I was planning on going all ‘Anna & Kristina’s Grocery Bag’ on Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter, but it still hasn’t happened. If you’ve never seen it, or don’t regularly watch the W Network, on the A&K show they take a cookbook and make 6-8 recipes from it, and decide if they would recommend it to the viewer.

I know I’m not the only one who was suspicious when Gwyneth Paltrow announced she was releasing a cookbook, so I was really curious to see what it was all about. I have to say, there isn’t anything in there that made me super excited to get into the kitchen. This is evidenced by the fact that I checked this book out of the library in July, and just made my first recipe from it in October.

Overall I would say Gwyneth is giving you a lot of fundamentals in the book (i.e. basic tomato sauce, a variety of vinaigrettes) but also a heck of a lot of alternative proteins and seafood (i.e. duck, clams) that I’m not really interested in. The recipes I jotted down were a few of the soups, a couple of pasta dishes, and one for corn fritters that will have to be saved until next summer.

I made this butternut squash soup when my parents came over for my birthday dinner. It was really easy, had a nice consistency (key for people with semi-soup aversion like me), and makes you feel good because you’re eating vegetables. The most difficult part is peeling and chopping the squash, which takes like 20 minutes.  As Anna & Kristina say, this recipe gets my stamp of approval, but let me make a few more things before I recommend the book!

(For dinner, I made the red-wine braised short-ribs from this month’s Bon Appetit. It was good, but not great. The short ribs I got at Whole Foods were not super meaty, like the kind you get in a restaurant, so I’m blaming it on that. I would definitely make it again, but perhaps with lean stewing beef, like last year’s Beouf Bourguignon.) 

Butternut Squash Soup

Source: My Father’s Daughter by Gwyneth Paltrow

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp butter

2 large yellow onions, roughly chopped (about 3 cups)

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp coarse salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/2 tsp curry powder or garam masala

1 large butternut squash, peeled and chopped into 1/2″ pieces (about 6 cups)

1L vegetable stock, warmed (just pour it into a microwave safe bowl or container and heat for two minutes)

Directions

1. Heat olive oil and butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add onions and garlic and saute for 10 minutes, or until softened.  Add the salt, pepper and curry powder / garam masala, and saute for two more minutes. Add squash and saute for another 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. Pour the stock into the pot. If it doesn’t cover the squash, add some boiling water until all the squash is submerged.
3. Bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer and cook for an hour. (Note: Gwyneth says 20 minutes, but my squash was not nearly cooked at that time. I let it go for about an hour until the squash was really soft).
4. Let cool for about 15 minutes, then blend until smooth. I used my immersion blender, and it worked like a dream.