You Go Gwyneth!

As I have mentioned before, I am a subscriber of Gwyneth Paltrow's oft-mocked lifestyle newsletter. More often than not, I find it completely laughable. But some weeks, the woman really hits it out of the park. I find that generally those weeks tend to coincide with the topic of cooking, so I am convinced that she really ought to change the focus of the site to food, but that's neither here nor there.

This week she publishes her holiday recipes, and I swear I want to make each and every one. What I'm loving about the collection is that together it does not make up a Christmas dinner feast. As she rightly points out, Christmas dinner is essentially Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone just published a ton of Thanksgiving recipes so people are a little burnt out on that stuff.

Rather, she offers up a recipe for roast fish with salsa verde (excellent for either Hannukah or an Italian-leaning Christmas Eve), potato latkes with salmon (this I can take or leave, but this has more to do with my wariness regarding smoked salmon than anything), and a bunch of delicious breakfast options.

Now I am a huge fan of breakfast in general, and am the Nazi in the family when it comes to preserving our Christmas breakfast traditions (grandma's poppyseed bread, yum!), so I have a predilection in this direction already. But I am all over Gwyneth's homemade turkey sausages (although it is vaguely annoying that she calls for a pinch of a particular salt available only in London), and it looks like, with the simple egg replacement described in this recipe, her pumpkin walnut bread can be made vegan quite easily so as to serve my recently arrived vegan sister!

Excellent work, dear girl, excellent work. Keep it up...this is soooo superior to your hotel recommendations from last week...cause we all know that the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Bel-Air are excellent hotels!