Gwyneth Paltrow, Domestic Goddess (Cookbook Being Released!)

No one personifies the crossroads of food and fashion to me the way Gwyneth Paltrow does. I know that GOOP has gotten it's fair share of criticism, but I really appreciate the way Paltrow moves seamlessly between topics like style, spirituality, travel, and most of all, cooking, and somehow makes it all work together.

I've had people ask me curious questions about Milk & Mode. I remember reading an email from a book editor one morning over my daily steaming cup of green tea; she had written, "The mixing and mingling of food and fashion is difficult for me to believe. I mean, really, aren't fashion people typically afraid to death of food?" I shook my head and moved onto the next. The idea that women (and men, for that matter) who work in the fashion industry are prone to starving themselves to near death is one of the most dated and infuriating stereotypes I've had to contend with.

Fashion is an art, food is an art. Fashion requires taste, food requires taste. Fashion is a major part of our cultural ethos. So is food. So why is it so hard to believe that the same type of person who knows her Comme des Garcons from her Ann Demeulemeester would be the very same one who can appreciate a heaping scoop of good caviar or, better yet, a simple, perfectly cooked roast chicken? It's sensory pleasure, it's good taste, it's appreciation for beauty--call it what you will, but food and fashion share all of these things and more. These are the things that Paltrow understands and the reasons, I suspect, she isn't afraid to combine the two.

Anyhow, that's just one of the reasons I was psyched to see her on the cover of August's Vogue playing the role of domestic kitchen goddess, as shot by Mario Testino. Another is that the inside profile revealed that her cookbook, all 144 recipes of it, is coming out and hitting bookstores in April 2011. I've made a LOT of the recipes she's published on GOOP since I started reading it about a year ago, and none of them have ever failed me. They are consistently as simple and straightforward as they are completely delicious. And I seriously can't wait to go through every one of them.