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. Continue reading
“When I pass a flowering zucchini plant in a garden,” Gwyneth writes, “my heart skips a beat.” I, on the other hand, have never seen a goddamned zucchini flower in my life. Until yesterday.
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.
Hey, guys! I’m back! Again! Sorry for the extremely long absences, but this site is simply a hobby for me, so it frequently has to take a backseat to more profitable ventures. (In that spirit, I will have a few things happening in the upcoming months that will give you MORE DANNY, if that’s what you’re desperate for. And if that is what you’re desperate for, then maybe you should talk to someone about that?) Anyway, let’s see how many recipes I can bang out before I disappear for 4 months again, right? Today’s post encompasses a whopping four recipes (actually, there’s a surprise fifth), and as a sign of good faith, let me tell you that I’m typing this as a pot simmers away on the stove in preparation of my next recipe. So there will be more in the near future, I guarantee it. Here’s a sneak preview: 
I have returned from Wisconsin, dog in tow, and I could not be happier to have this whole moving process finally, finally completed. But anyway, we can talk about that later. Let’s talk about Thanksgiving!
So here we are in New York City. I’ll spare you the details, but it’s been quite the week, what with driving two 16-hour days to get to Wisconsin, sadly leaving my dog behind with my parents (who, I should gratuitously mention, are absolute saints), and arriving in New York on Sunday morning. Since then, I’ve been touring apartments around the city like a lunatic, trying desperately to secure a place to live before I start work next Monday (and expect a forthcoming blog post on how Gwyneth is actually helping me find a place). In the meantime, my friends Nora and Mandy are graciously allowing me to impede on their space and sleep on their couch in Chelsea. To make up for this, I cooked not one, not two, but THREE Gwyneth recipes for dinner recently. Let’s see how my first NYC cooking experience went! 
Last night there was a lot to celebrate: my friend Lisa is in town from Wisconsin, and oh also by the way I’m moving to New York in like two weeks to go work in an ad agency (and possibly also to gay marry Zachary Quinto, but that’s still only at about a 50/50 probability). So, everything is very exciting! Also? TERRIFYING. I have so much to do in the next couple weeks (including, much to my chagrin, this project, the bane of my existence). My head may just burst into flames at any moment. Fun! I’ll be sure to document all my meltdowns on Twitter. Anyway, I made three recipes last night, because I need to get this train a-rollin’ and also because I am a masochist.
We’re flying right along here, as I completed two more recipes last night: Broiled Salmon with Homemade Teriyaki Sauce, as well as Fragrant Jasmine Rice. And both of these were almost comically simple, let me tell you. I mean, can you really claim as your own recipes the basic ingredients for a teriyaki sauce, as well as just throwing some spices into rice? I mean, really. This is just getting absurd. 
Oh, boy. We have a lot to cover. My family was here for the past week, for a whirlwind tour of Portland, Seattle (although I wasn’t present for that portion), and a five-day stay on the San Juan Islands, all the way up in practically Canada. Somewhere in there, I found time to cook two Gwyneth recipes for these unsuspecting fools, and it wasn’t totally awful! Even after the grease fire.
Well, that was a birthday weekend. And somewhere in there, I actually found the time to complete two recipes! They both barely count as recipes, but so does about 50% of this book, so let’s take what we can get.
The Danny/Gwyneth Project 