This recipe is not cheap, not easy, not healthy.

It is, however, really good.

I pulled this recipe ages and ages ago but I’d never made it because it is a multi-day process and it just didn’t seem worth the effort. I didn’t want to go through all that and have it be not that good. But then I needed something to bribe people with and I figured this might work.

I was organizing the Swap-O-Rama this year and I needed to make sure I had enough people around after things were over to help with cleanup. The Swap ended at four o’clock. I told people that I was making brownie ice cream bars but they weren’t coming out of the freezer until four-thirty, so anyone who wanted one had to stick around and help with cleanup until then. Worked like a charm.

Turns out the recipe is from Martha Stewart and it’s on her website. (I had a photocopy from the magazine, but the magazine name wasn’t anywhere on the page so wasn’t sure what magazine it was actually from.)

You can get the original from the website, but here is my version, with some comments.

Brownies
1-1/2 sticks unsalted butter
6 ounces semisweet chocolate, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour

Filling
4 pints vanilla ice cream

Chocolate Coating
40 ounces semisweet chocolate, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/4 stick unsalted butter

Commentary
(1) I am not Martha Stewart-esque enough to pull off a full chocolate covering; mine just had a small-ish amount chocolate on the top, none on the sides, and that was fine.

(2) I wanted to use good ice cream (Haagen Dazs Five is my current favorite) and could not bring myself to spend $16 on ice cream for a recipe that I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, and also four pints of ice cream seemed excessive for the number of people I was feeding. I used two pints, and had a smaller proportion of ice cream to brownie than you would have if you used the full amount. (Alternatively, you could use only half the brownie, or adjust as desired to get the right volume of ice cream with your given thickness of brownie.)

(3) 40 ounces of chocolate for the coating is insane. You don’t need that much.

Here’s what I did.

1. The first day, I made brownies, following the instructions as given:

Melt together 6 ounces of chocolate and 1-1/2 sticks of butter in the top of a double boiler. Whisk 3 large eggs in a large bowl; add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar, and 1 teaspoon vanilla and stir to combine. Stir in the butter and chocolate mixture, then fold in 3/4 cups all-purpose flour.

Pour the batter into a 10 x 13 pan lined with parchment paper. Cook at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. Do not overbake; a cake tester should not come out clean.

I actually cooked them in small loaf pans because of the limitations of my oven; I think that worked better, it made it easier to work with in later steps.

2. I let the brownie sit overnight. (I can’t remember if I put it in a plastic container or if I wrapped it in plastic wrap and then covered with foil — anything along those lines would work.)

3. The second day, I softened the ice cream slightly and beat with an electric mixer so it was spreadable but not melted. I do not have a paddle attachment, so I just used the regular metal beaters.

I put the brownie back in the small loaf pans and spread the softened ice cream on top of it. (I had started to follow the instructions to take the brownie out and trim but then decided that was just a waste of brownie and my friends probably wouldn’t care how straight the brownie edges were. So I didn’t trim, just used as is.)

4. I put the pans with brownie covered with ice cream back in the freezer. I increased the coldness of the freezer to make sure that it got really solidly frozen. I left it overnight.

5. The third day, I melted maybe 8 or 10 ounces of chocolate. I attempted to follow the recipe and melt chocolate with butter, but it didn’t seem like the consistency was right so I ended up adding a little bit of vegetable oil and that seemed to work better. I don’t remember what kind of chocolate I used, if it was just a bag of chocolate chips or some kind of chocolate from Whole Foods. I feel like I might have used better chocolate (Valrhona or something) for the brownies and regular chocolate chips for the coating, but I’m not sure about that at all. Basically any chocolate coating, such as melting together a tablespoon of oil with a bag of chocolate chips, would work.

6. I brought the ice cream bars out of the freezer one pan at a time (this is where having them in small pans worked better), took them out of the pan, and cut them into small squares. I did not trim them to make them even. No one I know cares how even the edges of their brownie ice cream bars are.

7. I attempted to cover them with chocolate and the first attempt started to melt the ice cream and all of the chocolate slid completely off onto the counter. From this I learned that you need to let the melted chocolate cool a little bit before attempting to put it on the ice cream. (That might obvious to other people but it wasn’t to me. Now you know.)

I very quickly realized that I lacked the skill to fully cover the ice cream bar, and I didn’t want everything to melt, so I just poured some chocolate over the top, spread it around a little bit, and didn’t worry about covering anything or how much was there.

I wrapped the squares in waxed paper and packed into plastic containers for storage and put back into the freezer. I transported in a cooler.

I gave one to a friend who worked an early shift and wasn’t able to stay later, I saw her just before she left and she said, “That was possibly the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

Really

really

good.

They were worth the trouble.

And if I make them again, I’ll try to take a picture that does them justice.

I was reminded of that idea this week with the divorce announcements of two high-profile bloggers, personal finance blogger J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly, and uber-blogger Heather Armstrong, known the world over as Dooce. Thought it might be worth expanding it a little, wrapping up, and posting.

So here it is.

====

There was an article in the N&O recently [oops, not recent anymore, April 2010], picked up from the New York Times, about all of these internet services that allow people to broadcast everything that’s going on in their lives — not just Facebook and Twitter but things like Blippy (which includes information about everything you’ve spent money on) and Foursquare (which announces exactly where you are at any given moment).

They talked to someone who is a big fan of the services and when asked about the privacy implications, he said he didn’t mind having everything about him on the internet, in fact he embraced it. He said, “I simply have nothing to hide.” [Somewhat random aside, I just need to say that when I first started hearing about these types of services, I thought, "Yeah, everyone thinks all of this is a great idea until they want to start having an affair." Come on people, think ahead!]

I just need to say that I think this is a terribly dangerous notion, the idea that anyone who doesn’t want everything they ever think or do or say posted on the internet for public consumption has something to hide.

One of the things I found exceptionally weird about my food projects was the level of detail I chose to put up on the internet for everyone who ever googles me to discover and read. I went from being really happy that when you searched for my name I didn’t appear until the second or third page, to having pictures of me eating soup and videos of me showing the contents of my refrigerator to reporters as the first hit. Oy! What was I thinking?

There’s nothing wrong with anything I’ve done, and there’s nothing particularly embarrassing about it, but it definitely affected my thinking — you can’t help but think, “How is this going to look on the internet?” every time you make a decision about something you’ve committed to blogging about. And that may have positive benefits — if you’ve told everyone you don’t eat junk food, you’re going to think twice about getting a Big Mac — but I don’t necessarily think it’s a healthy way to live. Because if you do get a Big Mac, you’re probably going to figure out some way to not talk about it, which is weird, or if you own up to it, you’re going to have to write about it and feel bad about it, which is also weird.

I think that people should be able to live their lives and not have to worry all the time about how it’s going to look to other people. And not feel like they’re “hiding” something if they don’t want it posted on the internet. Or actively (or passively) lying about what’s actually going on because they’ve decided they don’t want to talk about it.

Before the release of The Social Network (better known as “the Facebook movie”), there was a long  article in the New Yorker about Mark Zuckerberg. His stated reason for starting Facebook — and his ongoing contention — is that the world would be a better place if it was more “open and honest.” He feels like having all of this information about everyone easily accessible on the internet breaks down barriers and brings people closer.

I think it’s worth noting that Facebook was designed for college students. I think most people’s life when they were in college was probably simpler than their life is now (assuming that you are not a twenty-year old student at an elite institution) and some things that make sense when you are twenty might not make sense a few years later.

I so far have remained one of the thirty-five per cent of internet users who are not on Facebook, so I have only anecdotal evidence to draw from, I can’t speak from my own experience, but it seems to me that the way people get around this is to create an “online persona” that for some people is very close to who they actually are and some people is not. People set up a filter for how they deal with Facebook, just like they do with other areas of their life. So in that sense, it’s not more open and honest, it’s just another layer for people to negotiate. Not sure if that was what Mark Zuckerberg had in mind.

Right now I half wish I was a sociologist who studied online communities, because I think it would be fascinating to look at the intersection of public and private, how it changes as people move through various stages of life, and what are some of the unintended consequences of social media. Last I checked, J.D. Roth’s divorce announcement had garnered more than 500 comments. He’s not a blogger like Dooce, who has made a living writing about his private life, but the reason his site is popular and compelling is because of the personal connection people feel to him, which was built over years of his incorporating details from his life into his writings. There was really no way he could not mention this change in his life, but in so doing, it required him to put his private life out to the public in a way he might rather not have done (and in a way I’m sure his wife would really rather him not have done).

Which takes me back to the original point of this post, which is that just because you don’t want everyone on the internet to know everything about you does not mean you have something to hide.

And it is my firm contention that the world would be a better place if everyone stood their ground on that one.

The main work project I had going since mid-2009 (or earlier than that, actually — it started in 2008, though it went in fits and starts for a while) ended at the beginning of December. Now I’m trying to work through the things that had been neglected while I was taking care of that, and also trying to wrap up a few other projects that have been going on.

I have a lot of partially written posts, mostly random thoughts about frugality and lifestyle-type things, and I’m going to try to work through those and take a second look, finish what I can, and get posted.

My real-life food project for now is to try to eat for $100 a month including the food I buy for Scrap Exchange Third Friday receptions.

For the past year or two I’ve been making most of the food for the gallery openings, because the food I get is cheaper, better, and we don’t waste anything because I handle the leftovers and either freeze and use them again the next month (for instance crackers and juice) or incorporate into my next week’s meal planning (for instance crudité, which I can use in a stir fry). For 2011, I counted that as a separate budget line and didn’t worry too much about how much I was spending.

I just looked at the totals, and I averaged $42.04 per month for that line, including wine but not including food for the holiday party, which I was reimbursed for. (I spent about $150 on stuff for the holiday party, about half of which was used and reimbursed and the other half counted as grocery expense for me.)

My food average for the year was $101 per month which was much higher than expected due to a really stupid mistake I made with how my tracking system was set up.

[And I know probably no one cares about the details of this, but I'll give them anyway, in the interest of full disclosure.

I used to track everything in Quicken, but it was on an old computer and when that computer finally died and I went to try to get a version of Quicken that would work on my new computer, I discovered it was $75, which seemed like a lot to pay for a program that I used only a tiny fraction of, and that left my historical data in a format that required a special program to access. I tried various alternatives and finally settled on an Excel spreadsheet for tracking day-to-day expenses that I would then transfer into a Filemaker database at the end of the year. The Filemaker database includes all of my historical data exported from Quicken in addition to the more recent data transferred from Excel. This has worked well.

I gave up on Quicken in 2009, but I wasn't actually making any money at that point so tracking expenses wasn't an issue. I know that might seem backwards, but my goal is to spend the right amount of money -- when I have no money, the right amount of money to spend is none. I don't need to track that. Also I think I was trying to be less OCD and not track so much, but in doing that, I discovered that I like tracking expenses, I find it relaxing. Also when I actually have money, it's important because it keeps me from spending too little on things I do care about and too much on things I don't care about.

So in 2011, I went back to looking at monthly expenses more carefully, but I was doing it out of Excel instead of the way I used to do it, and was figuring out a new system. The way I deal with grocery money is to put cash on a Whole Foods card and use that for my normal grocery purchases. This simplifies tracking and also lets me handle cash in a way that works better for me; if I run out of cash, I can still buy food.

In my tracking spreadsheet, I deducted the amount left on my Whole Foods card at the end of the month from the month's total but I failed to add that amount to the following month's expense. Duh. So I'm tracking and I'm like hmm this is interesting, this seems lower than I would have expected, guess things are just going well. And I spent money in a way that I wouldn't have if I had actually had the right number. In December when I looked at the final totals in a different way and had the actual numbers come up I was like what?? And then I figured out what had happened and felt like a dumbass. But it was what it was, nothing to be done.]

So for 2012, I would like to spend $100 on food for me and Scrap combined, though I think I will exclude wine. Mostly I get two-buck Chuck (which is actually three bucks), but it still adds up. And I never use any of that for myself, unlike the food, which I end up using as needed.

If it turns out this endeavor seems worth writing about, I will. (And hopefully take some pictures, even I have started to miss not having any pictures on this blog. Where are the pictures? Maybe I’ll just start taking pictures of random things and posting them, since I can’t seem to manage to ever get any pictures taken of food.)

So anyway, that’s what’s going on here. For starters, I’ll try to get the odds and ends finished and posted and see how that goes, then take it from there.

Hope all is well with you.

I feel like I don’t read at all anymore (though I do still aspire to someday getting back to that life that I once knew) but back when I did read, one of my areas of interest was sociology/social psychology — books that explain how people think, how people see and understand the world, and why people behave in the ways they do (which is often not rational and can work against one’s own self-interest). Sometimes knowing why you think or act the way you do doesn’t actually help anything, but sometimes it does.

Two of the books I read that I liked were Stumbling Upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Both of them deal with how people feel about their lives and what factors contribute to those feelings, and while there is some overlap between them — in many cases they use the same studies to illustrate points — they are coming from different angles. Stumbling Upon Happiness focuses more broadly on how we feel, what makes us happy and why things we expect to make us happy often don’t, while The Paradox of Choice focuses specifically on how making choices impacts how we feel about our lives, and provides concrete steps people can take to increase satisfaction with the choices they make and their lives in general. Both books are worth reading.

One of the things that Barry Schwartz talks about in The Paradox of Choice is how a key factor that leads to unhappiness is comparing yourself to others and focusing on what you don’t have that you think your life is missing, instead of on what you do have that you makes your life better. (“When life is not too good, we think a lot about how it could be better. When life is going well, we tend to not think much about how it could be worse.”)

Which brings me to The Pioneer Woman.

Aspirational blogs like The Pioneer Woman are similar to lifestyle magazines like Real Simple or Martha Stewart Living (not to mention all of the advertising we are constantly bombarded with, from television, radio, magazines, websites…) in that they are designed to make you focus on what you don’t have and think about how your life would be better if you had A or B, or did X or Y.

One of the main tools Ree Drummond uses to drive traffic to her site and generate page views is product giveaways. She gives away everything from flowy tops from her closet to Kitchen-Aid mixers to high-end SLR digital cameras. Product giveaways on her site generate up to 10,000 comments, and are a key part of her business strategy.

As noted, her site is aspirational, she is creating a brand, and her site is designed to make you compare your life to hers. (Or at least to her life at it is presented on the blog — whether or not that is her actual life is an open question.) It causes you to think about what she has that you don’t, and to hope that you might get a little piece of that when she gives some of it away.

But generally, getting something like that will not make you happy. It may make you feel good for a little while, but there is likely to be no real long-term benefit, due to what Barry Schwartz refers to it as “the ubiquitous feature of human psychology[,] … a process known as adaptation.”

As Schwartz describes it:

Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted…. When I first got cable TV, I was ecstatic about the reception and excited about all the choices it provided (many fewer than today). Now I moan when the cable goes out and I complain about the paucity of attractive programs…. Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experiences doesn’t sustain itself.

You end up on what researchers have dubbed the “hedonic treadmill.” You buy things that make you happy, and then you get used to them, so you buy more things — bigger, better, faster things. The cycle can go on indefinitely, but you’re never really happier than you were before. How much nicer is the car you drive now than the first car you owned? It’s probably a lot nicer. Are you happier with it? Probably not. Were you happier after the vacation in Europe than you were after the camping trip? Were your friends more interested in looking at your pictures? (No, they were not — they were feigning interest both times just to humor you.)

There’s a constant escalation of purchases and activities, yet you are left at the same level of happiness. (I think it actually might better be called the “hedonic stairmaster” — you’re climbing and climbing yet not getting any higher.)

One strategy for getting around this that is not discussed in either book but that I have found to be generally effective is to consciously limit your purchases. If you  buy only things you need or truly want — after much thought and trying alternatives and seeing how it is to live without them — they will in fact make you happy when you get them. For instance I had a wood stove installed in my office last year and I love my wood stove with all my heart, it was the best sixteen hundred dollars I ever spent. I also continue to love the Terry road bike I bought in 1992, and my down comforter, and the hand-me-down cowboy boots my friend Rah gave me….

So I’m not going to say that things can’t bring joy, they can. But most things don’t, and the more things you buy, the less likely it is that any one of them will make you happy.

One of the reasons I love my wood stove and bike so much is because it took me forever to talk myself into getting them, and I spent a significant amount of time without them, thinking about what to do. When I finally did get them, I really, really appreciated them. And even now, when I use them, I remember what it was like to not have them, which makes me continue to value them highly.

So that’s my own personal strategy for making sure that things I get live up to expectations — don’t get very much, and only get things you really want.

Another strategy is the one outlined in The Paradox of Choice, which is to practice gratitude — to consciously spend time thinking about how much better things are than they could be, reflecting on what parts of your life bring you joy and satisfaction, and taking time to note what you do have that you love and value.

As Schwartz explains:

Finally, we can remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have. This may seem trite, the sort of thing one hears from parents or ministers, and then ignores. But individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optimistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not. Individuals who experience gratitude are more alert, enthusiastic, and energetic than those who do not, and they are more likely to achieve personal goals.

And unlike adaptation, the experience of gratitude is something we can affect directly. Experiencing and expressing gratitude actually gets easier with practice. By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than they could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation bring in its wake can be blunted.

(To support these conclusions, he cites the work of Professor Robert Emmons at UC Davis, a leading researcher in the field.)

So the next time you are tempted to go read The Pioneer Woman as a way to escape from the tedium of your day-to-day life, thinking it will be a little break that will make you feel better, you should instead practice experiencing gratitude for what you do have.

Schwartz even gives advice on how to do that. He recommends the practice of  keeping a gratitude journal, adopting a simple routine:

1. Keep a notepad at your bedside.
2. Every morning, when you wake up, or every night, when you go to bed, use the notepad to list five things that happened that you’re grateful for.

As Schwartz notes, “These objects of gratitude occasionally will be big (a job promotion, a great first date), but most of the time, they will be small (sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window, a kind word from a friend, a piece of swordfish cooked just the way you like it, an informative article in a magazine).”

He also says that you will likely feel silly or self-conscious when you start doing this, and you may have trouble thinking of things. But the more you do it, the easier it will get, and the more natural it will feel.

You also may find yourself discovering many things to be grateful for on even the most ordinary of days. Finally, you may find yourself feeling better and better about your life as it is, and less and less driven to find the ‘new and improved’ products and activities that will enhance it.

So the bottom line is … stop comparing your life to everyone else’s … stop thinking about what you don’t have that you “need” … and start thinking about what you do have that you love. It will become a self-perpetuating cycle, the more you do it, the better you’ll feel, and the more you’ll be aware of that you are grateful for, which will make you feel even better.

The End.

(And this is the last time I will write a post about The Pioneer Woman. I promise.)

Scrap holiday party food took a bunch of time, though I was nicely rewarded when someone who had been enjoying the offerings seemed like he was going to compliment something and then just said, “Everything on this table is exceptionally good.” Apparently he couldn’t narrow it down to just one thing that he liked.

The egg nog managed to live up to expectations, and my generous neighbor Ron donated four loaves of bread from his bakery, Loaf, which was a huge hit. Especially since I served it with fresh butter, made using the clothes dryer as a churn.

[How do you do that? Basically you follow the instructions given here, but instead of shaking the jar, you put the jar in a plastic bag and make sure the lid is on REALLY tight, and wrap it up with padding (I use dish towels) and put in the clothes dryer,  and run it on air (i.e., NO heat) until the butter has formed. I've done it before, but it took longer this time than I remembered, at least an hour, maybe an hour or an hour and a half. I'd set the dryer for 20 to 30 minutes and was doing other things, so I'd just let it sit until I managed to check and see if it was done and if it wasn't, I'd put it back in for more. I meant to stop when it was fluffy, like whipped cream, before it has fully separated and formed, but didn't manage to catch it in time. And then I made the mistake of putting it in the fridge instead of leaving it out so it would be spreadable. So a little bit hard to work with the bread, but tasty nonetheless.]

And then I was so enjoying my holiday peace and quiet that I couldn’t bring myself to write anything. But I am still planning on wrapping up the My Life and The Pioneer Woman series with a final post with my advice for what to do instead of comparing yourself to others. Hopefully it will be worth the wait.

And I am uncharacteristically (and somewhat sadly, I might add) without blogging obsessions at the moment, and have been left to spend my work breaks looking at house tours on Apartment Therapy, in the hopes that it will motivate me to get going with the house stuff I need to do. It has been motivating enough to get me to think about things, but not to actually do anything yet. Gotta start somewhere, I guess.

At any rate, best wishes for a joyous and prosperous 2012, and more posts coming soon.

For those of you who missed it last year, here’s the recipe. It’s not the easiest thing in the world—and is as far from healthy as you can get—but it is totally worth it.

Holiday Egg Nog (with thanks to Mrs. Lechter and Mom Karr)
10 eggs, separated
1-1/2 c. sugar + up to 1/2 cup additional sugar, to taste
2-1/4 cups brandy
1/4 cup dark rum
6 cups whole milk
2 cups low-fat (2%) milk
2 cups light cream

—Separate eggs.
—BEAT egg yolks with 1 c. sugar until very light.
—BEAT egg whites until very stiff. BEAT in 1/2 c. sugar.
—Combine yolks and whites, and BEAT thoroughly.
—Add milk to eggs and BEAT thoroughly.
—Add cream and BEAT thoroughly.
—Taste for sweetness, add up to 1/2 cup additional sugar, if desired.
—Add brandy and BEAT thoroughly.
—Add rum and BEAT thoroughly.
—Ladle into containers making certain that froth is evenly distributed.
—Store in a cool place at least one week.
—Shake well periodically.

Aside from the fact that Ree Drummond talks about “Keepin’ It Real” then does nothing of the sort, a second problem I have with The Pioneer Woman relates to the concept of reference groups.

One of the books I read that changed how I look at the world is The Overspent American, by sociologist Juliet Schor (chapter one is posted on the New York Times Books page). The book was published in 1998, and much has changed with the economy since then, but I think the book remains valuable. One of the most important parts for me was her explanation of how people judge their level of success not in absolute terms but in relative terms — how am I doing in relation to the people I interact with. In sociological circles, this is called a person’s reference group.

She notes that in the past, people generally compared themselves to people they knew directly — friends, relatives, neighbors. But in recent years, reference groups have expanded to encompass not just real-life acquaintances and friends but also media figures. (In 1998, she was talking about characters in TV shows, though if she were to update it, I suspect she would include bloggers and other internet figures as well.) Most people are unaware of this dynamic, and if you ask them, they will deny feeling pressure to keep up with anyone. But in a comprehensive study on which much of the book is based, the effects are fairly clear.

The problem is that lifestyles presented on most television shows far exceed what is within the grasp of the average American. Hardly any shows portray typical American households — nor do advertisements, for even the most pedestrian of products. Practically every image you see is of an upper-middle-class household with a large house, new car, nice furniture, and fashionable clothes. Even in ads for toothpaste, or light bulbs.

Schor notes, “My research shows that the more TV a person watches, the more he or she spends. The likely explanation for the link between television and spending is that what we see on TV inflates our sense of what’s normal.”

Blogs have elements in common with tv shows — they have “characters” you follow, and you tune in on a regular basis to see what’s new. The Pioneer Woman is probably more like a television show than many blogs, because the life she portrays is so far removed from most readers’ everyday lives. It’s also romanticized. As Amanda Fortini notes in her May 2011 article in the New Yorker, the blog is “aspirational” — it’s designed to make people think about what it would be like to have a life like that. Or, as Fortini writes, Ree Drummond “is who her readers would be if they had more time, more money, a quiet life in the country, a professional teeth-bleaching, or the support of a laconic cowboy husband.”

Ree, in her guise as The Pioneer Woman, focuses almost entirely on the positive in her blog. She might complain about piles of laundry and having to get up in the wee hours of the morning to “rustle cows,” but even those elements are presented as part of what her detractors refer to as a “rainbows and unicorns” world. Fortini sums it up succinctly: “Whole continents of contemporary worry go unmentioned: this is a universe free from credit-card debt, toxins, ‘work-life balance,’ and marital strife.”

At the same time, with the lil ol’ ranch wife/keepin’ it real angle, The Pioneer Woman is working to plant herself firmly as part of the average American’s reference group, in a much more direct and personal way than TV shows do — she is literally presenting herself as “one of us.” She also uses product giveaways as a means of driving traffic to her website, which provides an even more direct link between her blog, her lifestyle, and consumption.

In the same way that Friends set out the idea that you could work in a coffee shop and live in a killer apartment in Manhattan with great clothes and fabulous hair; and that Sex and the City sent the message that you could support a lifestyle filled with restaurant meals, late-night clubbing, and really expensive shoes by writing the occasional newspaper column; The Pioneer Woman sends the message you can work all day taking care of your family, write chirpy blog posts and Photoshop images to within an inch of their lives, while at the same time maintaining spotless Le Creuset cookware, a commercial-grade kitchen, and a closet filled with endless flowy tops.

The difference is that Friends and Sex and the City didn’t present themselves as documentaries. And the characters didn’t tell you that they got where they did by starting a little project in their spare time, in between homeschooling the kids and cooking dinner for their chaps-clad husband who makes their hiney tingle.

So in that way, I think The Pioneer Woman is actually more dangerous than Friends or Sex and the City. It makes people compare their actual life — filled with problems and frustrations and tedium and not enough money and recipes that don’t turn out right — to a life where all the men are strong, all the women are good looking, and the skies are not cloudy all day.

But unless you married into a family of wealthy landowners, have a guest house that you remodeled to include a TV studio kitchen, and make a million dollars a year from advertising on your blog, The Pioneer Woman is not part of your reference group.

Escapism is fine, but don’t compare your life to those you see or read about — your life is yours. For better or for worse.

Next up, advice on what do when you find yourself thinking about what your life lacks. (There’s an answer, really, there is! And it doesn’t involve getting leftover flowy tops from Ree Drummond’s closet.)

A friend of mine was housesitting over Labor Day weekend for someone whose apartment building has a rooftop patio; the friend that she was housesitting for told her she should have people over and use it, so my friend had a little dinner party on the rooftop. It was lovely.

This was right when PWS had gone offline, and I was in the midst of my Pioneer Woman obsession. I was trying to explain the phenomenon to my friend and she totally wasn’t getting it. I would try to explain what the deal was but she just kept saying, “Right, I see that, but who cares?”

So we were sitting on the lovely rooftop drinking lovely cocktails and getting into this very heated discussion, me trying to explain what the problem was and my friend saying over and over again, who cares, WHO CARES.

In the passion of the discussion, I managed to lose sight of the fact that I wasn’t actually obsessed with The Pioneer Woman, I was obsessed with the people making fun of The Pioneer Woman, and the reason I had become obsessed with that was because it made me laugh.

Once we got that cleared up, I tried to see if I could come up with a better explanation of why I thought it mattered. Because I do actually think it matters.

The Pioneer Woman phenomenon is interesting to me from a number of different angles, including feminism/homemaking (feminist food studies), the corporate commodification of homemaking, and consumerism. Some of which are touched on in an interesting way in this essay which I ran across at some point when I was indulging my obsession. These are all things I’ve been reading about and thinking about for a while now, and it all kind of comes together in The Pioneer Woman.

(There’s also the million-dollar a year blog angle, which is what got me looking at it in the first place, as well as the cult phenomenon, and something of a “Queen Bees and Wannabees” element that I also find intriguing. So just generally a lot going on.)

A little background, for any of you out there who have missed the Pioneer Woman bandwagon and who don’t want to have to go look at her site to figure out what the deal is.

The Pioneer Woman is the online blogging persona of Ree Drummond, a ranch wife in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, who takes photos of and writes about her day-to-day life caring for her husband and four children, including cooking, housekeeping, working the ranch, and homeschooling the kids. She likes to talk about “Keepin’ It Real.” She has had at least three books on the Amazon and/or New York Times bestseller lists, including a children’s book (Charlie the Ranch Dog), a cookbook (The Pioneer Woman Cooks), and a memoir (Black Heels to Tractor Wheels).

She began blogging in 2006, purportedly as a way to keep in touch with her family and to talk about her life, showing pictures of her kids and telling stories about them and the things going on at the ranch. (In other words, for all of the reasons that every other so-called Mommy Blogger started blogging.)

She writes in a down-home style, with catch phrases like “Help me, Rhonda!” (random aside: on one of the anti-PW sites, I saw a comment posted under the name “I’m Rhonda and I’m here to help” – love it!) and “Love you more than my luggage” scattered throughout her posts. She has a cult-like following — and I mean that in the most literal sense — and her blog reportedly generates upwards of a million dollars a year in advertising revenue. In September, The Pioneer Woman show debuted on the Food Network.

The “hater” sites like Pioneer Woman Sux, The Marlboro Woman, and Pie Near Woman seek to show the “truth” behind TPW, highlight the inconsistencies in the brand (she homeschools her kids and works cattle while travelling around the country doing book tours and staying in luxury hotels? she serves Krispy Kreme doughnuts that were heated at 300 degrees for 10 minutes? Really?), and parody her writing (which honestly sometimes almost parodies itself, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel). They in turn have developed their own cult-like followings.

For the premier of the FN show, there were dueling Tweetchats between #teamree and #pioneerwomansux.

Okay, so there’s the background.

I am definitely not on #teamree. I spent about five minutes on the site and could sort of see why some people might like it, but it didn’t do much for me personally. I did however find the anti- sites oddly compelling.

This is what led to the many conversations about The Pioneer Woman, which led people to ask me who cares, what does it matter, which I am now attempting to answer in this series of blog posts.

I started by saying it matters because she presents herself as something she’s not. She has a tagline of “keepin’ it real” but it’s not real — she’s not just a ranch wife who homeschools her kids and runs a little ol’ blog on the side. She’s a Brand, a carefully constructed corporate image designed specifically to sell advertising.

They said so what, welcome to America. Who cares? It’s like Martha Stewart, do you think she does that all herself?

I said it’s not the same. Martha Stewart didn’t create a media empire pretending to be just like you and me. Martha Stewart has always been aspirational, and Martha Stewart is clearly a Brand, she is clearly selling an idea of a lifestyle — buy my products and you can be like me.

Like Martha Stewart, The Pioneer Woman is a Brand, but her blog continues to be written as if it were by a person writing about her life. This is inherently deceptive. It’s like Lonely Girl — it was a good story, interesting and entertaining, but it wasn’t what it said it was.

Some people have continued to argue that this doesn’t matter, that constructing an ongoing, elaborate fantasy and calling it reality is harmless. But the reason I think it’s bad is because it makes people feel bad about themselves, about their lives, about what they can accomplish in the hours they have available. And it’s true that people who feel bad can just stop reading — which certainly many have done. But one of the things that inspires such passion in the anti- sites is that they are filled with people who used to follow TPW but eventually realized that something wasn’t right. They want to make sure other people have all of the information they need to come to that conclusion, possibly a little sooner than they did. The same way that if you had been in a cult, you would want other people to know that it was a cult.

Here’s one of my favorite comments from PWS:

Thank fracking God — I’m not crazy. For months I kept wondering, “Doesn’t anyone else smell something weird here? Am I just some jaded bitch while everyone around me is as perfect as this blogging megastar? Page after page, post after post, there’s never a whiff of a negative comment. WTF’s wrong with me??” There may indeed be many things wrong with me, but at least I’m not crazy. Thanks to PWS, MW, and PNW for loudly demonstrating that.

This is why there are so many searches along the lines of “Pioneer Woman not what she appears.” And why I think there is value in the sites that expose the reality behind the fantasy.

In the end, the bottom line for me is this: I feel like it is dangerous in the way that presenting Photoshopped images of supermodels in magazines is dangerous — it makes people want to be something that not only could they not be, but that no one could ever be, because it isn’t real.

If you want to read The Pioneer Woman and participate in the product giveaways, and imagine your life as an Oklahoma ranch wife, and think about how wonderful Ree Drummond is for doing everything she does in the same 24 hours a day that you have, that’s totally fine, as long as you recognize that reading The Pioneer Woman is like reading the Pottery Barn catalog.

It’s not real.

Next up: The Pioneer Woman as Reference Group.

Eventually I got back to my regular work and was looking for procrastination options and got sucked into checking on Pioneer Woman Sux every night. I really couldn’t have cared less about The Pioneer Woman, but I do love me some good parody, and PWS was often hilarious, and even when the post didn’t do much for me, the comments were almost always entertaining.

PWS went offline in September and I had a moment of panic, and then it came back but not really, it looks like they’ve gone underground and are handling things through the forums, which I am really trying to avoid getting sucked into.

Some time around when all of this was happening, a new little graph appeared in my WordPress header. My general strategy on this blog is to pretend that no one actually reads it (except my mom, who often comments on things I’ve written, and it’s probably best that I not forget that my mom reads my blog) and I’d like to not be disabused of that notion, so anything involving statistics or tips on how to get more readers is really something I try to avoid. So I ignored the little graph for a few days but it kept changing and it started to bug me not knowing what it was. So I went to my dashboard to see if there was anything there that would tell me what was going on and there’s all kinds of stuff on the dashboard that really I’d prefer to be ignoring.

But while I was there looking at the dashboard, I saw the list of search terms that led people to my blog, and was struck by the fact that a substantial number of them were related to Pioneer Woman. This seemed very odd to me as at that point I had written exactly one (1) post relating to The Pioneer Woman.

Eventually I figured out what the little graph was and moved on to other things and didn’t think about it much more, until Pioneer Woman Sux went offline and I was doing some searches to figure out what was going on and when I searched for Pioneer Woman Sux, I discovered that my post from May was the fourth hit on Google, after two links to the actual Pioneer Woman Sux site and one to a post from The Marlboro Woman.

I have no idea how this is possible. I think I must be some kind of SEO savant.

And I realized that would explain the many people ending up on my site with Pioneer Woman-related searches. Which I will actually include here because I think it’s kind of funny to see what people were searching for.

pioneer woman sux
the pioneer woman sux
pioneer woman
pioneerwomansux
new yorker pioneer woman
pioneerwomansux.com
pioneer woman sux blog
the marlboro woman and the pioneer woman sux
pioneer woman not as appears
pioneerwoman sux
pioneer woman
who is pioneer woman sux
pioneer woman cooking show sucks
pioneer woman new yorker
how the pioneer woman got started
pioneer woman new yorker magazine
what happened to pioneer woman sux
pioneer woman sux forum
comments on pioneer woamn sux
pioneer women sux author
why pioneer woman sux
pioneer woman too much oil
wordpress theme which looks like pioneer woman
pioneer womand sux

(My favorite is definitely “pioneer woman too much oil” — I think this post might be what you’re looking for, whoever searched for that. And “pioneer woman not as appears” is also a winner.)

Of the views resulting from searches for the time period reviewed (I don’t remember what the time period was, 7 days? 30 days? I have no idea), 140 of them were from searches relating to Pioneer Woman and 80 were for every other search term anyone used to find anything on my site. That means that the one Pioneer Woman post I wrote resulted in almost twice as many hits as everything else I’ve ever written here.

I was like dang, I should be writing about the Pioneer Woman every day. (But then I remembered that I would like to pretend that no one actually reads this so I decided that was a bad idea.)

Because I was spending so much time on Pioneer Woman Sux, and because I found the whole thing interesting for a bunch of different reasons, I was talking about it a lot. None of my friends read blogs, no one I talked to had ever heard of The Pioneer Woman, and no one could figure out why in the world I was at all interested in it. And let me tell you, they all got pretty sick of it pretty quickly. But do I ever let a little thing like what people are interested in talking about get in the way of my talking about what I want to talk about? No. I do not.

As a result of some of those conversations, I ended up writing some extended expositions on, as one of my friends wondered, where the vitriol comes from, and also on why I thought it mattered. And I was going to wrap them up and post them but then I had Scrap fundraising and then my work recurred, so all of it went back into the box.

This past Friday, I was out with some friends and they were talking about something on the Food Network so I asked if they’d seen the Pioneer Woman show (I have not seen it and have yet to find anyone who has, most of the reviews I read were pretty brutal) and my friend said she had never heard of the Pioneer Woman until she bought a book for her three-year old that turned out to be by Ree Drummond, who the book said was The Pioneer Woman, and my friend said she wondered who that even was and what the deal was.

I’m pretty sure they regretted getting me started on that topic.

And all of that made me look at the post I wrote earlier about why I think it matters and I had a short version of this intro with that longer post, but then I decided to write the intro as its own post to say where it all came from and I’ll put up the part that actually says something separately.

So there you have it. Exposition on The Pioneer Woman coming up this week, betcha can’t wait.

The posts I’m writing about shopping for less are for the people who were pretending for a week to be part of the program, in an effort to experience what poverty is like.

I believe that the amount of money they had to work with ($31.50 for the week) is perfectly adequate for a healthy, gainfully employed person with a functioning kitchen and a car to eat well without much effort.

Not everyone in the SNAP program is healthy or has reliable transportation or a functioning kitchen. I recognize that and, as I just said, that’s not who I’m writing for.

I don’t think it’s possible to experience poverty by trying to eat for $31.50 a week. No matter what happens with your food this week, you are not poor. You have an education and an income and a safe place to live.

For whatever reason, these kinds of projects get under my skin. And I feel compelled to explain how you can eat for $31.50 a week.

So that’s what I’m doing.