Oh, today we’re in for a treat! Gwyneth Paltrow this week releases her latest cookbook It’s All Good in Australia and – hoorah for us – I’ve been very lucky to be granted a sneak peak and an extract.

Perhaps she’s wearing makeup that makes her look like she’s not wearing makeup…either way, the shot is hot and fresh and pervily captivating.

Gwyneth and I are very much on the same page with food and lifestyle stuff and she contributed a recipe to my I Quit Sugar cookbook. You might recall her last cookbook, My Father’s Daughter, was a rippa…but it used sugar in the recipes; this time around, Gwyneth has switched most of her recipes to xylitol, rice malt syrup and stevia. We’re straddling a revolution, I tell you!

She’s also a fan of slow cooking. Anyone who follows my style of eating here will no doubt love the lamb tagine. The recipes are also hit with a “Vegan”, “Protein Packed” and “Elimination Diet” so you can choose your own adventure, with various modifications specified. Clever, hey?

But over to Gwynnie and her nouriture…

Sweet Potato + Five Spice Muffins, recipe below. © It’s All Good by Gwyneth Paltrow, Grand Central Publishing

Sweet Potato + Five Spice Muffins

Gluten-free baking is not for the faint of heart. At first as we tested this recipe, we produced heavy or bizarrely textured muffins, but we finally hit the nail on the head with the perfect mix of ingredients. These muffins are super-tasty and are always a smashing success in my house.

Makes a dozen (vegan) muffins

• 1 large sweet potato
• ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
• ½ cup unsweetened almond milk
• ¾ cup xylitol
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 2 cups gluten-free flour (if the flour doesn’t include xanthan gum only add 1 teaspoon)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1½ tablespoons Chinese five-spice powder
• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Prick the sweet potato a few times with a paring knife or a fork. Bake until soft (when a paring knife can cut through with zero resistance), about 1 hour. Set the sweet potato aside until it’s completely cool.

Peel the sweet potato, discard the skin, and mash the flesh in a mixing bowl with a fork. Whisk the olive oil, almond milk, xylitol, and vanilla into the sweet potato. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, five-spice powder, and salt. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.

* This post has been updated.

You can read more about this below… Meantime, over this New Year shutdown period, I’ve come across a few reads and things that you might be interested in if you’re thinking of quitting sugar. Momentum is building, more and more people are working out that sugar is the missing link in their weightloss woes, and more and more scientists – reluctantly! – are confirming that sugar is toxic and causes many of our health issues.

US sugar consumption…Australia is much the same.

This UK study finds giving up sugar can take 20 years off your looks…”results in weeks”. Take a look at it.

For the first time, a direct link has been established between the amount of sugar circulating in the blood and how old a person looks….They found that those with higher blood sugar looked older than those with lower blood sugar. In fact for every 1mm/litre increase in blood sugar, the perceived age of that person rose by five months.

I found it interesting the study was done in conjunction with a cosmetic company, given this quote from one of the scientists:

There is no point in spending lots of money on expensive skin creams if you are eating a diet high in sugar,’ says Dr Aamer Khan, a cosmetic dermatologist who is also medical director of the Harley Street Skin Clinic. ‘Yes, you can protect and moisturise your skin from the outside with creams, but you need to feed and stimulate the growth of good strong skin cells from inside too and sugar will sabotage that.’

This review of Dr Lustig’s new book (stay tuned for mine!) shares news that should come as a relief to many: sugar tricks our brains to overeat and get fat. It’s not about weakness of will.

It is, he says, a hormonal issue, triggered by eating too much sugar.

He points the finger of blame at the hormone leptin, which acts like an appetite thermostat.

This is part three in my Iceland series. You can check out my Iceland style and Iceland hiking guide as well. But today…it’s all about food, the stuff that fuels all my travels.

You can also peruse my Slow Food and Hiking Guide to Provence and my Slow Food and Hiking Guide to Andalucia.

Food in Iceland is seriously good. Delicate, revered, off-beat-nutritious. Surprised? Me too. You might have heard of the Nordic Cuisine scene? I touch on it here. In Iceland it’s followed with much parochialism and the Slow Food movement here is loud and proud.

Catfish with puréed peas (grown by the chef’s grandad), “may beets”, mushroom foam and dulce at VOX restaurant

Once more I’ll do this guide as a series of pictures, mostly because Maria’s pictures are so wonderful and they tell thousands of words. If you want to learn more because you’re heading that way, two ideas:

• If you go to my instragram feed, all the pics from Iceland are there, geotagged!
• Contact Slow Food Iceland

If you eat at one place only…

Make it Vox at The Hilton in Reykjavic. Chef Fannar Vernharðsson is a passionate Slow Foodie. Every single ingredient in his joint is Icelandic. So much so, they don’t even use olive oil. He grows most of the ingredients himself (or his Grandad does, see dish above). He hangs and cures his own meat. And he takes time to come chat through his