book club: black heels to tractor wheels

Here's what I knew about the blogger Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond) before I read her book:

• Girl makes a mean cinnamon toast.
• Apparently Reese Witherspoon will play her in the NY Times best-selling story of her life.
• I have entered no less than 5 giveaways on her cooking blog to win candy-colored Kitchenaid mixers
• I am the proud owner of all of her {free} photoshop actions, such as Old West:

As you can probably tell, I had no expectations going into reading her book Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.


Here's what I know about blogger Pioneer Woman after reading her book:

• She annoys the sh*t out of me.
• I can think of three people off the top of my head who could write a better book than she did.

Obviously, I was not a fan of this book. And when our book club met at Laurasia (my phone's autocorrect pet name for "Laura's"),  we were pretty divided on it. Here's the breakdown:

The "loved it" girls felt like Ree did a great job expressing the "fizziness" of a new relationship. The "hated it" girls thought Ree was a bad person and her relationship was based on a lot of making out and some big arm muscles. My personal opinion was that the story wasn't even that interesting, although a better writer could have made me care. Case in point:  in the book, Ree runs over her childhood pet, and in describing it, didn't even make me feel bad for her. I felt like I was reading a far-off narrator explain to aliens how a girl might act if her dog died.





When my car suddenly shook from a series of unsettling bumps, i knew something dire had happened. To my horror, when I looked in my rearview mirror, I saw that I’d run over Puggy Sue. Puggy Sue, my fat, prognathic canine who’d settled into my arms the day I’d returned from California and had become, in effect, my child during my time at home, was now lying on my parents’ street, squealing, writhing, and unable to move her hind legs. 


Hearing Puggy’s yelps from inside the house, my mom darted outside, scooped her up, and immediately rushed her to the vet’s office. Within thirty minutes, she called to tell me the news to which I’d already started resigning myself: Puggy Sue, my little package of fawn-colored love, was dead. 


I spent the next several hours in a fetal position, reeling over the sudden death of Puggy. 





I'm glad we read this though, if only because the conversation was hilarious and the food - recipes from the Pioneer Woman blog including fig and prosciutto pizza, bruschetta, chicken spaghetti, and pear clafouti- averaged about 4 sticks of butter per dish.  And there was sangria. Butter and sangria, who could ask for anything more?

& a few pictures from our Gatsby book club night, which somehow slipped through the blog cracks: