Drovers Run » The Pioneer Woman

WordPress for Blackberry and P-Dub

ness — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:32:15 +0000

So I just discovered a free Blackberry Apps, which is exactly like having WordPress on my phone.

In short, it is amazing, downloaded fast, and the first time I used it, there was no wondering how to do something, and I was able to easily post something to my MacNessa blog, with all tags and categories intact. It even works seamlessly with the photographs so that I can be shooting and blogging on the road without the need for 3G or even a laptop!

Normally I simply shoot a photo with my Blackberry and then post it to Facebook, but FB are in my bad books right now with their attitude to privacy rights and things, so I think I’m going to start posting to my blog rather than FB more often. After all, why give them the link juice?

It also means that I can be entertaining you folks with riveting posts about an apidexin scam, or whatever strikes my fancy while I’m oot and aboot.

…

On another note, something happened the other day which I thought I’d mention, which is about the impact that blogging has had on my life. This time in a more lighthearted fashion.

So you guys know how much my hubby likes the Pioneer Woman’s Recipes right? As a result of the dramatic improvement of my cooking since she entered my life, whenever I mention something to the hubby about her blog, her photography, he has started taking an interest in what I’m saying. This is as opposed to the usual grunt and nod that anything blogging related usually elicits from him. So when the other day I mentioned to him that Ree, her hubby and their four punks were off to Disney World for a week, he (my husband) kind of whipped around, and with genuine concern asked, “But then WHO is looking after the ranch!??” I had such a giggle at that one.

Right back to work it is peoples.

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I love Packages in the Mail

ness — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:36:00 +0000

Aren’t packages in the mail like *totally* exciting!!

Even if you know what they are, they’re still super exciting to receive.

Even my 4 year old spied the package and asked me all wide-eyed, “Is that for ME mommy?” to which I responded by throwing back my head, cackling like an old hag, hugging it closer to my chest and said, “NO, it’s MINE, ALL MINE.”

Then I did a Jim Carrey (as Ace Ventura) type run to the bedroom with it so I could open it without the kids getting their hands on it.

Want to see what I got?

So you can see where it was ordered from, and made it’s way all the way here to sunny SA (not so sunny yesterday I might add).

Trust the Yanks to have a super easy way to open a package. My bread knife that I’d taken with me for the purpose of hacking open the box was rendered totally useless…sometimes I’m so third world, I annoy myself.

The 4 year old, was all like, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! What is it Mommy? Let me help you Mommy!!?? Is it from Farmer Crimsus?!?” (Note to self, do not be tempted to dispel the Father Christmas myth just yet, no matter how much the continuing talk about Christmas is annoying you right now).

My mother, who had brought over the mail (we share a PO Box), walked into the room at this point, and said, “Honestly! Why are you taking photos of opening a box?”

So I said, “For my blog.” (She is vaguely aware of the fact that I have a website, but let’s just say she takes the word ‘technophobe’ to the extreme, she nearly had a full blown panic attack when I banned her from using Internet Explorer and installed Firefox instead. Of course the next time she opened the browser she didn’t even realise it wasn’t the same…)

So she gives a sort of dismissive snort, as if *anyone* would be interested in reading about my little parcel in the mail. Feel free to assure me that you’re on the edge of your seats right about now okay?

I won’t keep you in suspense for ever… buwhahahahaha.

…

Sorry, the childishness, it’s a disease.

I can see the head!

Yes, I’m drawing parallels between childbirth and opening Ree Drummonds cook book from it’s packaging.

But in all the good ways!

Because soon the inconvenience of ripping it from the box will be forgotten and soon I will be gazing into it’s many colourful pages and just enjoying it.

Aaaah, there is she is!

Now I just have to hide the book until I’m ready to unleash it’s culinary magnificence, because other wise the husband is going to expect some kind of fancy dinner tonight.

First I need to hit up the shops for some supplies, and butter.

Yes definitely more butter.

As a seasoned PW cooks recipe reader, I know that I am going to need that.

Thanks to her I already have about 6 different kinds of vinegar in my store cupboard. Basic necessities like bread and milk are like hens teeth around here, but Rice Vinegar, I have you covered!

Maybe I’ll just take a quick peek…

Ree wasn’t kidding when she said that this was more than a cook book. I can actually sit down with this and see a whole lot more stuff about her life and on their ranch.

Stuff that we don’t see on her website.

This is a cook book that I will put on the nightstand and read when I get into bed tonight, and enjoy the photographs, drool over the dishes and if I’m feeling at all inspired (which I know I will be) I’ll be planning some menus for the coming week.

Now I just need to find some cattle to wrangle, to work off all that butter.

Hey, if you want a copy, they’re still priced really well, and these photos are proof that they can make it through the SA Postal service unharmed! Go and get your copy of The Pioneer Woman Cooks here.

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Happy Me

ness — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:10:40 +0000

I just had a small “Twilight Zone” moment.

I was standing in the kitchen preparing a marinade for the beef we’re having tonight for dinner, when I picked up my blackberry to read an email that just pinged in.

It was one of those ‘so-and-so’ is now following you on twitter emails. The weird thing about it – or at least the ‘Twilight Zone’ moment came about because I realized that the person who was now following me (Jaden from Steamy Kitchen) was none other than the author of the book Steamy Kitchen - whose recipe I was using for the marinade. A recipe that I actually picked up via the Pioneer Woman, when she made it and published it on her blog (with Steamy Kitchen’s permission of course). For the foodies among you, I’m talking about the Beef with Broccoli. It’s insanely awesome. Jaden also has a cook book out, take a look here if you’re interested.

It just *really* struck my how much blogging, and bloggers have become a part of my life, and this has been an amazingly good thing.

I think my husband would agree that the entry of The Pioneer Woman’s recipes into his world has only been a good thing too. He’s practically swinging from the light fixture with happiness about the extension of my repetoire. His waistline does tend to argue this point, and whenever he requests that blasted fried chicken recipe, I try not to be too quick to point out that unless he’s about to go and saddle a horse and spend 8 hours either riding the range, castrating calves or being engaged in other waist reducing pursuits, then I probably shouldn’t make the chicken dish. Yet Again.

I hear a joyful clucking arise from the nearby poultry farm (or was that just my stomach?).

Anyhoo, apologies for my longer than normal absence. I’ve been engrossed (first in Eclipse ) and now currently in Breaking Dawn , and I swear if anyone puts spoilers in the comments box, I am just telling you now…I know where you blog…

Reading the book, and dealing with the amount of work that I have (forgetting for just a moment the two little male darlings of my life who currently require much fetching and taking, and tending and feeding) at the moment must be something akin to Bella’s bloodlust. Seriously. I mean hello – that freaking book calls to me while I’m busy getting on with things like work, eating, bathing, and yes I consider taking it to the loo just to get some alone time.

TV is a *thing of the past* I tell you. The ONLY TV that I am currently watching is Greys Anatomy on a Monday night at 19h30. That is IT.

Things are going so well right now work wise, I have a steady stream of work that is keeping me happily occupied (I’m definitely doing the right thing for me, I mean how many people get *excited* to sit down at the computer and work???) the only down side of course being that working keeps me from reading the rest of the book. But I’m being a good girl and getting it all done to the best of my ability. In a way I am glad that I am dragging it out just a little for myself. I usually don’t read books, so much as devour them, and since I read really quickly (Eclipse took me a little under 24 hrs – WITH all of lifes interruptions) I really am trying to enjoy every last detail of this story.

Anyway since I promised to take some photos (I didn’t take nearly as many as I should have) of the last few days food exploits I’ll leave you with a photo of Bakerella’s Fast Food Cupcakes, mine aren’t nearly as elegant perfect as hers, but dayam they are delicious! I should also point out that putting cupcakes in this format, completely threw my boys for a loop. They are both refusing to touch them…leaving all the more to the hubby and me. (This is a bad thing, but it’s also a good thing

I forgot to add – that bakerella used buttercream icing as her ‘cheese’ but I have used fondant. For those of you who are confused – this is a vanilla cupcake, with a brownie as the ‘patty’ with buttercream lettuce and tomato, and yellow fondant icing as the cheese. It’s very, very naughty.

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Fried Chicken, No Follow and Photos

ness — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:22:53 +0000

Well there’s a varied headline for you.

Okay, first things first. Fried Chicken.

I once made the Pioneer Womans Fried chicken strips. All three of the males living in my household were over the moon with it. (It kicks KFC’s ass royally and is really worth trying)

Since that first time I made it, it has been requested nearly every weekend since.

Yeah, my jeans are really pissed about *that* but moving on.

I have played around with the recipe somewhat, and added my own concoction of spices to the buttermilk and the flour that you use, and the last batch I made, my husband pronounced as ‘ohmuhgoshzisispuhfect‘ whilst burning himself in his eagerness to eat one right out of the pan.

Since I have this dodgy thyroid, I’m really *very* careful with how I prepare foods and most nights it’s strictly low fat grilling that goes on, but I make the exception with the chicken, well, because it *is* delicious and it’s the only food that I ‘fry’ as such.

So yesterday being Saturday, the request for fried chicken was yet again made, and I set about making the buttermilk and soaking the chicken in it. I pottered on, letting Skip stir the flour while I added salt and cayenne pepper and cumin etc and then as I started dipping (in fact yesterday’s version involved double dipping) I suddenly realised that I didn’t have enough cooking oil to be able to be able to finish the dish.

I had barely uttered the words “Honey, I need more cooking oil” when there was a vague tinkle of car keys, shortly followed by the screeching of car tyres in the driveway. About 5.6 seconds later I had two brand new bottles in front of me courtesy of our corner shop.

My mouth literally fell open.

Had I say, needed, I dunno, lettuce, or tomato, or even butter at this stage, it would have been met with a ‘oh well, do without’ comment or something like that. (I must admit, when the PMS is strong with me, the hubby has the same reaction about fetching me chocolate. After 10 years together he’s learned to pick his battles I suppose).

Now I’m just trying to figure out what I can leverage as a bargaining chip *next* time. Honey, if I make you fried chicken will you rub my back for an hour?

Okay, onto some internet stuff.

Remember a long long time ago, I talked about Google Page Rank and Alexa? You can read it again at that link. Anyway, after I wrote that, google did this huge swoop on blogs and cut the page rankings of any blogs that appeared to be doing sponsored posting. One of the side effects of this swoop, was that blogging platforms built into their commenting sections, a little tag called ‘no-follow’. What this meant is that when google ‘crawls’ a site to check for new content that it’s little spider bots completely ignored any links with the no-follow tag, grossly reducing the ‘respect’ of the website.

What this meant is that when you left a comment on a popular blog it no longer gave your website a boost. Remember, when a site with a higher page rank than yours links to you, it counts in your favour with google, bringing you bigger traffic and in blogworld traffic=money. So here is me, Ness page rank 2 on my graphic design blog, going to say, a page rank 6 blog and leaving a comment, and baddabing, google looks at me with a bit more respect. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, but then they went and changed things).

So as a result a lot of people stopped commenting on blogs. A lot of blogs that had been popular lost google ranking, and with it, a lot of opportunities to produce content for remuneration disappeared, and I still can’t believe that they axed things the way that they did, but there is some good news!

An enterprising group of people have written some plugins which removes the ‘no-follow’ tag from the comments boxes on websites.

You may have noticed this little graphic now in my sidebar:

What this means is that I have removed the no-follow tags from my comments page, and that if you leave a comment on my blog, it will count towards improving your rank in google. I have done the same for my graphic design blog, my photography blog, and for my magazine blog. So leaving comments on any of those three blogs will count in your favour. I’m just sayin’. If you would like some help removing your own (wordpress) no follow tags, I can help you out with that, it’s the simple installation of a plugin, and then activating it.

A word on linking.

Linking in the blog world is a polite thing to do. It’s proper netiquette, if you talk about someone, say I want to mention something about bathtubjunkie, or Lisanne, or Kristi, or Mel or other Mel, then the correct thing to do, is to pass on the link juice by linking to those blogs. Otherwise it’s like gossiping about someone behind their back. Trust me, it’s appreciated. That goes for re-tweeting things too! You don’t have to retweet everything verbatim, just the things that you like.

In the same vein, if you read something you like, and the blog offers a ‘share this’ button, with links to things like stumbleupon, digg, facebook etc, then if you feel like you enjoyed the post, then share it. Remember, some of us make a living from blogging and any extra traffic is appreciated whole-heartedly! (Feel free to share anything on any of my OTHER blogs, just don’t mention *this* one on facebook please!).

If you’re interested in more stuff about Technorati Tags: SEO (search engine optimisation) or Technorati Tags: SMM (Social Media Marketing) then you might want to subscribe to nessworld, because I’ll be talking about that a lot there in the coming weeks.

Okay, now onto the photos.

We drove a bit to find a nice quiet spot today where Skip could practice riding his new bicycle, and we could push Flip (who is currently awake at 11pm and refusing to go back to sleep I might add…) in his new tricycle. We ended up going to a local cricket clubs sports fields, it was quiet (but not too quiet..that’s never a good sign) but we spotted another dad pushing his son along on his bicycle too, and another guy hitting golf balls, plus the ever faithful ADT security guys patrolling so we felt safe enough to let the kids run wild for a bit.

We made sure that the boys stayed outside the cricket oval ropes, so no grounds keepers would be annoyed by the bike tracks (not that we saw any).

Many of you overseas folks probably think I’m nuts talking about security like that, but in order to survive here (mentally and physically!), you need to be realistic, and alert, and not do anything stupid. So I’d rather be cautious and be aware of who or what is in my surroundings rather than just throwing caution to the wind and saying c’est la vie.

It turns out the local cricket field had a bit of a play area too.

It was such a glorious day, and we even had some running races. I was actually surprised by the sensation of running again. The weather was just right, the temperature perfect, and we were running anti-clockwise around the pitch (the same direction as an Technorati Tags: athletics track) and I had the most vivid flashbacks of training, and competing (gosh is it really 13 years ago already?).

Now before you all think I’m a slow poke and this far behind, I kept running back and forth like a complete nicompoop taking photos and then jogging to catch up again.

…and lastly…

This little dude.

Boy, oh boy. He melts my heart daily. My older boy, is at an age now, where he melts my heart, periodically, and has me tearing out clumps of my own hair inbetween. Right now, the little dude is at an all time high in terms of cuteness factor. He is talking, a LOT. But only about 20 percent of it makes any sense. Physically he is very big for 20mths, so people sometimes wonder why he isn’t more vocal, but he’s really still technically a very little dude. So today when I said to the husband, “I wonder if he wants a yoghurt.” Through all the baby talk I heard, “Yah, I wanna yah-yah.” Then he went to the fridge and pointed at the yoghurt, followed by going to the cutlery drawer and helping himself to a teaspoon. We were *so* impressed! Of course, I’m sure your kids were all doing higher mathematics at this age, but my boy? Gosh I couldn’t be prouder!

Hey, Lotus just announced the prizes for her Weekly Winners of 2009!

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Sugar, Peanut Butter, and Harry Potter

ness — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:41:38 +0000

I’m not joking.

Yesterday, in a fit of madness (theoretically before I actually had sugar, but that’s totally beside the point), I decided to make The Pioneer Womans Chocolate Crusted Peanut Butter Cream Pie.

The only difference with mine, is that I called it PMS Pie. Because darn it if my PMS symptoms weren’t shouting (((FALL BACK TO MINAS TIRITH))), sounding their orc horns and disappearing over the distant hills like a bad quote from Lord of the Rings.

Seriously, if you like chocolate, and peanut butter, you need to make this pie. It’s so freakin’ easy too, that I managed to remember all the ingredients without a shopping list and just had to check the recipe once for the order of chucking it all together. It’s one of those recipes where you chuck it all in, and bung it in the fridge, the only effort required is cleaning up afterwards.

I gave a slice to my husband after a hearty pasta/bolognaise bake for supper, and took it from me, with a doubtful glance (implying that he was already quite full), took one bite, and said, something which sounded like, “OH MY GAWD!” and when he’d cleared his plate in exactly 2.6 seconds, and helped himself to another slice, he mumbled something like, “Pi-nr Mun?” in between gob-smacking sounds, which I translated as “Pioneer Woman?” (because of course I couldn’t possibly think up something quite so delicious – no really I can’t!!).

I said yes, and then because I did want to put my own stamp on it of sorts, I said, “It’s PMS pie. She didn’t call it that, but I am.”

He didn’t answer me because he was too busy making, oomph, nom, nom, lick sounds.

So do yourself a favour and make it. It’s tewtally worth it man.

In other news, did anyone else notice that we’re just over a month away from the release of the new Harry Potter movie? I keep seeing advertisements that say ‘in cinema’s July 15th’. I have yet to see a Harry Potter movie more than a DAY after it’s released. This one is going to be *really* good too, I’m sure!

Remember it’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6), and the third last in the series of movies because book 7 is being split into two movies.

I think I’ll make the man stay home, since he’s not a fan, and the poor thing wouldn’t know his expelliarmus from his wingardium leviosa, and, and well… those of us *who know*, know just exactly how that can get you into all sorts of unneccessary trouble.

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