It’s All Easy, is it? What I learned from eating like Gwyneth Paltrow for a week
Gwyneth Paltrow is so easy to hate.
She looks ah-mazing as usual whilst smugly smiling, holding a wooden crate full of expensive-looking vegetables on the cover of her new cookbook, It’s All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook.
Cue the eye rolls. What does G.P. (which is her nickname now … at least according to her book) know about being a super-busy home cook? I decided to find out for myself just how easy it is to cook like G.P. for a week. From Monday to Friday I vowed to prepare all of my main meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner – from her book. Channeling my inner Gwynnie I was feeling pretty smug when I picked up the $42 tome at the bookstore. After all, I usually cook all of my meals at home during the week so I figured this would be a piece of cake.
I failed the very first day, when after returning from a weekend trip away my fridge was bare and yet to be stocked with cartons of almond-coconut milk and other items I’d never bought before. Since I was dragging The Husband into this experiment with me, I kept things easy for myself by skipping the more intensive and expensive recipes. There was a recipe to make my own fresh coconut milk from scratch, but it required a high-powered blender. G.P. advised using a Vitamix blender which she noted was “expensive, but worth it.” I looked Vitamix blenders up online and they are indeed very expensive, retailing for between $459-$759. I decided that was an investment not worth making at this time.
The book, as expected, is filled with items that gave me sticker shock. In the spirit of the experiment I splurged on coconut oil, almond butter and ground cardamom. Those three items alone were more than $30, meaning many of the recipes would be out of reach for the super-busy home cook on a budget.
I did mange to go the whole week preparing food from scratch at home for The Husband and I. And, a surprise to us both, we actually liked all of the recipes. The vegan, gluten-free granola recipe is my new obsession. But, like many of the recipes it’s not all that easy to whip up homemade granola on a weeknight.
It’s All Easy was easier than I expected, but unless you have personal assistants and chefs to help you out à la G.P. you should consciously uncouple from this cookbook during the week. Save the recipes for the weekend when truly super-busy home cooks will actually have time to source the ingredients and whip up the yummy recipes sandwiched between the arty photos of Gwyneth on a bike, Gwyneth on a couch, Gwyneth staring out a window, etc.
In all, shopping, cooking and cleaning up after the meals from It’s All Easy took about four hours total – basically on par with a typical week for me. And, it cost about $65 for one person’s breakfast, lunch and dinner for five weekdays, also fairly close to what I usually spend on groceries.
G.P. might be easy to hate, but there are lots of recipes in her book that are just as easy to love.
All photos by Melissa Dunne
