Posts

There’s never a dull moment on the Drummond Ranch in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Now, us fans get to see more glimpses of real-life in The Pioneer Woman’s household than ever. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, filming for Drummond’s Food Network show, The Pioneer Woman, has screeched to a halt in an effort to slow the spread of the virus and keep non-essential workers safe at home. With Drummond’s kids at The Ranch, however, it’s provided the perfect opportunity for her children to keep The Pioneer Woman ship afloat and step in as the ad hoc film crew....

For single mom Lisette LeJeune and her two sons, isolating for weeks while battling COVID-19 meant relying on family members to deliver food and medical supplies to her Houston doorstep. “I was really sick the first week, so it was really hard trying to take care of both of them,” LeJeune told Good Morning America of her sons. “It’s so hard being a single mom.” Then, last Tuesday, just as her three-year-old son was the sickest, a mystery package appeared outside her front door....

I consider myself a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur. I’ve rarely had a bad chocolate chip cookie, but there is a world of difference between an everyday cookie and an extraordinary one. Whenever I visit a new bakery, it’s the first thing I look for, and usually determines whether or not I go back. To me, a perfect chocolate chip cookie is golden and shatteringly crisp around the edges, with tender, chewy, almost underbaked centers....

In honor of Black History Month, Etsy has teamed up with Nest and Souls Grown Deep to welcome the famous quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, to the Etsy marketplace. The 700 or so residents of Gee’s Bend—now named Boykin—are mostly descendants of slaves. For generations, the women of the rural community surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, have been making some of the finest quilts in the country. Known worldwide as The Gee’s Bend Quilters, their colorful, abstract, and highly coveted works of art have been reproduced on official US postage stamps and featured in over 20 museums....

Pepper aficionados, listen up. If you think you’ve tried them all, there’s one more pepper you need to add to your tasting repertoire. But you’ll have to head to America’s oldest city, St. Augustine, to find it. That’s because the datil pepper only grows in this part of North Florida thanks to the right combination of salt air and humidity. Farmers across Florida have tried to grow these finicky peppers season after season but with little success....

Cake is not something that people in the South treat lightly, no matter if we’re talking layer, Bundt, sheet, 18-layer, upside-down, or dump. It’s serious business. Yes, even dump cake. However, there is no cake that captures our undivided attention quite like gas station cake. Unbeknownst to some, it’s a real thing, and can be a delightful thing at that. (We’re not talking about Little Debbie, either.) Evolving from the tradition of old-fashioned roadside stores in the South, gas station cake looks like something your grandmother could have made, except it’s often presented smaller as a slice, square, or even a quarter-cake or half cake....

Sugar in tea, tomatoes in gravy, peanuts in Coke. The South has a number of unusual, or downright odd, food combinations, but perhaps none gets as much attention this time of year as salt on watermelon. Indeed, each year, when the oversized fruits come rolling into farmers’ markets and gardens, the salt shakers—and really strong opinions—come out. Whether you choose to salt your slices or abhor the very idea, there’s a perfectly good reason why Southerners love to sprinkle a bit of sodium on the fruit before biting into the juicy wedges: it makes the watermelon taste better....

The presents have been opened, but there are still hours ’til dinner. Welcome to Christmas Day, where lunch is more of a paradox than a midday meal. You don’t want your guests to fill up before you serve the dinner you’ve likely worked all day preparing, but if left to their own devices (or to drift further towards the emotional state known as “hangry”), that too puts said dinner at risk....

Summer is upon us. You know what that means: barbecue, y’all, and lots of it. Long days and longer weekends call for dinners straight from the grill and midsummer parties with all the neighbors. We’re dusting off the grill (which has been hibernating patiently all winter), and soon, we’ll be lighting it up to grill some tender, flavorful, fall-off-the-bone meats. In preparation for grilling season, we’ve been unboxing our tried and true tools—basting wand for sauces, check; meat thermometer, check—but we realized that we’d forgotten one important tool....

Our dads do it all, and any good son or daughter knows that you don’t have to wait until Father’s Day to show him how much you care. It can be hard to say exactly how you feel in the moment, especially to someone who is so important to you. These songs about dads put into words just how much we love our fathers and the impact father figures have on our lives....

Brent and Becky Heath know daffodils. They grow fields of them at their bulb farm, Brent and Becky’s Bulbs, in Gloucester, Virginia. Here are some of their tried-and-true tips for success. Tip 1 “Never cut daffodils,” says Brent. “Always pick them. When you cut them, they have a shorter stem, and the stem is hollow. It doesn’t draw water very well, and the flowers don’t last. If you pick them, reach all the way down to the very base of the stem to snap it off....

One of the most beloved holiday dinners, the mere utterance of “crown roast of pork” may make your mouth water. It may also make your brow sweat when you think about finding that roll of kitchen twine, and then wrapping your masterpiece to snug, secure perfection. Well, fear not, Alton Brown is here to help. As the host of Good Eats: Reloaded revealed in a recent Instagram post, you can skip the twine and added labor....

I need to start a detergent fan club of laundry sniffers anonymous. I love the smell of a good clean shirt. But don’t you worry, all my laundry-sniffing friends, I’ve found the secret to the best smelling laundry and it doesn’t require those little scent booster beads, the luxury suds that you can only buy at a department store, or pods that come by the bucket. Nope, it’s all about Arm & Hammer Liquid Laundry Detergent in Clean Burst....

Sometimes you’re in the mood for cookies. Sometimes you’re in the mood for flowers. How about the best of both worlds? Turns out, you can have your garden and smell your chocolate chip cookies too, at least according to Valerie Ghitelman, Vice President, Product Development & Design, 1-800-Flowers.com. “The Cosmos Atrosanguineus, also known as Chocolate Cosmos, is a very graceful flower with velvety-red petals and centers that are almost black. While some get a sense of red velvet cake, its fragrance reminds me of rich chocolate and the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies—it is irresistible!...

When a teen went missing, the police department went to the dogs. Well, they went to one dog specifically. When a North Carolina teenager ran away and their family got worried, the Union County Sheriff’s Office called in Maverick, a two-year-old English Labrador retriever. Maverick is specially trained to track scents. The family gave the deputies a blanket that held their missing child’s scent and the deputies gave it to the Maverick for a good sniff....

The year was 1912. Americans elected Woodrow Wilson as U.S. President, Arizona became the 48th state and the Titanic sank into the Atlantic Ocean. That same year, in Memphis, Tennessee, another piece of history was unfolding. Elmer “Doc” Dyer opened the doors to his new café aptly named Dyer’s Burgers. But these were not your average hamburgers. Dyer’s burgers were made from specially seasoned ground beef that created extra grease when cooked....

Let’s call it “Gap envy.” It’s the state of wishing your shirts and sweaters were folded so neatly and stacked so perfectly that if you could buy them again, you totally would. If you’re like most people, your stacks are uneven and ready to topple over at any moment. But guess what? You don’t need to work in retail to get those same-size, same-height stacks. Just grab a cutting board or clipboard, and get started....

Most little girls come to accept losing barrettes and hair bows as just another part of life. But not Columbia, South Carolina’s Gabby Goodwin. At just five years old, she and her mom Rozalynn set out to solve the age-old problem of disappearing hair barrettes. “I was super excited,” Gabby, now 14, recently recalled to The Washington Post’s KidsPost of her quest to create a superior hair accessory. “I was nagging my mom every single day about these barrettes....

In some recipes, specific ingredients, like cream cheese, must be at room temperature before you can use them. Even if you know this already (which you probably do if you like to bake), that doesn’t mean you will remember to take the cream cheese out of the refrigerator, so it has time to soften up—ideally for an hour. Forgetting to leave out the cream cheese is a problem when you need cheesecake, pound cake, or carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting in an instant....

I’ll admit that I was initially one of those wary of the vegetable slicers and dicers that you’d see hocked on television infomercials in the wee hours of the morning. I’m prone to going pessimistic when it comes to kitchen tool gizmos that take up precious cabinet space and perform extremely specific functions, like an egg peeler, crème brûlée torch, or raclette cheese melter. Sure, in a late-night dark chocolate-fueled haze I might convince myself that I’d use that celery juicer all the time—seriously, more than anything else in my entire kitchen....