Favorite Thing Friday

The internet is a dangerous place for many reasons! This week I am realizing it can be downright unhealthy.


I love finding cool blogs. I have found so many of them on photography and crafting and scrapbooking and just cool people. I realized the other day that I have been hoarding a HUGE secret. It's the Pioneer Woman. Now maybe you know about the Pioneer Woman. I just discovered her a few months ago . . . how? I don't know. But I thought I had stumbled on to something fabulous that hardly anyone knew about. I was slightly wrong. She had a contest one day about a photo she had taken to give it a good title. I looked at it thought of something clever and realized that I am not the only one who knows about the Pioneer Woman. I should have known she had a big following since she was giving a $600 e-card to Amazon for that contest -- that's a great prize. I went to enter my clever title and as I started scanning to see if anyone else thought of my exact title and I realized 400 people had already entered the contest that day, scrolling to the bottom of the page I realize 400 entries fit on the first page and they were 9 pages. 3582 people submitted a entry for that contest in one day! As I browse the many blogs I frequent, I started to notice that the Pioneer Woman is a pretty standard blog that many bloggers follow. So maybe I was the only one in the dark about her, but hey if I am . . . why didn't you tell me about her, huh?

Why do I like the Pioneer Woman so much? Well she takes fabulous photos. She lives on a working ranch and most of her photos are of the daily goings-on of their ranch. Farm life. Plus I just love cowboys and there are cowboys there . . . I wonder if Aaron could become a cowboy? I would really like that . . . I'll have to see. Anyway, she has 4 kids and homeschools and she gives great photography advice and she's self-taught on that and I need lots of easy to understand photography advice!

Mainly why she's my new favorite thing is her recipes! Oh, I made the mistake of looking at that portion of her blog last weekend. So I added some ingredients to my grocery list and made some Pioneer Woman vittles. Serious weight will be gained here if I continue to use her recipes on a regular basis -- no lie! So far I've made:


Crash Hot Potatoes These are AWESOME! I could eat these every day!


Onion Strings These are good too just like in a restaurant and the kids love them even though they hate onions, but I remembered that I can't eat too many onions at once or I get a bad tummy ache!


Marlboro Man's Favorite Sandwich This one we really didn't care for but it gave me a spring board to make another sandwich changing the ingredients a little.


Chicken Spaghetti This is was really good. It made a ton! 2 out of 3 kids liked it too but next time I make it I'm putting it in 2 smaller casserole dishes and cooking one and freezing the other. We'll have enough for a meal and still have leftovers with half the recipe.


I also want to make her wings, olive cheese bread, bacon wrapped Jalapeno thingies, Cowboy Nachos, and about a million other things . . . I think I've gained weight just typing this!


So if you want some great recipes, good photography tips, or just see how the cowboys live check her out!