Gwyneth Paltrow - It’s All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook

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

How does one do itcreate ease among the pots, appliances, fresh food, and pantry itemswhen 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 momentthe small and beautiful moment of preparing food with some care, by ones 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). Its 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. Im 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 doesnt need to be complicated to be good. You dont 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 Amys pizza bites. Meaning, Ive 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 Its 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, its 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, its worth it.