Mariel Cooks and Still Has the Looks!
Categories: Cookbooks
Recently, I saw the trailer for the new Woody Allen film, Whatever Works. Basic premise is aging eccentric New Yorker meets a sweet young thing, marries her and the ensuing drama (and hilarity?) that follows. It immediately made me think of Manhattan and the semi-scandal of featuring seventeen-year old Mariel Hemingway as the then middle-aged Allen's love interest. That and his own marriage to his former step-daughter do give one pause about his fascination with younger women. Mariel, however, seems to have emerged unscathed from her notorious moment as the Allen star du jour and has turned to writing books about holistic living and cooking in addition to her acting career.
Her latest offering, Mariel's Kitchen: Simple Ingredients for a Delicious and Satisfying Life,is an attractive, glossy book stuffed with pictures of the still gorgeous Hemingway as she preps and cooks for her daughters and friends. Of course everything is fresh and organic and raised just down the road at that adorable sustainable farmstead, but in addition to her preaching about living a greener and healthier life, Hemingway does offer some basic recipes that suit the needs of those avoiding flour and sugar (for a while she ate no fructose but does allow some fruit to sneak into her recipes).
Organized by the seasons and then by courses, the food is fairly easy to prepare and the ingredients are super market staples except for a few items such as whey protein isolate powder that you can find in the health food aisles of a large supermarket.
Hemingway claims that with fresh, seasonal foods and some pantry staples, anyone can produce good, wholesome food for their family. A few core recipes such as a breakfast smoothie and some simple salad dressings are featured and from these any reasonably adept cook can riff off with variations once the proportions are right. Another nice feature is a seasoning guide for basic foods and a list of fruits and vegetables that are available year round, so the novice cook knows what to expect when grocery shopping.
This is a pretty book with lots of beautiful photographs of gorgeous food and the equally gorgeous Ms. Hemingway but there are no pictures showing techniques, something beginning cooks might find helpful. Another flaw, the libarian's lament, is that there is no INDEX! Unless you can decode the recipe descriptions in the table of contents, you may have difficulty tracking which chicken recipe you thought you remembered reading. The recipes themselves are not complicated and the directions are fairly easy to follow.
Her final chapter on finding the sacred in food almost sent me running for the hills, but she disarmingly diffuses the touchy feely aspects of her text by claiming it is not "woo woo", and I felt on much safer ground. So, while not a cookbook that will be one of my regular references, this is a pleasant diversion, with lots of eye candy. Oops, I forgot. No sugar allowed in Mariel's Kitchen.
As well as inviting you into her beautiful kitchen, Mariel Hemingway asks for feed back and additional thoughts at her blog www.marielhemingway.org/blog. I did find that very woo woo.
