"Gwyneth Paltrow" news and stories

And you thought Gwyneth Paltrow spent her evenings sitting around listening to Coldplay outtakes? Turns out, when Paltrow hasn't been working on her upcoming memoir/cookbook, My Father's Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family and Togetherness (Grand Central Life & Style; due Spring 2011), she can be found curled up in a comfy chair ingesting food blogs. For Gwyneth's favorite foodie ramblings (among them one of our own faves, pastry chef David Lebovitz's "Living the Sweet Life in Paris" blog) head over to Goop to get the full story.

A few of the best links on the Web this week:

• Back-of-the-box recipes used to be basic -- but not anymore.
• Gwyneth Paltrow discovers the delights of fried Southern food and shares her "Quest for the Best Fried Chicken."
• The food bus is the latest take on the food truck even offers patrons a place to sit and eat.
• Unemployed? There's no law against using food stamps for gourmet provisions.

Mario Batali. Photo: Bauer-Griffin.

Mario Batali's on the hook for some back rent. According to a suit filed Sept. 4, the celebrity chef and his business partner Joseph Bastianich, owe $75,000 for their now defunct seafood restaurant, the John Dory.

"It's going to be settled," Bastianich told the New York Daily News on Wednesday. "We've returned the space back to the landlord, and the rent is going to be paid today or tomorrow."

The pair were guarantors of the failed restaurant, the Daily News reports.

'Mario Batali Simple Italian Food: Recipes From My Two Villages'
By Mario Batali
Photographs by Mark Ferri
Clarkson Potter -- 1998
Buy it on Amazon

More than a decade ago -- long before Del Posto, Otto and road trips through Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow -- Mario Batali had two restaurants, Pó and Babbo, and was just beginning to grow his rock-'n'-roll, orange-Croc-wearing legend through the Food Network.

It's there that we find him with "Mario Batali Simple Italian Food," his first cookbook, which takes readers through the tastes of Borgo Capanne, where Batali worked in Trattoria La Volta on the border of the Italian regions Emilia-Romagna and Toscana, as well as his other "village," New York.

Batali divides the recipes of these villages by color: The orange-titled ones are those he invented in New York; the brown titles are those he learned in Italy.

See what we tested and whether it's worth buying after the jump.

Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow has road-tripped through Spain with Mario Batali and Mark Bittman on "Spain On the Road Again," and the chefs' culinary know-how seems to be rubbing off.

The star of "Shakespeare in Love" has made a move towards her own cooking show with a roasted chicken how-to video she posted to her Web site Goop. During the nearly 8-minute video, the actress debones a chicken while talking about learning to cook while a 19-year-old student at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

"I was trying to be an actress as well so I kept driving down to LA to audition for movies, and my dad was there working. We sort of started getting into cooking together; we got sick of the frozen meatballs that were left in the freezer for us," Paltrow says. "It just became our thing. So we started watching a lot of cooking channels, and over the years its become a major passion."

Paltrow's Quick Roast Chicken and Potatoes after the jump.