Gwyneth vs. Chrissy

In a freezing-cold-January-Sunday frenzy, I invited a couple friends over for a four-course meal. Two dishes would be from Gwyneth, and two would be from Chrissy Teigen. It wasn’t a fair fight, and I apologize to Gwyneth. The first course would be her Bitter Greens Salad with Anchovy Vinaigrette. The second and third courses would be Chrissy’s french onion soup and “Better Than Ina’s” roast chicken and vegetables. And dessert would be Gwyneth’s Pomegranate Granita. I probably should have put a more substantial Gwyneth recipe up against Chrissy’s, but I was already making a four-course meal for no reason and I really didn’t want to complicate things. Again, it wasn’t a fair fight.

Hours before we ate, I had to make the granita, which is pretty annoying! You just whisk together pomegranate juice, lemon juice, and agave nectar, and then stick the liquid in the freezer for an hour. Then, for the next two hours, you stir the slush every fifteen minutes. It’s really really irritating to be cooking three other things, making conversation with your friends, and also having to frequently walk the dog, while also stirring frozen pomegranate juice every 15 minutes!!!!!! Confusingly, she also says you can just freeze the thing overnight and then give it a quick stir before serving, which makes NO SENSE TO ME. You either stir it 4 times an hour or just let it sit for like 20 hours unbothered??? Do I need to be a chemist to understand why this makes sense???? I’M LOSING MY MIND.

Anyway, can we talk about Chrissy Teigen for a second? Her cookbooks are so good!!! I was inspired to finally try her french onion soup after going psychotic at a bar over onion rings, forcing my friends to order six plates of them over the course of the night, kicking off an internal onion craze that could only be sated by the grandmother of all onion dishes: french onion soup. And, like she does with every recipe, Chrissy delivered. The onions truly melted as they simmered for hours, and we all lost our minds as we ate the soup. Her roast chicken was also good (thanks to the entire stick of butter and the TWENTY-THREE CLOVES OF GARLIC you cover it with), but nothing we ate that night compared to the french onion soup. Nothing I ate in my LIFE compared to the french onion soup!!!!!

But back to Gwyneth. The first dish was her stupid bitter greens salad, which she claims supports detoxification of your liver. If that’s the case, my liver is toxic as hell because I barely ate any of it. It’s just torn up pieces of raw radicchio, covered in an anchovy dressing that’s basically a lot of anchovies with a little bit of mustard and olive oil. Which means the salad tastes like extremely bitter leaves covered in fish sauce. It’s… not good. It’s boring at best, gag-inducing at worst. I hated it. This is the 400th extremely bitter dish Gwyneth has forced me to make, and I’m starting to worry about her! Why does she think you should be punished by your food???

A bad picture of a bad salad.

The granita, on the other hand, was really very good! I scraped the flakes of frozen pomegranate juice into small glasses and topped them with pomegranate seeds. It was a perfect, delicate ending to a very rich meal. Tart, sweet, and not at all filling. Justin and I ate the rest of it for dessert the next night, and my friend Meghan requested that I make it when a group of us goes to a house upstate in a few weeks. Privately, I was happy that my dear frenemy Gwyneth redeemed herself a bit in the 11th hour of the meal. I didn’t give her a fair fight, but at least she left us on a high note.

• Winter Greens Salad total cost:
  • $10.65 ($2.66 per serving @ 4 servings)
• Pomegranate Granita total cost:
  • $13.56 ($3.39 per serving @ 4 servings)
• Stores visited:
  • 1!
• Hours spent, including shopping and dishes:
  • 5