GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY (OR KITCHEN)

Have you been following the culinary ghostwriters debate?  It had never even crossed my mind that celebs actually wrote their own books, but it seems that Gwynneth Paltrow wrote every word of the book that has her name on the front.  And she did her own proof reading, and jacket design, and her own printing and binding, and she drove a delivery truck down to the Amazon warehouse so she could keep complete control of the process.  Good for her.

And yet, and yet.  Look at that title: my father’s daughter.  No capitalization!  Some people might think this was just folksy, borderline illiteracy, but others might ask themselves, “Is that woman plagiarizing e. e. cummings?”  In a way I rather hope she is.

My favorite e.e. cummings line, “Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.”

REFRIED PALTROW

Look, I have nothing against Gwyneth Paltrow as an actress.  She is a pretty decent actress and she has very interesting tastes in shoes. But every time she opens her mouth to talk about food or cooking I just want to scream. Her latest foolish utterance comes in an interview with Elle magazine.

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ELLE: Have you ever had a dinner party disaster?


GP: Yes! When I was about 19 and started cooking there was no “online,” so you couldn’t go to Epicurious.com or anything for help. I was having six people over for dinner, and I realized that I had bought all the ingredients for eggplant Parmesan, and had no recipe for it. I didn’t know you had to sweat the eggplant and then bread it and fry it first, so I just arranged raw eggplant in layers with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. It was so awful. I think we ended up ordering pizza.

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But hold on GP, if you didn't have a recipe for eggplant Parmesan how could you possibly know what to go out and buy?  You couldn’t, could you?  And even if by some bizarre chance you randomly happened to buy all the ingredients for eggplant Parmesan, without a recipe how could you possibly know that’s what you’d bought?  By some magical process you knew what the ingredients were for eggplant Parmesan, by some random principle you bought them but then you didn’t know what to do with them?  This whole answer is complete gibberish, isn't it Gwyneth?  And you know it, don't you?  Stop it.  Just stop it right now.  

Nice plug for Epicurious.com however.  And here's a picture of Gwyneth kissing a chef who once said, "There are two ways of making a woman happy, and they both involve putting something into her.  Food is one of the things."