‘Lonely hearts with big appetites’
I Love You: Recipes from the Heart
by Pamela Anderson
New York: Voracious (a Hachette Book Group imprint), 2024
$35 / 9780316573481
Reviewed by Jessica Poon
*
To introduce Pamela Anderson seems absurd, like going out of your way to explain that puppies are cute or that water is wet. Born in Ladysmith, British Columbia, Anderson moved to Vancouver in her early twenties, uncertain of her career trajectory. Her stardom was catalyzed by her attendance at a BC Lions game, where she wore a Labatt’s beer shirt. When her image appeared on the Jumbotron, the applause was thunderous, Jesus wept, and the sun shone a little brighter. Anderson became a model for Labatt’s beer, moved to Los Angeles, appeared in Playboy, and became an actress. She is no stranger to writing. In 2004, her novel, Star, inspired by her life, was published and in 2023, her memoir, Love, Pamela, was published. She currently has a Substack newsletter called “The Open Journal.” Though perhaps most famous for being singularly gorgeous in Baywatch, Anderson’s portrayal of Shelly, an idealistic showgirl, in Gia Coppola’s 2024 film, The Last Showgirl, was a serious role demanding fragility and strength. Co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis, her performance garnered immense accolades. A lifelong animal lover and longtime vegan, Anderson has worked with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) since 2008, which makes the 2025 release of her vegan cookbook, I Love You, a more than apropos addition in her fantastically varied career. In her warm introduction, she describes herself as an “eternal homemaker.”
I Love You came to me during a particularly volatile time in my life, when I believed, mistakenly, that reprising a former relationship was a Very Good Idea. It was not. For all the faults of that relationship that steadfastly keep me in therapy, there was, even by the inexorable dumpster fire conclusion, a shared camaraderie in the kitchen. Few things are so obviously evocative of love as food. We dimpled focaccia, massaged kale, and he joked that our dog, lying on her side in the middle of the kitchen, was “helping.” There were numerous instances where I was not entirely convinced that we were, in fact, speaking the same language. In the kitchen, though, we shared a purpose and a palate. I don’t miss that man, usually. But I miss being in the kitchen with him. Nobody made a better salad than he did. But I still have Pamela Anderson’s cookbook, which feels like visiting your Los Angeles-influenced vegan friend who hands you jars of pickles and keeps gesticulating toward beautiful vegetables, all with the proud declaration: “This is from my garden.”
I have a strong love affair with a London Fog, so Anderson’s Earl Grey Chia Overnight Oats recipe was a no-brainer to test out. For maximum flavour, she suggests using two Earl Grey tea bags. You can get away with one, if you’re feeling parsimonious. It’s filling, flavorful, and easily customizable with the fruit toppings of your choice (blueberries being my personal favourite). A perfect incentive for planning your breakfast the night before.
Buddha Bowls with Crispy Sesame Tofu is equally delicious as it is nutritious, relying mostly on the oven to do the heavy lifting. Roasted sweet potatoes, broccoli, and tofu dusted with cornstarch and spackled with black and white sesame seeds all get thrown in the oven, mingling with rice (Anderson specifies brown, but you can use white if you prefer). After, it all gets doused in an umami explosion of black vinegar-almond sauce, a long-lasting, potent sauce that encapsulates savoriness, saltiness, sweetness, acidity, and just a hint of spice. Once the bowls were demolished, I still had a lot of sauce left and saved it for the next time I had rice.
Anderson’s Salad Pizza is not an oxymoron, but a marvel of perfect, disparate things—fruit taken seriously as a topping (tomatoes and figs, though pears can be used), carbohydrates, herbs, and mustard greens. Pizza is one of those glorious things that don’t suffer from versatility or ingredient swaps, so feel free to omit the plant-based cheese or even the fruits, if the idea of fruit on pizza seems too outlandish—although, now may be the time for a third-grader to point out that tomatoes are a fruit—that, too, can be omitted. Herbaceous, sweet, and bursting with flavour with the right amount of zing from arugula, I’d eat this everyday if I weren’t such an impatient, lazy cook.
If you’re hankering to impress with little effort, just make the Almond-Grapefruit Visiting Cake, which is Scandinavian-inspired and impressively flavourful. And if you’re in the camp that believes baking is a special snowflake science requiring exacting rigor, you’re wrong. You can make this cake!1 As a scatter-brained person liable to be daydreaming in grocery stores, I don’t always obtain the ingredients I’ve written down on my list, which leads to resourceful improvisations as necessary. I found that this cake didn’t seem to suffer at all by the inclusion of walnuts when I didn’t have enough sliced almonds (and never mind that the almonds I had were not pre-sliced, but were cut by hand). Grapefruit zest is the superstar ingredient here. A slice of this cake woke me up to sensual pleasures. It’s a cake that makes you wish you could slow down time, call a friend on a rotary phone, and admire grazing sheep from a bay window. Not all food invokes love, it is true, but this cake does.
For animal lovers, Anderson’s included two recipes for dogs, including one with (easily omitted) CBD oil. A long-time animal rights activist and vegan writes that one of her mastiffs, Zou Bisou Bisou, “is a glutton for dehydrated sweet potatoes and stalks of cold celery. It’s so funny how he loves his veggies—just like Mom. Pets take on their guardian’s vibe—and vice versa.” There’s a section on preserved and pickled things, including a recipe for pickles (the secret ingredient? Rose petals). Anderson’s love for being in the kitchen and garden is unmistakeably real and infectious. Interspersed with Anderson’s own poetry and sketches, I find the physicality of the book, simply existing in my proximity, to be soothing. I Love You is sunlight in the form of a gloriously vegan cookbook, perfect for lonely hearts with big appetites.
*
Jessica Poon is a writer in East Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has recently reviewed books by Daniela Elza, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Linda Cheng, Neko Case, and Karina Halle for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster
- It has not escaped my attention that there are people who hate cooking and always try to outsource it. To make a sandwich seems a grievance. There also seems to be the widespread notion that baking, unlike cooking, is a science demanding rigorous perfection; anything shy of that is doomed. That’s a lie with the disservice of discouraging totally qualified humans from baking. There is no earthly reason to believe a deviation from a recipe—which was almost certainly devised in conditions different from yours, from the temperature of the room, to the type of oven, or ripeness of fruit—is reason for despair. What you need, instead, is trust in your own judgement. (Yes, it’s easier to say than to do). That, admittedly, can take time to acquire. Nobody likes to hear that. It’s easier to simply say, “Baking’s extremely precise, so I don’t do it.” The truth is, sometimes baking is easy, messy, imperfect, and still delicious. ↩︎