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It’s a little curious to me how many celebrities are putting out cookbooks these days. Not chef celebrities, just straight up celebrities. And if you’re wondering what in the world I’m referring to? Just browse’s Amazon.com’s 100 bestsellers today and you’ll see a few of them…
Gwyneth’s book is sitting pretty at #6 on Amazon right now with Eva and Sheryl at numbers 52 and 90, respectively. Is this a new trend? It’s certainly not something I’ve noticed in the past. I remember Alicia Silverstone putting out her cookbook a few years back…
But that didn’t seem too unusual to me since her book was full of vegetarian recipes and her advocacy for animals is something she’s made pretty widely known for years. Where as many of the “cooks” listed above, well, I haven’t ever really known them for their cooking. Just for their uncanny ability to stay really slim, believing they always had a chef at home helping them out. Granted, I haven’t picked up a single one of these books, so maybe I don’t have room to have an opinion, I’m just putting the question out there…do we really need celebrity cookbooks? Or should they leave room on the shelf for all the real chefs to get published. Maybe there is room in the world for both?
All my curiosity on this new trend aside, as a book marketer, I have to give a gold start to Paltrow’s marketing team. They organized a partnership with the very popular One Kings Lane who sold a limited number of signed copies of the book, cohosted a dinner party for 60 people with the Oscar-winning author (which she has documented on her beautiful blog), and then offered the same table settings, serveware, and tabletop accessories used at the party for sale on their site! I, for one, an impressed. Marketing partnership well done.
So will you be purchasing any of these celebrity cookbooks? And if yes, I’m just curious, what motivated you to buy?
Hello friends, Happy Valentines Day!
In honor of the holiday of love, I have a sweet treat to share with you. This heart cookie idea comes courtesy of Southern Living and I have to give thanks to my sister for finding this great recipe.
You can find the complete recipe for these heart-shaped sugar cookies here. It’s very easy to follow, but I do have one recommendation from experience. The recipe calls for them to bake for 8 to 9 minutes or until lightly browned on the bottom. I found these to be two very different things. If I took them out at 8 to 9 minutes, they weren’t browned at all, but if I waited till they browned lightly (almost 20 minutes) they became hard when they cooled. This could just be my oven, but I would recommend taking them out at 8 to 9 minutes, not when they brown. As you can see, I baked about half of the cookies per the “browned lightly” rule and the other half per the “time” rule. Quite a difference.
You’ll also notice that my cookies are round, not heart shaped….I just didn’t have a heart cookie cutter, I didn’t have any cookie cutters actually! So I used the rim of a glass instead. I used the icing to bring in the heart shape, as you can see in the finished product below.
My favorite part of this sugar cookie and icing recipe? The fresh lemon juice and the grated lemon rind…it’s such a wonderful addition. I hope you enjoy this sweet treat and enjoy the day of love with someone you love!
Every winter I rediscover how much I love soups. Being the career girl that I am, I am always grateful to find easy to make soups that I can take with me to work and eat on my lunch break. This winter I have been so happy to stumble upon some new favorites…
Created by Pacific Natural Foods, they are the most wonderful, unique soup I’ve found. Many of them are gluten free, vegetarian or even vegan friendly and the package is make from renewable resources. Best of all, I don’t have to go to pricey Whole Foods or even upscale Publix to find them, they are stocked at my regular ole Kroge, but in the “all-natural” section.
Priced at only $2.50 a piece, they have proven to be a big win for a healthy winter lunch. The Poblano Pepper and Corn Chowder and the Chipotle Sweet Potato Soup are two of my favorites.
Hello dear friends! I hope you have all been sticking to your New Years Resolutions….maybe a little better than I have. I’ve done a perfectly average job of sticking to my goals of eating better and working out more and I’m always trying to do better, but aren’t we all? To help, I wanted to share a recipe that’s been a delicious addition to my healthier eating diet and I have to give 100% credit to my little sister for this dish.
Healthy Recipe of the Week: Chicken Salad
Tear off the white meat of a plain rotisserie chicken. Discard or give the dark meat to a friend or boyfriend who isn’t so worried about eating only the lean meat. 
Chop chicken into smaller pieces. I love the pre-cooked whole chickens that you can find in the deli area of most grocers – one such chick would work perfectly in this case.
Mix with ½ cup yellow mustard, ½ tsp black pepper, ¼ cup chopped shallots, ½ tsp garlic salt and one small chopped tomato. While the recipe calls for 1/2 a cup of mustard – just a heads up, this has proven to be a bit much for me and I would suggest ¼ of a cup instead…it is, of course, entirely up to your taste preference.
Arrange on a bed of fresh spinach or lettuce.
As a side, Laura suggested a handful of Sun Chips or other whole grain chips/crackers. I tried these Toasted Asiago crackers from Kashi, which went well.
This recipe makes two generous servings so you can enjoy one for dinner and enjoy the leftovers for lunch the next day.
I know there are dozens of Chicken Salad recipes out there, but I liked this one because of how easy it was to make and it’s not weighed down with tons of caloric ingredients. I’d love to hear any additions or suggestions you may have to spice this up further.
Hello friends! Happy New Year to you all!
I know I’m not alone in making New Year’s resolutions, and mine aren’t even that original. Lose 10 pounds, work out more, eat better, save money, pay off debt, cook at home more, and and eat out less. And along with many of my fellow bloggers who have failed in keeping the blog site up-to-date, I’m also hoping to post much more often. My goal is to share easy and healthy recipes that I discover in my quest to eat better along with a few new craft ideas mixed in too.
With my darling new apron in tow,
I bring you my first easy, healthy recipe tip of the New Year. I found this while flipping through a copy of Shape magazine at the gym and now that I’ve tested it out myself, I can promise you it’s a must try. And, best of all, it couldn’t be simpler to make.
The main ingredient is this wonderful organic, cubed squash that can be found in the frozen food section of Whole Foods.
Follow the cooking instructions on the bag and you’ll have delicious squash ready to eat in under 5 minutes. The squash mashes up nicely and looks more like sweet potatoes than what you would traditionally expect squash to look like. The best suggestion from Shape was to add a spoonful of apple butter on top of the squash. A fantastic, nutritious, super simple side dish is the result…enjoy!
For starting out today with very little planned, I think I ended up having a great first day of the Memorial Day weekend. Thanks to Crystal Watson, I got to kick it off with a perfect pancake breakfast…I just don’t think it gets better than Saturday morning brunch with friends. I also got to check a few things off my “to do” list. Not my clean the bathroom, do the laundry to do list, but the “fun things I plan to get to when I have time to do list.” The first being, I got a few summer herbs planted.
I’ve been planning to get some herbs planted for weeks now and every time I’m at the store and pay $3-4 for some fresh basil or thyme I remember that I want to get this done. Today, I got started with some sweet basil, french thyme, and dill. In addition to being herbs I seem to use often, dill and basil are supposed to freeze and dry well, which is why I picked those two. The dill was the most difficult, I actually never found a dill plant but was doing good by my third nursery to find some dill seed, so hopefully that’ll work just a well, it’ll just take a little more patience to get the finished product. I learned a few fun facts about basil that, being the novice herb grower that I am, I didn’t already know…
This was the beautiful basil selection at one of the local Green Hills nurseries:
First, basil is an annual, so it will only bloom for one life cycle and then it’s gone. You can lengthen it’s life by trimming any blooms as soon as they show up. Second, the suggestion of the nursery owner was to plant basil seed alongside my basil plants so that about the time the plant dies, the seed will be grown and ready to go. Pretty smart!
My herb “garden” is the definition of starting small, but at least it’s a start…
With the herbs planted, the roommates and I headed over to check out the Nashville Food Bloggers Bake Sale for Flood Relief, the adorable poster alone was enough to get me to come:
Upon arriving, we found an array of delectable goodies and everything was priced at $2, it was too good to be true!
Chocolate and banana cupcakes:
Vanilla almond blackberry goodies dressed in pink:
Everything was baked and donated by local Nashville food bloggers and all proceeds whet to Second Harvest of Middle Tennessee. So smart and delicious, for the full story, click here.
To top it off, I finally got to see Iron Man 2 tonight, and if it’s possible, I’m pretty sure it was even better than the first. The perfect summer blockbuster.
Now for some sweet sleep…I can’t wait to see what tomorrow holds.
This morning I got to pick up 5 pieces of beautiful hand-painted pottery, all products of a fun little day I got to have last Saturday. I am privileged to work alongside a wonderful inner-city ministry, Front Porch Ministry, which I hope to blog about in more detail in the near future. It’s been through my time spent with this ministry that I’ve come to know some special young ladies who live in the neighborhood where Front Porch is based. Last weekend, I was able to introduce a few of those girls to some of my close girlfriends during a Saturday outing that was centered around pancakes and pottery.
Eleven of us somehow managed to get a table at the very popular and always busy Nashville favorite, the Pancake Pantry. After eating so much that we were all groaning from being too full and vowing to not to touch food again for several days, we literally ran across the street to get out of the frozen air as quick as we could to arrive at the warm and inviting All Fired Up.
The older girls took much more time deciding what we wanted to paint while the younger ladies quickly made up their minds, picked out pottery and paint, and dove right on in. Some of them were practically finished by the time some of the older girls were just getting started.
Most of the girls picked boxes to paint, each a different size or shape. Chasmine, above, chose a small, sweet heart box.
As much as a tried to dissuade her, once Scottesha laid eyes on this skeleton box, nothing else would do:
Lauren chose to paint a perfectly pink piggy bank for her new niece Tirzah:
In the end, both young and old had a blast…it was a perfect winter day activity. Here is most of the group, we lost a few after breakfast:
Here are the pieces I was able to pick up this morning…which includes my War Eagle mug and the boxes that the four girls painted. All the older girls stayed for many hours into the afternoon, long after I’d taken all the younger girls home, painting their pieces to perfection. I can’t wait to see how all their pottery turns out!
