KEEPING IT EASY

By Gwyneth Paltrow

What does “easy” mean in the context of being in the kitchen and preparing food?

How does one do it—create ease among the pots, appliances, fresh food, and pantry items—when we so often arrive in that particular heart of the house brimming with worries about time and preparedness, execution and outcome? “Easy” implies a lack of complications or obstacles. The kitchen seems laden with both. But let me back up.

When I sat down to start this book, I had been polling my friends and colleagues on what sort of cookbook they were looking for. These friends all seemed to have a common culinary yearning: They wanted a collection of recipes that they could prepare easily. They wanted to find themselves in the kitchen at the end of their overextended day and be able to prepare something delicious and quick.

Their lives are packed with responsibility and work and children. And yet, they were not willing to give up on the moment—the small and beautiful moment of preparing food with some care, by one’s own hand, and sitting down to eat it with the people they love. Essentially, they yearned for the moment that is the antidote to all their busyness. A simple reset of the compass toward wholeness and quality at the end of the day, before the next morning comes, bringing with it the dizziness of being pulled in so many directions, a splitting of priorities.

How to integrate “busy” (anxiety, fullness of schedule, responsibility) with quality of inner life seems to be the issue on the table (so to speak). It’s almost as if the more we pile on our plates, the deeper we long for the simpler aspects of life, which makes perfect sense. But how can we achieve this balance?

Everywhere I go, everyone seems to be inundated with obligation. Everyone is under an intense amount of pressure to do multiple things simultaneously, and to be doing them to an impossibly high standard. It seems to be a facet of life for our generation: hyper-responsibility. I’m not quite sure why we have done this to ourselves or how/why this drive was imparted to us, but we seem to be living lives where our self-imposed standards leave little time for daydreams and meanderings. We yearn for that lost aspect of life, before smartphones hijacked picnics and walks on the beach. Before media, in all its new forms, made you so aware of what everyone else was doing that the magic of solitude gave rise to FOMO^*.

My friends said that they want to make good food quickly and easily, but what are they really saying? What is the feeling they are seeking? A road map, perhaps, for a way back to something. That warm wash of simplicity. It takes effort to carve out those moments, and increasingly we need a framework from which we can hang them. Good food at a table can provide that framework.

The food doesn’t need to be complicated to be good. You don’t need to work for days to create that feeling of wholeness. There has been many a night when I have stood in front of the open pantry, totally at a loss for what to throw together, and settled on pasta with butter and cheese, or a can of organic tomato soup and a grilled cheese, or frozen Amy’s pizza bites. Meaning, I’ve done the best I can on that particular day, and gone really easy on myself… with a large glass of wine on the side and no guilt.

This book is meant to be a road map: a self-help book for the chronically busy cook. With the extraordinary support of my cohort, Thea Baumann, I bring you It’s All Easy, and it aims to make your time in the kitchen just that. Although the food in this book tends to be on the healthier side (see the gluten-free, dairy-free dessert section), we have also included recipes with more standard ingredients (some cheese, some regular flour) because, well, it’s just easier. And because we never sacrifice deliciousness, some of these recipes might have an extra step or a special ingredient that might not seem super easy, but trust us, it’s worth it.

My friend Crystal Lourd ends her emails with a phrase I love. When we are trying to decide who is bringing what to the fourth-grade-class faculty appreciation potluck, trying to coordinate a last-minute playdate for our boys, or aiming to sneak in a glass of wine and a chat, she signs off with “Keep easy.” It’s a phrase that instantly gives comfort and takes the pressure off. That’s the idea here: Approach the kitchen with an air of easiness. Because even if life isn’t all easy—far from it—sitting down and enjoying a good meal with people you really like can be. It should be.

 

MAKING SURE IT WORKS

By Thea Baumann

When Gwyneth first asked if I’d be interested in coauthoring this cookbook, my jaw nearly hit the floor. Anyone who knows me well knows that this opportunity was literally a dream come true. It was, however, also kind of terrifying. While I’d written recipes for private clients in the past, and was busily writing recipes as the food editor for GOOP, I’d never worked on a cookbook and was frankly a little daunted by the idea.

Gwyneth, or GP as we call her, the consummate pro, quickly set my mind at ease. She explained, in her characteristically nonchalant manner, that, in simple terms, writing a cookbook is a pretty straightforward undertaking: we cook, we write down what we did, we test, we tweak, and we retest. Since the theme of the book is easy weekday meals, I started writing down recipes I made for dinner that she and the kids loved, and she did the same. We set aside time during the day to cook together, enlisting guitar teachers, houseguests, and kids over for slumber parties as taste-testers, and compared notes about recipe ideas and inspiration. We then roped in willing friends, family (I think between them, my sisters made every single recipe in this book), and pretty much the entire GOOP team to test and give feedback, and, slowly but surely, the book began to take form.

With a name like It’s All Easy, you might expect this to be full of recipes with five ingredients that can be made in under twenty minutes. It’s not. What it is, however, is a book thoughtfully developed by two busy women who understand the importance of a good, simple meal. These recipes are easy, healthy, and approachable for cooks with any lifestyle and any skill level. We made them as quick and simple as possible without ever compromising on taste or quality, because while efficiency is key, we still want everything we eat and make for our families to be delicious and good for us. Otherwise, what’s the point?

As a minor (read: major) cookbook addict, I can spend hours poring over beautiful pages full of obscure ingredients and complicated techniques. But the books that I actually reach for when I want to cook, the ones with worn bindings and food spills on the pages, are the simple ones. They’re the books full of great flavors and unpretentious ingredients; the ones with recipes that I can shop for and get on the table without giving up an entire day. Our aim here was to make a book like that—a book full of recipes that are beautiful and sometimes unexpected, while also comforting, satisfying, and realistic for anyone and everyone to make. If we’ve done our job, which I sincerely hope we have, this book will live in your kitchen, its pages stained with anchovy oil and stuck together with egg white. I hope you have as much fun cooking from it as we had making it.