Pamela Anderson has been many things in her life. Baywatch babe, rock wife, sex bomb, magician’s assistant, fantasy figure, mother, lover, movie star, dedicated vegan, America’s sweetheart, Playboy centerfold, activist, icon and former sex tape star celebrities, to name a few.
Now, at the age of 57, she has added domestic goddess to her vibrant list of credits by publishing her first cookbook.
I Love You: Recipes From The Heart is a surprisingly authentic adventure featuring more than 80 of Pammy’s favorite, tried-and-true vegan recipes, including a bunless sweet potato burger, whole roasted cauliflower with harissa, harvested vegetable pies, and a ‘ spicy probiotic cabbage that she eats every day, yum.
Vegan baking isn’t for the faint-hearted, but our girl puts on her organic linen apron and offers recipes for cakes and cookies made with plant-based milk and butter, including cinnamon rolls, an almond and grapefruit tray bake, and, yes, My Wedding Cake: A multi-tiered concoction made up of layers of brioche, diplomatic cream, syrup and wild strawberries.
Pamela has been married six times, so she has had many opportunities to practice this one. “It’s a little rustic but also delicate and not too sweet,” she writes, words that are equally true for herself.
Pamela Anderson’s cookbook, I Love You: Recipes From The Heart, is a surprisingly authentic adventure featuring over 80 of Pammy’s favorite, tried-and-true vegan recipes.
Among the recipes are practical tips for the vegan home cook. “A useful tip,” he writes cheerfully in his chapter on baking bread. “I use a scale to be more precise.”
For her Green Glow Juice, she advises readers to “squeeze the juice with a juicer,” and when she makes her own flower teas, which include the Sensual Blend, Longevity Blend, and Beauty Blend varieties, she urges her fellow tea makers to “save teas in glass jars”. and don’t forget to label’.
Well, quite a bit. You don’t want your Sensual to mix with your Longevity; that’s how you end up with half a dozen husbands.
In her cucumber sandwich recipe, Pamela advises cutting the cucumber into peeled strips instead of traditional slices. I don’t know how our dear late Queen Elizabeth II would have reacted to this sacrilege, but I fear it did not involve condemnation for teatime delicacy services.
Much of the vegan recipe territory in the savory chapters was covered by Gwyneth Paltrow in 2013, when she published her clean eating book, It’s All Good. Pamela even includes her own recipes for Gwyneth classics, like kale fries and avocado toast.
Pammy’s twist? Add curry powder to the kale and shred nori sheets into the avocado mixture, because why not at least try to make it taste even worse, right?
However, where the two women really differ is that Pammy goes crazy in a way that level-headed Gwynnie never could. “Sourdough has my heart, I like to think that baking bread is like giving birth,” is one of the first statements of I Love You. “I really liked the teas,” he says later. ‘I feel a real connection to the Earth and its medicinal gifts. A garden is redemptive with its moral spaces, its reality, its courage: an act of faith.’
That’s quite a lot to put in a cabbage patch and I don’t mean manure, like some. “I love all olives,” Pammy shouts in the introduction to a tapenade recipe, pausing to rejoice at their “wrinkled skin” before rushing to trick Mr. Kalamata with Mr. Girolle as they prepare a risotto.
‘Mushrooms are so beautiful. There are so many varieties. It seems like they have intelligence,” he stammers.
She feeds her mastiffs, Lucky and Lola, fruit balls mixed with CBD oil to calm them after traveling, and includes the recipe here. “Consult your veterinarian and read the bottle carefully,” he adds, as he might well do.
She believes dogs absorb vibrations from their owners and vice versa, so please don’t let anyone mention the word “bark” until we’ve decided whether Pammy’s flower salad recipe is a joke or not. “This came from a dream,” he writes, “a single rose served simply as a salad, dressed romantically with olive oil and sumac.”
Chef Pam actually loves roses and includes them in recipes for pickles, chili beets, and an olive oil cake.
Pamela played CJ Parker in the 80s series Baywatch
“I even bathed my babies with rose petals,” she writes. But don’t get excited because he’s referring to his kids and not his most famous physical attributes, who infamously reached 34DD in their Baywatch heyday.
Beautiful olives, drug-crazed Lucky and Lola, and sentient mushrooms: what in the name of nut butter is going on?
There’s no denying that a molten vein of Pam-tastic eccentricity runs through this book, as thick and impenetrable as the coconut cashew coating on your ice cream sandwiches. However, this comes as no surprise to those of us who know Pammy and love her in our own way.
In 2017 I met the self-proclaimed ‘icon’ in Marseille, where she was living while dating French football star Adil Rami, a handsome hunk who was 18 years her junior. Nothing prepares one for Pamela in person. As he walked across the lobby of the French hotel to meet me (a vision in her Betty Boop dress, vegan stilettos, and tousled blonde hair), the men simply stopped in their tracks and looked at me.
During brunch, he ignored the fruit plate and devoured a cow’s butter croissant while ordering a cappuccino with cow’s milk.
I thought you were vegan! ‘I’m a very naughty vegan. “I haven’t eaten meat for over 20 years, but I’m not strict with veganism because I don’t like any kind of depravity,” she purred.
I wondered aloud if their infamous implants were also vegan. “I’m not talking about my breasts,” she said, demolishing another pie. Fun and friendly, she was easy to like and had an unconventional charm.
After three marriages: to Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee (the father of her sons Brandon and Dylan), to musician Kid Rock, and then (twice) to poker player Rick Salomon, Pamela believed that she and Rami They were in this for a long time. .
However, the couple acrimoniously separated just two years later.
So she returned to the United States and consoled herself as only Pamela Anderson can: by marrying two more times in quick succession.
In 2020, she married her long-time friend, Hollywood producer Jon Peters. That lasted 12 full days. Later that year, she married Dan Hayhurst. He was the handyman who came to help renovate their property. After 13 months, that marriage also ended.
At the end of her recipe book, Pamela writes wistfully that she would like to have “one last great love story” and that it would take a heart of stone not to wish her the best in this ambitious project. There is no mention of her lovers or her countless husbands in her cookbook I Love You; They are the ghosts of the parties he prepares for his children and his girlfriends.
For Pamela today she is a very different woman from the bad boy magnet of yesteryear. The barbed wire tattoos are fading, the implants are gone as she ditches the glamor and even stops wearing makeup.
For this cookbook photo shoot, she is photographed in dungarees and wellies, all rustic and wild. Here she is, in the garden of her Vancouver Island retreat, thinking deep thoughts.
“Planting a garden is the hope for a blessed tomorrow: it heals what is broken,” he says. Pamela Anderson is certainly a master at crafting her own narrative, you have to give her that. It is what has kept her in the public eye for almost four decades in a life that has not always been easy.
She has endured multiple traumas, including playing Lily James in a Hulu biopic about her life, complete with generously sized prosthetics and laughable dentistry.
So let’s applaud this step toward glorious, bucolic cronedom and celebrate the many interesting ideas in Pamela’s cookbook for the adventurous vegan. It has Buddha bowls; It has artichoke sauces; she has pizza salads which are, get this, a pizza base with a salad on top.
She even has a recipe for Superfood Warrior Chocolate Chip Cookies that are mixed with something called maca root powder. “The Vikings were known to eat it to maintain their strength and vitality,” he writes, while some studies say it improves the quality of male semen.
Since maca (a parsnip-like root) is native to the high Andes and is fertilized with alpaca dung, it seems unlikely that 10th-century Vikings ever enjoyed its pleasures. However, it was almost certainly in the cookies Pamela brought to the Ecuadorian embassy as a vegan gift for her friend Julian Assange.
Poor Julian! Still, he managed to father two children while living in captivity in an embassy closet for two years. So maybe, just maybe, there’s something to savor in Pammy’s crazy ways after all.
