Their looks and bodies are their business

Gwyneth Paltrow Gwyneth Paltrow salutes her father's love for food — with a new cookbook Given that their looks and bodies are their business (let's not kid ourselves

that Eva Longoria's acting talents are what made her famous), it's always interesting when stars open up about what's on their dinner plates. And it's also not surprising that the world greets those revelations with more than a pinch of scepticism. After all, does anyone really believe that Longoria took time out of her intense workout (and work) schedule to come up with a recipe for goat's cheese and lemon balls, despite, as she says in her book, disliking the flavour of goat's cheese? Or that she regularly sits down to eat a stack of deep-fried plantains with a friend?
Perhaps we're judging her too harshly — or by the standards of her most famous character, the hilariously spoilt Gabrielle Solis in Desperate Housewives, the kind of mother that thinks cooking for her family involves bribing her overweight child. Longoria, after all, already had two restaurants before her book came out last month, so cooking and eating are evidently a part of her life.

A pleasant balance

Pleasingly, her cookbook, Eva's Kitchen, has a balance of indulgent dishes — think churros, or Mexican doughnuts, and devil's food cake — alongside the dishes one can imagine her eating, such as the guacamole and the shrimp cocktail she discusses at length. There are also plenty of recipes coupled with stories about her family, although disappointingly, dishes she might have cooked for former husband Tony Parker are conspicuous by their absence. What makes the book feel like it is a true reflection of her tastes is its diversity. While the Mexican-origin, Texas-raised Longoria might well be expected to enjoy cooking the dishes of her heritage, such as that famous tortilla soup (refreshingly, and betraying what appears to be a lifelong interest in food, she reveals she didn't invent it but found the recipe in a magazine when she was 12), there are also other dishes that not only reflect her broad tastes acquired as a worldly actress, such as a lemon fettucine acquired from the chef at New York's Seraphina restaurant, and an asparagus dish with "Grey Moss Inn" dressing. Readers can decide for themselves if shortcuts such as using Miracle Whip in an avocado-shrimp salad and a can of cream of mushroom soup in a broccoli casserole are charming doses of reality or cheeky coming from someone making money peddling a cookbook. If there's anything that makes the book tiresome, it's the photography — in every picture, Longoria is seen preparing food at great risk of cutting off a finger, seeing as she has got her head thrown back in peals of laughter, ostensibly at a joke made by an unpictured companion. Cooking with Eva is so! much! fun!

Longoria's not the only star making a dinner date with her fans this spring, and so it seems appropriate to measure her against another rail-thin Hollywood star who recently released a cookbook: Gwyneth Paltrow, who, until now, was known in the food world for her not-necessarily appetising macrobiotic diet and naming her first-born Apple in tribute to healthy eating, and for being the co-author of a guide to eating in Spain with US chef Mario Batali. The reaction to Paltrow's cookbook, My Father's Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness, has been far stronger and more divisive than that of Longoria's.
While some hailed her the next Martha Stewart and others poked fun at what appears to be a complete lack of self-awareness when it comes to boasting about her lovely life (one line has been on the receiving end of countless jibes: "One evening when I had my wood-burning stove going I realised I hadn't thought of dessert.").

While Longoria's book doesn't aspire to go beyond the personal fulfilment of cooking for friends and family, Paltrow's has a higher purpose, paying testament to her late father's love of cooking with dishes she believes could have saved him from the cancer that eventually killed him. An extension of her Goop lifestyle website, the book features bite-sized philosophy — "Invest in what's real" — alongside recipes for dishes involving spelt flour or Veganaise (which she kindly suggests you can substitute unbleached wheat flour and Hellman's mayonnaise for should you be out, although make sure you don't scrimp on the wood-burning oven, which is obviously one of those real things you should invest in). But it's worth bearing in mind that Longoria and Paltrow don't actually differ that much from other cookbook authors, most of whom have their own ideologies to espouse, and whether that's something the public finds tasteful or not — think Jamie Oliver telling readers they can make a two-course dinner in 30 minutes or the patronised reaction all those years ago when Delia Smith dared to write a book that opened with instructions on how to boil an egg — it seems they're always ready to lap it up.

From : Gulf News