January | 2022 | The Danny/Gwyneth Project

Monthly Archives: January 2022

January 12, 2022 · 12:18 pm

Don’t Pea In My Pesto

I didn’t intend this to become a cooking-while-high post, but the decision was taken out of my hands. I was midway through prep, all ready to start cooking Gwyneth’s Cavolo Nero Pesto with Penne & Peas, and then my boyfriend Justin declared he wasn’t hungry yet. So I put the cooking on pause, took a few hits from my weed pen, and passed the time on my phone, where I narrowly avoided making a stupid purchase:

A bad sweatshirt I almost bought — *Say no to weed and ironic sweatshirts, kids.*

Eventually I got back off the couch and continued. But before that, I had needed to figure out what the fuck cavolo nero is. Gwyneth informed me it’s “a dark green leafy vegetable that’s very good for you” and is in season in the winter, but I highly doubted my local stores would carry something I had never heard of. But, apparently: I had heard of it! It’s also called Tuscan kale, lacinato kale, or, my personal favorite, dinosaur kale (cavolo nero is allegedly Italian for “black kale” but I can’t vouch for that because my Duolingo hasn’t gotten me there yet).

While I had never purchased it, I had actually admired it at several of my local stores. It’s just so fun looking! These scaly, almost blue-green, massive leaves always beckoned to me from the produce aisle, but I never knew what to do with them, other than give them to a cartoon mouse to use as a fan. Now, thanks to my dear friend Gwyneth, I had an excuse to cook with it. This is what passes for a thrill these days.

Cavolo nero: so sexy to me — *Do I have a crush on cavolo nero?*

The recipe calls for you to steam one bunch of cavolo nero, which was a problem because one of my biggest insecurities in life is the fact that I don’t have a steamer basket. Thankfully, my creative brain was unlocked due to the cavolo verde I had vaped, and I turned my strainer into a makeshift steamer basket. Mensa vibes much????

Makeshift steam basket — *Nothing can stop me now.*

After some high-level anxiety and agony about whether I should steam the kale with or without the stalks (I did it with and I think it was the right call), I steamed it for the exact 7 minutes Gwyneth called for. I truly love when she gets ultra-specific. It’s very dom.

Then I let the kale cool for a minute or two, before “whizzing” it in my food processor with garlic, olive oil, black pepper, and 10 olive-oil packed anchovies. Well, actually, my anchovies seemed to be significantly larger than is typical, so around the time I was plopping my 6th anchovy into the food processor I looked at the heaping pile of fish filets and felt like a godforsaken maniac, so I called it quits at 6 anchovies. I do like anchovies, but you can’t tell me anyone would have wanted to eat the full 10-anchovy version of this pesto!!!!! And if you did tell me? I wouldn’t believe you.

I whizzed that shit and then stirred in some mascarpone, and you know what? It tasted like pesto! A hair fishier than I would have preferred (stopping at 6 anchovies: another stunning cooking decision by moi), and I maybe would have wanted an extra garlic clove in there, but this was actually a pretty good kale pesto recipe! WE LOVE WHEN GWYNETH SUCCEEDS, FOLKS.

But, meanwhile in the pasta department, things were getting weird. 3 minutes before your penne is done cooking, you see, Gwyneth tells you to dump a cup of frozen peas in with the pasta. Maybe this is a thing other people do all the time and no judgment to you if you think that’s the best move for your family in these uncertain times, but for me? Like this is so fucked up:

Anyway, we survived the ordeal, and once the pasta and peas had finished cooking, I reserved “a teacup” of pasta/pea water, strained the noodles, and mixed it with the pesto until it all… is emulsified the proper word here? I literally never know what that word means or where it’s appropriate. Does “emulsify” just mean “mix together”? Please don’t tell me the answer.

I piled that shit with Parmesan, trying to smother any weird pea flavoring, and voila: kale pesto with peas for some reason! I had tasted the pesto earlier so I already knew it was good, which made the last-minute addition of boiled peas even more confusing. What is this for? Not to rehash the dreaded peas-in-guacamole fight of yesteryear, but stop adding peas to things that don’t need them!!! Peas have a distinctive flavor so you can’t just throw them into anything green and pretend like they’ll blend in! They won’t!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The peas not only transformed this dish but transformed ME, from an absolute Earth mother kitchen goddess who can whip up a pesto using fresh local Tuscan kale while pleasantly stoned, to a sullen bratty child miserably picking around the clumps of boiled peas in his dinner. Not cool! (But I probably will make a kale pesto adaptation of this again, so let’s take our victories where we can.)

Programming note: I have come to absolutely loathe WordPress (WHY do they force me to post such BIG IMAGES), so I’m moving to Substack! You can subscribe to The Danny/Gwyneth Project here. That said, I will still be posting updates here for the sake of keeping the whole project in one place, but I reserve the right to stop doing that if WordPress keeps making it this unbelievably irritating to make a simple post. So I’d suggest subscribing to the newsletter!

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Filed under Pasta

January 9, 2022 · 10:54 am

The Covid Era

3 years later……….

Welcome to the Covid era of the Danny/Gwyneth Project, my probably lifelong journey to complete every recipe in Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbooks. When I last updated this dear old blog, my beloved dog Antony was still alive and Covid didn’t exist. FUNNY HOW THINGS CHANGE.

Efforts to resume this stupid project have come and gone throughout the pandemic. I frequently get the urge, because I hate having this incomplete (and also the days in Covid are oh so long and aimless), but then I remember how truly hard it was to find and source the ingredients for these recipes pre-pandemic, and I get overwhelmed by the thought of hunting down whatever a “halibut frame” is by going in and out of a dozen Omicron-infested shops in the city, and then I give up and have an edible and shelve the project again.

And yet, here we are again. Throughout the past year, I did, in fact, cook three Gwyneth recipes that went unblogged, so let’s rectify that now.

The first was Grandad Danner’s Favorite Peanut Butter Cookies, a mercifully normal recipe, which was only made difficult via — as always — my own kitchen idiocy. First of all, it took walking to four grocery stores to find peanut butter chips, which really should not be that difficult to find! Shame on Flatbush. Even worse, the only ones I could find were Reese’s-branded, which you just know sent a shiver down Gwyneth’s perfect spine the moment they were added to my cookie batter.

Even more idiotically, I guess I kind of forgot that brown sugar can, like, fossilize on you? So when I got home from my exhausting shopping trip and started to bake, I discovered this:

After getting some help via Instagram friends, I learned you can sometimes soften the block by microwaving it alongside a bowl of water. This felt and still feels insane to me, but you know what? IT WORKED. Over a decade since I started this project and I’m still learning and growing ❤

Microwaving sugar — *Don’t judge my dirty microwave, it’s been a rough 2 years.*

After that, it was just a matter of slopping all the stuff together in a bowl, rolling the batter into balls, and baking. Normal cookie stuff. And they came out… sickening! And I mean that in the bad way, not in the fun, gay way. These were nauseatingly, sickly sweet, with a gloppy mouthfeel that made you chew like a dog trying to lick peanut butter off of its back teeth. I’ve never been a big fan of peanut butter cookies, if we’re being honest, but these were maybe the worst I’ve ever had. Look, I’ll give Gwyneth credit for including an honest-to-god unhealthy cookie recipe in her cookbook, but in the future she really should stick to what she’s best at, which is anything but this.

The worst part? The recipe was for THIRTY COOKIES. I was able to offload some to my friend Annie, but even half a dozen of these cookies is too many cookies. I’m so thankful I never have to do this recipe again in my godforsaken life.

The other two recipes I completed were equally nauseating: The Wedge with Blue Cheese Dressing. I love a wedge salad, but blue cheese dressing can really be hit-or-miss with me, so I was apprehensive.

The hardest part was, as always, sourcing ingredients, namely my dear old friend VEGENAISE. Since Gwyneth introduced me to the brand over a decade ago (yikes we all got old), the vegan mayo business has exploded, making it paradoxically easier than ever to find vegan mayo but harder than ever to find Vegenaise-brand vegan mayo. I could have settled for any one of the other brands available at one of my neighborhood grocery stores, but I absolutely must stay as true to the recipes as I possibly can, so I persevered and somehow found a jar of the good stuff.

The dressing recipe is very simple: thinly slice a shallot and mix it with sour cream, Vegenaise, crumbled Gorgonzola cheese (she tells you to use the “picante or mountain kind, not the dulce” but I literally don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about so I just got the only kind I could find), red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper. Nothing too shocking, everything’s going fine. Until… hold on, what’s this? 1/3 a cup of COLD WATER? Why would I possibly want 1/3 cup of cold water in my salad dressing!!!!!!! What purpose could that possibly serve???? AM I LOSING MY MIND???

Will it surprise you to learn that the resulting dressing was watery? And not just “hmm, I wonder if we can thicken this up a little” watery. The dressing was, essentially, shallots in a dirty puddle. I’m so so so sorry for what I’m about to show you:

And you wonder why I take years off from these recipes at a time.

To make “The Wedge,” you just take your nasty Vegenaise shallot water and pour it over a wedge of iceberg lettuce, feeling free to add “super ripe” tomatoes and thinly sliced onions if you want. The resulting “salad” is one of the worst things ever created, a wedge of watery iceberg lettuce drowning in vegan sewage runoff.

“If there is a wedge with blue cheese dressing on a menu anywhere,” Gwyneth informs us, “a Paltrow will be ordering it.” And if it’s this wedge with blue cheese dressing, a Danny will be diarrhea-ing it out within minutes.

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Filed under Desserts, Salads