You know, I'm really torn on this issue.  On the one hand, I recently re-watched "Supersize Me," and I am overcome with the urge to never eat again.  On the other hand, I just spent an hour browsing the recipes on Pioneer Woman's blog.

Then… oh, you won't like what happened then.

Then I thought, "I wonder how many calories are in these recipes?"  And I found a tool at About.com which lets you paste in a recipe, and get the calorie information.  And now... now I don't feel so good.

To answer the first question, Pioneer Woman's quiche - assuming that it is cut into twelve slices - has 750 calories, 46 grams of fat, 20 grams of carbs, and 23 grams of protein.  Which is to say, about the same as a McDonald's DOUBLE quarter pounder WITH CHEESE.

But… have you seen the pictures?  Go look at the pictures.  Tell me you can look at every single picture without feeling that tingle in your salivary glands.  I dare you.

"Surely this is some kind of fluke," I thought.  I clicked on a recipe without looking, and randomly chose her recipe for bacon onion cheddar biscuits.  Whoa nelly!  Assuming that recipe makes 12 biscuits (it seems to, as far as I can tell from the pictures) that's 185 calories, 10 grams of fat, 17 grams of carbs, and 5 grams of protein.  Per biscuit.  Which is to say, about the same as a McDonald's hash brown patty.

But look at those pictures.  Scroll down.  Look at the cheese strings.  Can you smell them?  I think I can smell them.

People, this is what I'm talking about.  Pioneer Woman is probably one of the biggest bloggers in the world, largely because of her recipes and photographs.  In fact, she recently finished a cookbook which should be on bookstore shelves soon.  Ree Drummond obviously knows which side her bread is buttered on, so to speak, or she wouldn't accompany every recipe with three dozen lavish photographs.

The thing most of us probably don't realize is that Drummond is cooking this food for working ranch hands.  They probably burn 10,000 calories apiece every day, at least.  (I wasn't able to find a calorie burning chart that included "wrangling cattle.")  At that rate, a couple of bacon muffins with dinner is just a drop in the bucket.

Is Pioneer Woman telling you to eat this stuff for every single meal?  No she is not.  Is she going to threaten to shoot your dog if you don't eat a handful of bacon cheddar muffins?  No she is not.  Should she somehow be forced to tone it down in the recipe department, because that food is literally dangerous?  I doubt if she'd do it, because she's obviously found a lucrative niche, and she's going to mine it for all it's worth.  (I can't blame her - I'd do the same thing.)  

I don't even want to be the party pooper in all of this.  I should talk, right?!  Still though, I can't help but feel that Ree Drummond's recipes should come with some kind of health warning.  We all know that bacon and heavy cream is bad for you in the abstract, but I'd love to see Drummond include a Nutrition Facts graphic with every recipe.  Maybe it would put the food porn into its proper perspective, you know?