I am a Ree Drummond fan. My good friend Alice posted something from The Pioneer Woman on Facebook some months back, and I went and got myself hooked on her unique sense of humor and her quirky, humorous and thoroughly riveting writing style. And the fact that we get a big, fat slice of her life and all of her varied interests and pursuits. Her blog is definitely an inspiration to me. It also doesn’t hurt that Black Heels to Tractor Wheels is incredibly addictive, even if it means laboriously pawing through tons of old posts to read it in the right order. But I digress.

One of the cool things about Ree, is like I said, the way she doesn’t limit herself to one or even a few subjects. One things she blogs about frequently is food. We get a lot of our new recipes from Mark’s Daily Apple, but sometimes something crops up from a random source that we can’t pass by. And that was this:

Photo by Ree Drummond/The Pioneer Woman. Click through to original post.

The Pioneer Woman’s chicken and dumplings recipe. Looks great. And I know Adam likes chicken and dumplings, so why not? So we took the recipe for a spin.

Photography side note.: The lighting in my kitchen is abysmal for photography. And there are no exceedingly convenient plugs for easy, alternative lighting. Sigh. It’s an issue. I’ll figure it out one of these days.

Unlike most recipes we test-drive, I had no complaints about how the steps were organized or described. Everything was straightforward and made good sense. The recipe was so easy!

We lightly breaded and mostly cooked the chicken.

Chopped and cooked the vegetables.

Chicken went back in and was shredded. Added broth, spices and the plopped dumplings.

Dished it up and then sat down to watch some Star Trek: Next Generation.

The Star Trek wasn’t called for in the original recipe, but I think it added a certain je ne sais quoi. Actually, the only way in which we deviated from the recipe was the addition of the broccoli, which we has laying around from a previous recipe and didn’t want to waste. Not having had chicken and dumplings much – at all? – in my childhood (then again I have a notoriously poor memory for that kind of thing), I found the whole experience novel. And the final product tasty. All-in-all-totally doable for a weeknight dinner. Thanks, Ree!