A recipe from Gwyneth's cookbook

When I sent my niece Lanie to cooking school, I didn’t know that she will be serious about it. I would watch her chop onions with gusto in the kitchen. Sometimes, she would bake muffins, which she would bring to the office for tasting. Once in a while, people in the office would coax her to bring them onion rings, or marinara pasta or green salad with “suha” and grapes, or her to-die-for cream dory and Lanie would painstakingly work on them. Work in the kitchen is no easy, that I learned. I would see burnt skin on her hands. She would nonchalantly declare, “napaso ako,” when after coming home I would notice red marks on her arms. Lanie is now a serious “cook.” The kitchen is her home and playground. She’s proud of what she does and that makes me a proud Tito. Just the other day, she prepared a weeklong menu for Nanay.

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Before the release of her cookbook, My Father’s Daughter, I didn’t know Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow had the flair for cooking. In an interview with Jessica Seinfeld, wife of Jerry Seinfeld, Gwyneth said that she started to make a go for the kitchen when her late father Bruce was stricken with cancer. Gwyneth loves organic food. She also prefers natural food than processed. In the intro in her website Goop, Gwyneth wrote, “Well, it’s here at long last. After three years of hard work, my cookbook is finished, and in stores! To celebrate the release, I made dinner for 60 friends and foodies on Monday. Sunday was spent doing most of the cooking and prep. We snapped some shots with our blackberries to document the day. They are below, along with some of the recipes for the dishes we served.” Here is one recipe from the book and a note about the recipe from Gwyneth:

Chicken & Dumplings

“This is probably the homiest dish in the book. I absolutely love to make this; it’s an uncomplicated one-pot dish that you can prepare in the morning and keep on the back of the stove building deep layers of flavor. The chicken falls off the bone and the biscuit like dumplings are light and delicious. I was seven when my mother filmed The Great Santini in Beaufort, South Carolina — one of the happiest times in my childhood. I spent afternoons running around the marshes and would come home to freshly baked biscuits by Neetha Polite, the lady who was looking after us. The biscuits in the recipe are inspired by her. When I make this, it vanishes — there are never any leftovers.”

Ingredients

1 organic whole chicken

Coarse salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 stalk celery, roughly chopped

1 large carrot, peeled and roughly chopped

1 small leek, roughly chopped

1 slice duck bacon, finely diced

1 dried bay leaf

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

1/2 cup white wine

2 cups Vegetable Stock or Chicken Stock

2 cups water

1 cup unbleached all-purpose or white spelt flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 cup plus 1 teaspoon half-and-half

1/2 teaspoon fine salt

Fresh parsley, for garnish

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Wash and dry the chicken.

Discard the back and cut the chicken into 10 pieces.

Aggressively season the chicken pieces with coarse salt and pepper.

Heat the butter and olive oil in the largest, widest oven-safe pot you have (at least 12 inches in diameter, with a lid) over medium-high heat. Thoroughly brown the chicken pieces, in batches if necessary (7–8 minutes per side), and remove to a plate, leaving the fat in the pot. Add the vegetables, duck bacon, bay leaf, and thyme to the pot and cook for 15 minutes over medium low heat. Return the chicken to the pot. Add the white wine, bring to a boil, and cook for 2 minutes. Add the stock and water, bring to a boil, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Turn off the heat, cover the pot with a circle of parchment paper, and put the lid on top. Cook the chicken in a 400°F oven for 1 1/2 hours.

Meanwhile, combine the flour, baking powder, half-and-half, and fine salt together in a bowl. Take the pot out of the oven, discard the parchment, and scoop large spoonfuls of the dumpling mixture on top of the chicken mixture — you should end up with about 10 dumplings. Cover the pot and put back in the oven for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with parsley and a bit more ground black pepper. Serve immediately, being sure to spoon plenty of the juices over each portion.

Rumors were rife that this Chicken and Dumplings recipe was young Brad’s (Pitt) favorite among Gwyneth’s sybaritic creations a long, long time ago, way before Jennifer (Aniston) and Angelina (Jolie).