ranch and takes care of land and cattle. Cowboys often live on the ranch they help care for, and as such, they can become a significant part of the family. This is certainly the case on Drummond Ranch, and after many years of living among them, I can tell you that the cowboys you see in movies and TV miniseries are absolutely real.

  Cowboys look the part. They wear sturdy jeans, which many of them starch, and from the cowboy hat on down to the spurs on their boots, their outfits display durability, flexibility, and undeniable style. People often ask why cowboys don’t just wear gross old T-shirts to work when they know they’re going to get covered by mud and manure, and there are two very good answers for this. First, T-shirts are hot, sweaty, and uncomfortable, as the knit fabric sticks to the skin. Woven shirts, on the other hand, breathe and wick away sweat much better. But aside from that, a T-shirt is entirely too casual and not at all appropriate for most cowboys to wear to the office—and the ranch absolutely is their office. They want to give their work the respect they feel it deserves, so they dress the part. Our cowboy Josh (we call him, appropriately, Cowboy Josh) wears a wild rag, which is basically a patterned silk kerchief, tied around his neck. Wild rags are for warmth and protection from the elements, and they look mighty spiffy. His little boy, Taos, wears one, too.

  Cowboys love animals—not just the livestock they take care of but also the scruffy, mixed-breed doggies on their porch. Cowboy Josh had a pit bull-boxer mix named Hooker; he found her hungry and pregnant, wandering in a pasture one day. He took her home and she became his most loyal dog—and is one of my top five favorite dogs that’s ever existed on Drummond Ranch. Cowboy Josh also loves my dogs, and we have a shared custody arrangement with our canines—sometimes they like to toggle between our two houses, depending on where the leftovers are better. (The dogs are mostly at my house.)

  Cowboys cuss like truck drivers, and because of this, a mother on a ranch has to understand that from a very young age, her kids will occasionally shout out expletives they’ve heard in the cattle pens. Some of these expletives are quite advanced, and curbing this habit in her children may take a little more time and patience than normal. Don’t worry—the kids will be just fine. Cowboy cussing isn’t usually
pointed at anyone or used out of anger; it’s just woven through their speech like a fine twine.

  Cowboys are big brothers. The summer after Alex’s freshman year of college, she brought a group of friends home to the ranch for a weekend, and all ten of them (a mix of boys and girls from various urban areas) piled into one of the ranch pickups so Alex could take them on a driving tour. As they headed down the road, Alex noticed Cowboy Josh’s vehicle heading toward them and she was immediately excited, as she’d hardly seen him at all in the year since she’d left home.

  “Oh, that’s Cowboy Josh!” Alex told her wide-eyed friends. “He was like a big brother to me growing up.” She couldn’t wait to introduce them to this special person in her life. The two vehicles stopped, and both Alex and Josh rolled down their windows.

  Josh looked at Alex with a huge smile and hollered, “You’re an asshole!!!”

  Turns out Josh had sent her text messages to check on her a few times while she was at college that first year, and she’d neglected to respond. He wasn’t about to let that go unchecked. No self-respecting big brother would. Her friends died from laughter, of course, but it hardly fazed Alex. It was nothing new to her.

  Yes, cowboys are big brothers, uncles, and godfathers to the kids on the ranch, and they’re fiercely protective, sizing up potential love interests with more scrutiny than even the parents. My girls have always said they were never concerned about Ladd approving of someone they were going to date—it was Cowboy Josh they were worried about. Alex never wanted to bring her now fiancé, Mauricio, to work cattle with the crew, because she knew Cowboy Josh would put him through the wringer as he tried to evaluate whether or not he was worthy of her. Also, cowboys are huge tattletales: If they see one of the ranch kids getting stopped on the highway for speeding, or if they hear of one of the ranch kids drinking beer at the lake Friday night, or if they hear a rumor involving one of the ranch kids—which is bound to happen, considering cowboys also happen to be enormous gossips—they will snitch to the parents immediately. They’re watchdogs, and they aren’t going to keep any secrets if they think the kid needs to get knocked back on course.

  Cowboys are gentlemen. For all the cussing and tattling and ribbing and hollering, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more chivalrous lot. They call a lady “ma’am,” whether she requests it or not, because it’s simply ingrained in them from birth. They say thank you when home-cooked meals are set before them—a home-cooked meal, by the way, is the avenue to a cowboy’s soul. Cowboys open doors for females, which some consider an antiquated practice, but which feels like a privilege if you’re the lucky recipient. And somehow, even though they let the colorful language rip when they’re working with their bosses and the kids, they’re able to flip the switch and turn it off when ladies are present. Which makes you wonder why they couldn’t just turn it off in the cattle pen, too—but I think cowboys should be allowed to be themselves while they work.

  The cowboys I’ve known through the years, from Big John to Cowboy Josh, have been cowboys their whole lives and do not desire another path for themselves. They get up before daylight, they live in their feed truck and on their horse, and they take good care of animals. It isn’t a glamorous life they’ve chosen. Or . . . maybe it is. Maybe watching the sun rise on horseback is the greatest kind of glamorous life. You get the sense that if they were ever plucked out of their cowboy careers, they’d be in unfamiliar territory. I haven’t seen a lot of cowboys who’ve changed directions and gone to an office job. It would be like putting a stallion in a shoebox.

  That’s something no one wants to see!

  Cowboy Colloquialisms

  Here are some gems from the cattle pens. (These are some of the tamer ones.)

  “It’s rainin’ like a cow peein’ on a flat rock.”

  Translation: It’s raining hard.

  “All hat, no cattle.”

  Translation: All talk, no action.

  “You’re windy.”

  Translation: You’re exaggerating.

  “Go piss up a rope.”

  Translation: I’m not interested in discussing it

  any further.

  “He’s tighter than Dick’s hatband.”

  Translation: He’s cheap.

  “He’s luckier than a three-peckered billy goat.”

  Translation: He’s very fortunate.

  “He’s worthless as tits on a boar hog.”

  Translation: He’s quite unproductive.

  “It’s darker than the inside of a cow.”

  Translation: It sure is dark outside.

  “It’s colder than a witch’s tit.”

  Translation: It’s freezing.

  “He’s not smart enough to pour piss out of a boot.”

  Translation: He’s not smart.

  New Territory

  Pawhuska vs. the Hamptons

  It was the most incomprehensible turn of events that resulted in me, a regular gal with no official culinary training, winding up with a cooking show on Food Network. But life is a crazy roller coaster, and right or wrong, good or bad, it happened in 2011. And speaking of incomprehensible: It’s still happening! I’m inching close to a decade of shooting The Pioneer Woman, and between this, writing cookbooks, and cooking for my family, I can’t get away from food no matter how hard I try. (Update: I don’t really try.)

  Here’s an interesting piece of TV show trivia: The production company that films my show is mostly British. Five times a year they fly from London, England, to Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and spend three weeks on my turf, filming me cooking in the kitchen and Ladd working on the ranch, where—let’s face it—both of us are at our best. By now, many years into our gig together, the TV crew has become part of our family. We love them all. That said, for the first couple of years of filming my show, there was a bit of a learning curve.

  This British production crew is the same company that films Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten’s well-loved Food Network series—a series, by the way, that’s filmed entirely in and around East Hampton, New York. By the time my show began airing, my British crew already had several years of filming with Ina under their belt. So this means that the first two years we worked together were a continual learning experience for them about the many ways in which Pawhuska, Oklahoma, is not the Hamptons.

  Rachel, the producer, was enamored with Oklahoma from the moment she arrived to film my pilot episode. She’d had little experience with the United States apart from New York and California, and she found the unbridled beauty of the tallgrass prairie—and the strong western culture—utterly captivating. Her head whipped around at every Ford pickup that drove past. Her eyes widened in childlike excitement when a cow made a noise. And hearing both the cowboy drawls and the spurs jingling and jangling was almost too much for her English soul to take. She fully embraced her new adventure in Middle America, and her smile was a mile wide. Her enthusiasm for the state in which Ladd and I had grown up was both refreshing and infectious.

  Then filming began, and I started cooking. And I found that something as simple as chicken-fried steak would sometimes require a thirty-minute explanation.

  “So when exactly does the chicken come into play?” Rachel would ask in her refined English accent.

  “Oh, it doesn’t,” I’d explain, laying a piece of cube steak in seasoned flour and pointing to the marbling. “It’s steak.”

  “How fascinating!” Rachel’s voice would sing as she’d focus her eyes on the food. “So you call the steak . . . “chicken” . . . in this scenario?”

  “No, it’s still called steak. Chicken-fried steak,” I’d explain. “It’s just steak that’s fried like chicken.”

  “So it tastes like chicken but it’s actually steak,” she’d say. “I see!”

  “No,” I’d begin. “It tastes . . .” And usually I’d just give up.

  Similar exchanges would transpire in the coming months over things like cream gravy, boxed cake mix, pancake syrup, and fruit cocktail. And don’t get me sta
rted on Velveeta. Velveeta almost shut down production for a week, because that’s how long it took me to adequately explain it to my new English friends. And don’t get me wrong—I love a beautiful gourmet meal! But in Oklahoma, Velveeta is its own food group.

  Rachel fell in love with the romance and drama of country life. My sister, Betsy, visited the ranch during one of our early shoots, and when she asked Rachel if she was liking Oklahoma, Rachel’s response was almost operatic. “Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t everything just beautiful, and isn’t Ladd just dashing in his hat and his chaps!” Her gestures were as grand and full of wonder as her voice. Betsy just stood there scratching her head, trying to square the Ladd Rachel was describing with the brother-in-law she’d known for years.

  Rachel would pitch show ideas to me. “I was thinking,” she’d say, an enchanted look in her eyes, “that we could follow you to the mah-ket [market] and film you as you browse the pro-dyoos [produce] and the bakery.” She was surely picturing Ina, hand-woven wicker basket on her arm, strolling around a local Hamptons grocery shop for bundles of watercress and fresh-baked brioche. I’d tell Rachel that sure, she was welcome to come to the store with me . . . it’s called Pawhuska Hometown Foods, and the baskets are made of red plastic and say “Best Val-U” on them in scratched-up white letters. The floors are linoleum and the bakery is brought to you by Sara Lee. There’s a whole aisle of Velveeta. But yes, you’re more than welcome to film it! It’ll be a hoot.

  Another idea Rachel proposed was that during an evening I planned to have my sister, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law over to film a girls’ dinner, it might be fun for a second cameraman to film Ladd and his brother Tim taking the kids on a picnic at the creek—a tale-of-two-dinners type of thing. She imagined a vintage quilt upon which Ladd, Tim, and the six children would all sit as they nibbled on tasty treats contained in (here we go again) a hand-woven wicker picnic basket.