Somewhere between reading about her afternoons in the kitchen with Jeffrey Steingarten, recreating some of her father’s favorite recipes for last August’s Vogue cover story, and watching her rock out to Cee-lo’s “Forget You” on Glee, I converted. I officially became a Gwyneth Paltrow fan.
It wasn’t that I disliked her before; I just wasn’t familiar with many of her movies. Plus, when I saw the years of regular upkeep — and fellow bloggers, you can attest to how hard it is to post routinely — she put into Goop, I couldn’t help but respect her for it. So when the A-list actress released her cookbook, My Father’s Daughter, last week, I was genuinely curious: Sure, she’s passionate about food, but would it be any good?
GP has already had her fair share of goop flung at her — from Eater’s list of the ‘best’ lines in her cookbook to WSJ’s story on how aging celebs must turn to cooking as a way to stay in the spotlight and all the blatant hate mail in between — but she seems pretty resilient. In fact, I really appreciated her response to criticism that her book only underscores how privileged and annoying she truly is:
“I think people mistake me trying to be the best version of myself for me telling them you’re not, or they just think well, what does that make me then, you annoying f**king person on the soapbox … It’s a projection. Sometimes if I hear of something really unkind or somebody’s really misunderstood me or something like that for a second I’ll be like, ‘Oooh wow that hurt,’ but almost immediately I’ll be like, ‘poor guy,'” she told Popeater.
Rather than content myself with critics’ mixed reviews, I decided to step up and buy her book. I even went so far to swing by her book signing at Williams-Sonoma, where I sampled pea soup and peanut butter cookies. (Initial verdict: Daaang, I never knew I could thoroughly enjoy — and later crave — a chilled pea soup. The chefs at Williams-Sonoma can execute her recipes wonderfully. Whether I can is another story.)
Over the next few weeks, I’ll test some of her recipes to see how novice-friendly they are (and if there are any easy food hacks I can employ for my dorm-dwelling friends — holla!).
Also, because I can be (admittedly) a bit socially awkward at times, my introduction to GP was a little different from the usual, “OMG I love, love, loved you in Glee/Shakespeare in Love/Iron Man/Insert-Any-Movie-Except-View-from-the-Top-Here!” It seemed rude to run up and gush at her, so we exchanged hellos and how-do-you-do’s (my mama didn’t raise no rude girl!), then I just blurted out, “So I really hope the rumors are true that you’re working on a food/lifestyle magazine in the same vein as Goop. Is there any truth to this?”
Unfortunately, she said the rumors weren’t true. There’s no Gwyneth Paltrow Magazine in the works — at least not yet. “Maybe someday, years from now,” she said, though that may have been just to give me hope since I made a childishly comical pouty face and ran a finger down my cheek as if a tear were there (to which my inner monologue spent the next five minutes going, “Did you seriously just hand-motion a tear because you couldn’t think of anything to say?! Did you really just do that?!” Yup, I totally did.).
At that point, she was done scrawling her name across my book and swirling a heart underneath, so we wished each other a nice day and I scampered back to work. Well, not before taking some shaky, poor-quality photos, of course.