My Father's Daughter...

is the title of a new cookbook I bought. It is by Gwyneth Paltrow. I never used to imagine she ate much, much less cooked, until I saw the Spain...On the Road Again show on PBS. Between her life experiences and the fact that she has a lot of foodie friends, I figured her cookbook would be pretty good.

I love that she believes in doing without processed foods and making your own wholesome variations, even including a recipe for Sriracha! And, she uses a lot of veggies and talks about having a garden. The only things that aren't so great for me personally are her heavy use of seafood (I have some kind of shellfish allergy) and heavy use of duck. She does not eat or include recipes for pork or beef. I have a fairly irrational tendency to avoid consuming duck. Basically, they are too cute! I had lovely pet ducks when I was young. They, and geese too, seem awfully smart to me sometimes. But I also had chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows and they seemed smart and cute and yet I still eat them...that's why I said it's irrational!

Some ingredients will be new to me like vegenaise instead of mayo, brown rice syrup and agave syrup. I know, I'm probably the only person who hasn't been using the agave for some time now. I want to look into the supposed health benefits of these and give them a try, but they are not essential to the recipes. For instance you can use Hellman's mayo instead of the vegenaise.

It is an enjoyable book to read and the pictures are gorgeous as you'd expect. There are a lot of appealing recipes. I am always looking for salad dressing variations since I don't use store bought dressing, so I know I will try hers. For meals this week, I got groceries for her Broccoli and Cheese Soup, White Bean Soup and Blueberry Muffins. I started with the Blueberry Muffins and we had a breakfast for dinner night. They are not one of the healthy recipes, being made with a stick of butter. I like a lot of blueberries in my muffins and the ratio is good here. I did have to substitute frozen, smaller, wild berries for the fresh which made my muffins a little different, like a more blue colored batter, but the recipe still produced a very tasty result.

I'll let you know how other recipes work out. Let me know if you try any from this book too!