Thanksgooping

Last night, Justin put Julie & Julia on, and I was plunged into a fit of nostalgia. Years ago, when I started this stupid project, I conducted research by reading Julie Powell’s original blog from the beginning. (It still existed online, back then, even though the project was finished and her book was already published. You can see the first post here thanks to the Wayback Machine.) Sitting in my shitty Portland cubicle in a job that was making me insane, I obsessively followed Julie’s troubles with finding ingredients (I had never heard of Dean & DeLuca until reading her blog), maneuvering around a miserably tiny New York kitchen, and trying to muster the energy to cook after a 12-hour workday. I never imagined that would become my life. And yet, here we are.

We must talk about the latest news: Gwyneth’s FOURTH cookbook, The Clean Plate. The email announcing it, I’m sure you can imagine, has ruined me. Gwyneth explains the theme of this book, which sounds exactly like the other ones:

When I sat down to write The Clean Plate, the first rule was that everything had to taste really good. The second was that every recipe had to comply with the fundamentals of clean eating. I wanted the recipes to work on days when you’re craving a healthy, filling lunch or planning a dinner for a friend with a food sensitivity. And because I love to cook and I love to eat, I wanted it all to feel fun. I hope it does for you, too. The Clean Plate hits bookshelves January 8, right in time for my own annual detox—you can preorder it now.

The nightmare continues.

My friend Annie — from my Portland days, speaking of! — recently moved down the street from us, so when she invited us to her Thanksgiving dinner, we happily accepted, excited to only have to travel a few blocks on the coldest Thanksgiving in a century or whatever the record was. I volunteered to make my first-ever pumpkin pie, and decided to try out a recipe from my new cookbook Rose’s Baking Basics. The recipe called for a homemade pie crust that incorporates cream cheese, somehow? Which turned into this:

Thanks for nothing, ROSE

Store-bought crust it would have to be! The rest of the pie turned out fine. Pumpkin pie isn’t that hard, apparently. Since the non-crust portion was so easy, I decided to throw in another recipe: Gwyneth’s Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Spices.

The recipe is crazy simple. Peel and cut up sweet potatoes. Put them in a pan. Mix maple syrup along with a little bit of fresh orange juice, vegetable oil, cinnamon, and ground cloves in a bowl, which basically gives you a bowl of maple syrup:

SWEET

Pour the stuff all over the sweet potatoes. Bake them until they’re soft. And there you have it.

“Btw I’ve decided to do gwyneth’s sweet potatoes. They seem like they’ll be nasty,” I texted Annie, who replied, “A DANNY AND GWYNETH CREATION?? I’m pumped,” because she is supportive and nice. But really, they were nasty.

I found the potatoes sweet and gummy. I mean, it’s softened sweet potatoes swimming in a puddle of maple syrup. The “with spices” portion of the recipe title is a LIE. These were a sickly, monstrous creation. At Annie’s, I put 4 little pieces on the very edge of my plate, and heaped the rest of my dish with everyone else’s SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER contributions to the dinner.

The majority of the guests — who are all unfamiliar with this idiotic project — kept reassuring me the potatoes were great, but I think some people thought this was my recipe and were just being nice. I kept insisting, “You don’t have to say they taste good! They don’t!” but I’m sure it only came across as self-deprecation. But really, they were gross, and we must call out evil when we encounter it.

At Annie’s I was reunited with an old friend, Mary, who I haven’t seen in nearly a decade, back when we both lived in Portland. As we were catching up, I briefly mentioned to someone nearby that the potatoes were Gwyneth’s recipe, not mine. “You’re still doing that thing?” she asked. Yes, Mary. Somehow, I am.