Ree Drummond

Background

Anne Marie Drummond has successfully made a name for herself in the blogging community. Her TastyKitchen.com website swiftly grew in popularity among other food bloggers due to its interactive nature. Born on January 6, 1969, Drummond grew up in the oil town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She was raised together with her two brothers and a younger sister by her father, William Dale Smith, and mother, Gerre Schwert, who later divorced. Drummond went to Bartlesville High School and graduated in 1987. She then went on to study at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. She graduated in 1991 in gerontology, although journalism had been her first choice. Before she could join Law School, she met her husband, Ladd Drummond.

Drummond started blogging in May 2006 using a subdomain on Typepad that she registered as ThePioneerWoman.com in October later that same year. Her topics include life at the ranch, homeschooling, and her family. About a year later, she began posting detailed recipes on the blog, adding several photographs to elaborate on the cooking processes. Her food photography, together with her other blogs, raced up the popularity charts to win her several awards at the Weblog Awards — she won ‘Blog of the Year’ for several years.

ThePioneerWoman.com later gave birth to TastyKitchen.com in April 2008, which revolutionized the cooking blogging community. It allowed her readers to post their recipes and engage with one another through their posts and direct messages. Drummond has also gone on to write several books, including cookbooks such as “The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl”(published in 2009), and children’s books like “Charlie The Ranch Dog” that went on to be illustrated by Diane deGroat, a widely recognized illustrator of more than 120 children’s books.

Drummond’s success gave her the opportunity to be featured in an episode of “Throwdown! With Bobby Flay” that aired on Food Network. The Food Network also announced that as of August 27, 2011, Drummond’s cooking show “The Pioneer Woman” would begin airing. Her film debut, however, came in the 2021 Discovery+ film, “Candy Coated Christmas.” On September 21, 1996, Drummond married her husband and they celebrated their honeymoon in Australia. They moved to a remote cattle ranch — eight miles from Pawhuska in Oklahoma — where they started a family, becoming parents to five children; Alex, Paige, Bryce, Jamar, and Todd.