A Bitter Meal To Swallow

Breaking news: Gwyneth has a podcast. FINALLY. It’s actually kind of surprising she didn’t have a podcast until now? Shows surprising restraint. The first episode of the goop Podcast comes out Thursday, but I gleefully downloaded the 1-minute preview episode about 45 seconds after it was released, and let me tell you, this shit is already delivering everything I wanted.

Speaking uncomfortably close to the microphone in what surely must have killed a few ASMR people, Gwyneth said, with an audible smile in her voice that made my eardrums tremble like blades of grass on a breezy summer day:

“Hi, guys. Gwyneth Paltrow here. You may have heard of goop, the lifestyle brand I started from my kitchen table almost a decade ago. Since then, we’ve test-driven earthing, colorstrology, sex bark, aura photography, and goat’s milk cleanses, all in the name of wellness content research. During each episode of the goop podcast, which you can listen to starting March 8th, myself or one of the goop editors will get into it with brilliant researchers, thinkers, and culture-changers. If you’ve got a burning or totally random question you want me to answer, hit us up at goop on Instagram or Facebook.”

Oh, I WILL be hitting you up on Instagram or Facebook, goop. I have so many questions. Like: did you really try “earthing,” “colorstrology,” and “sex bark” or are those things you just made up to troll me with your podcast? There’s no way to ever know, because I don’t want to google.

(Update: I gave in and googled “sex bark” because it has the word sex in it. Looks like it’s chocolate bark made with some of that snake oil from Moon Juice, the scammiest scammer Gwyneth has ever taken under her wing. Moon Juice is hell.)

Anyway, this is all very exciting. I’ll be sure to listen to every episode of the goop Podcast until my entire life is finally perfect OR my brain does its own version of a cleanse AKA suicide, whichever comes first.

Meanwhile, I’m still cooking, and not even fun stuff like sex bark. I knocked out three recipes, in a desperate attempt to get this shit over with, and, guys, I really fucked up. I’d like to think I’m pretty good at this whole cooking thing by now, but one thing I’m really terrible at is MENU-PLANNING. Why is it so hard to make a plate with two or more things that all taste good together!!!!!!

Ugh, so. I decided to make Whole Roasted Fish with Salsa Verde (love when I get 2 recipes for the price of 1), Grilled Radicchio with Gorgonzola, and Whole Wheat Pasta with Purple Sprouting Broccoli. An important thing to know is that this purple sprouting broccoli recipe has been driving me insane for, quite literally, 7 years. I had never heard of purple sprouting broccoli when I first bought this book, and I’m still not quite sure what it is. Some sort of broccoli? I assume? That is purple? With sprouts? Anyway, I’ve been low-key looking for it for almost a decade now. Anytime I go to a produce section or walk through a farmers market or, like, see a bag of rotting veggies on the sidewalk, I check to see if there’s purple sprouting broccoli. No luck.

I’ve said it a million times, but I hate making substitutes to Gwyneth’s recipes, as it goes against the spirit of this project (lol as if this project has anything resembling a “spirit” anymore, that shit died long ago). But sometimes she makes it so difficult, i.e. basing a recipe around an ingredient so rare that you can’t find them in either Brooklyn or Portland, the world’s two dueling epicenters for Food Assholes. If I want to get really serious in future recipes, I should probably start making relationships with local farmers, but for now I just needed to get this shit off my plate. Well, on my plate. (SORRY FOR THAT ONE, IT’S OKAY IF YOU CLOSE THIS TAB NOW.) Gwyneth promised that if you can’t find purple sprouting broccoli, “broccoli rabe is also delish,” so I bought the damn broccoli rabe and hoped it would truly be delish.

Maybe now, if you’re really paying attention, you’ll start to see why making all these dishes together was a problem. Broccoli rabe and radicchio and gorgonzola? This menu was destined to end up like my ex-boyfriends: BITTER.

I bought a whole fish, something I realized I’ve never done before. I genuinely love when Gwyneth makes me do something I’ve never attempted in the kitchen, so this was exciting. But, when I approached the counter at Whole Foods, eager to see what Jeff Bezos had hauled from the ocean that day, I realized that a whole fish is literally just, like, a dead fish. Laying there. With eyes, and scales, and guts. Blessedly, our lord and savior Mr. Bezos takes care of us, his good and happy worshippers, and he had one of his Whole Foods Seafood Section Attendants or whatever do unspeakable things to the fish behind the counter, to make it gut- and scale-less for me. I’m a devoted Survivor fan, but I’m not eager to extract fish guts in my tiny apartment. (Please note I still have to make Gwyneth’s recipe that starts with stabbing a live lobster in the face. Yes, I’m actively avoiding it.)

The actual cooking was easy as hell. Made some gashes in the fish and stuffed them with lemon slices and fresh herbs. Tossed it in the oven. My dog was rabid, desperate to get a bite of the stinky, fat sea bass. My favorite part was making the salsa verde, which is, obviously, fantastic. Take a bunch of fresh herbs, some olive oil, a few anchovies, vinegar, and mustard, and whiz it all together in a food processor. It’s perfect.

The pasta was nothing. Boil some pasta, then saute some broccoli. It’s so dumb. Maybe it’s better with purple sprouting broccoli? I won’t be finding out anytime soon.

Someday I’ll get a real steamer, because this is embarrassing.

The radicchio is where things started to fall off the rails. Granted, she suggests you grill it on a real grill, but I’m not about to squeeze myself and a little grill out onto my fire escape just to make some damn radicchio. My stovetop grill pan would have to suffice, as always. She says specifically not to char the radicchio, which felt wrong to me, because what you get after 5 minutes of grilling radicchio on moderate heat is some wilted radicchio. You then put it in a baking dish and sprinkle HALF A POUND of gorgonzola over it, before putting it all under the broiler for a few minutes. This is… a lot of gorgonzola for the little radicchio she suggests! What you’re left with is a nasty dish of wilted radicchio absolutely smothered in melted, bitter, goopy gorgonzola.

The resulting plate was awful:

I’m honestly sorry you have to see this.

Individually, the pasta was fine and the fish was tasty (the salsa verde was legitimately delicious). But the radicchio was horrendous. Bitter, with the texture of snot. Paired with the broccoli rabe in the pasta, it all just overpowered the delicate fish. We were left choking it down, Justin doing his usual insistence(/LYING) that it’s good! Honestly, it tastes good, babe! I love it!

We ate all the fish, practically drank the salsa verde, and threw the rest away. Oh well. Another waste of time and money and precious food from our dying planet!

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Another one will be coming to inboxes soon, probably. Especially because I’ll be driving a tiny circus motorcycle across Morocco in a few weeks (a normal activity), and I’ll be trying to send a dispatch FROM THE ROAD, if that’s a thing that is possible. I don’t know, we’ll see. Sign up and read the archive at tinyletter.com/dannyletter. It’s just an email, it can’t hurt you. (Tell that to HILLARY. Sorry.)