Believe it or not, the time has come for another delay from the Danny/Gwyneth Project. But! It’s not as bad as my Italy trip, I promise. You see, several plane- and train-loads of family members are about to descend upon Portland for a whirlwind 10-day tour of the Pacific Northwest. We’ll be all over the place on the weekends, but will be, for the most part, concentrated together in a rented house up in the San Juan Islands next week.
And, you see, this is where the Project comes in: My sadomasochistic family members have requested I make something of Gwyneth’s for them, so I won’t really be taking all this time off as a vacation. There WILL be cooking. (On the plus side, I think I can force my parents to pay for the ingredients. Lobster grilling it is!) I haven’t totally decided what to make for them yet, and it will probably depend on what sort of cooking equipment we’re faced with when we arrive at the rental house. I also haven’t decided how horrible I want to be to them. Do I try to impress them with a delicious-sounding meal, or do I force them to dine on one of Gwyneth’s more intimidatingly strange meals? I suppose we’ll find out.
So, enjoy the weekend, and expect to hear from me at some point next week, hopefully with stories of family mayhem and cooking gone wrong.
(On a related note, anyone in Portland want to watch my dog? For some reason, all the kennels are either booked or require absurdly extensive “evaluation” time with the dog before they’re allowed to stay overnight. I have no idea what these “evaluation” sessions are like, but my dog is sure to fail most of their tests. So, uh… no idea what I’m going to do with him. Sell him, maybe?)
As I mentioned last week, most of the serious recipes left (as opposed to the salads, for example, that are often no more than two ingredients) require at least 4 or 5 hours’ cooking time, which means there are going to have to be more Gwyneth Paltrow Sundays in my future. In that spirit, I knocked another one out this past Sunday, making Turkey Bolognese from 2 PM until nearly 8:00.
Guys! I almost forgot to post this today! Crisis averted, though. We can now move on with our regularly scheduled weekends. Is it hot where you are? Everyone seems to be complaining about how hot it is outside, but none of us in Portland have any idea what you’re even talking about, since we’re all basically wearing sweaters through July. ENOUGH SMALL TALK. Let’s talk Grilled Tuna Rolls.
Since tonight is my night to cook, I will be subjecting my roommates to Gwyneth’s Grilled Tuna Rolls, whether they like it or not. We’ll see how it goes! I’m cautiously optimistic. But seeing as I won’t have anything to report until tomorrow, this means today you are forced to endure my random, completely tangential musings. My friends are surely going to shout, “Off-topic, off-topic!” at me, but I make the Blog Rules around here. And today, I’m thinking we should talk wine.
Well, everyone, the cooking has returned. Are we excited? Get excited! Thank you to everyone who voted over the weekend. If you were to tally the votes now, I think Duck Ragu is actually the winner, but when I tallied the votes earlier in the weekend I had Fish Tacos ahead of the pack, so Fish Tacos are what I made. My indifference to the rules makes me the Florida of cooking blogs.
And then we come to the end. The final part of our Italian trip, and the last of my excuses to prolong my return to the Danny/Gwyneth Project. (Actually, I have already returned: Last night was fish tacos, and holy shit was it an interesting meal. We had some special guests, but you’ll have to wait to hear about it.) It was fun while it lasted, though, right? But we flew too close to the sun, and now we must fall back to Earth. Or something. This portion of the trip, I assumed, would surely be less insane than the previous three — surely falling in a Venetian canal would have to signal the end of the insanity, right? Of course, that’s never the case in Italy, as Florence had a few surprises up its sleeves. 
The Danny/Gwyneth Project 