On GOOP and Soup

I have a troubled relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow.

I know, I know. That sounds moronic. I don't have any relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow. I may have feelings about Gwyneth Paltrow, but I can't possibly have a relationship with her as she doesn't have even the vaguest idea that I exist.

But let's just roll with it: I have a troubled relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow. For years now, I've been saying "I hated Gwyneth Paltrow before hating Gwyneth Paltrow was cool." And that's true. I started hating Gwyneth Paltrow way back in college, when Shakespeare in Love came out, and I thought "this would be a good movie, were it not for Gwyneth Paltrow." That summer when I went to England, I took peculiar satisfaction in reading the newspaper our British friends took, which criticised her "implausible accent." The British get it, I thought, and satisfied with myself and the sophistication of my 22 years, I drank another cup of Fortnum's Royal Blend and read a few more pages of the Lisa Jewell novel I'd bought after seeing posters for it (posters! for a book!) all over the underground.

And then I sat back and watched for years as others -- turned off by things she said or roles she took or didn't take or photos where she was bizarrely captioned with "I am African" or the way she was friends with Madonna or the way she was suddenly not friends with Madonna anymore or the whole Kabbalah thing or marrying the guy from Coldplay or naming her kids something cuckoo or referring to Billy Joel as William. William! I ask you!

And then, of course, there was the time she poisoned me. That's right. Gwyneth Paltrow poisoned me. A friend of a friend had raved about the weight she'd lost on the GOOP cleanse, and I decided to give it a shot. I made some modifications to cut the obvious beets out of it, but between counting the minutes until I could have my snack of mixed seeds and nuts, and becoming so crazed with hunger that when the lid stuck on my smoothie cup, I resorted to smashing the cup against the counter in an attempt to crack it open like an otter with a clam (a gross, peat bog tasting clam), I failed to notice that the Green Powder I was putting in said smoothies contained 200 mg of dehydrated beet juice...until my breathing was compromised and I broke out in hives.

God damn you, Gwyneth Paltrow, I thought as the ER nurses shot me full of epinephrine. You and your lifestyle website and your funkily named children and your diet of no gluten but all the poisonous root vegetables you can eat. Damn you.

But...

There's another side to the story, of course. Otherwise this wouldn't be about me having a complicated relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow; it would just be about me finding her tiresome and her trying to poison me.

You see, before I hated Gwyneth Paltrow, I actually rather liked her. I liked Se7en. I thought she and Brad Pitt made a cute couple, back in the day when they had the same haircut and all. I love, love, loved Sliding Doors -- one of the all time greats from that particular genre of 90s chick-flicks when they all opened with Blair's "Have Fun, Go Mad" and made it seem like if you moved to a major urban center and got an asymmetrical bob, anything could happen. I think I was even ok with Emma, despite wanting to slug my roommate in the face for raving that it was "just like Clueless!"

And some of the things that started turning other people against Gwyneth Paltrow started slowly nudging me back toward her. So she stopped being friends with Madonna? Good for her. Have you seen Madonna recently? Bitch be scary. So she gave her kids atypical names? So did half the girls I went to high school with, and they don't have the excuse of being eccentric, artistic millionaires (they just crazy).

And then there's GOOP. Which, for all that she tried to poison me through it, has given me some good recipes I fall back on all the time. Which, for all that people make fun of the pretensions and the preachiness and the William Joels...that sort of thing just makes me roll my eyes slightly and smile.

Yes, she can be socially tone deaf. So can I. I'm lucky enough that I have friends who call me out on it when I'm at my worst, and just roll their eyes and order another glass of wine when I'm just being ridiculous.

And maybe that's what appeals to me in part -- the idea that with Gwyneth, I'm the sane one. I'm the one who knows when she's being a privileged moron. I'm the one who gets to roll her eyes.

Anyway. All these things considered, naturally I was excited when I heard that Gwyneth had a cookbook coming out. For the most part, this was because I really do like her recipes. I'm never going to follow a whole lot of food rules, but I do like the idea of keeping my diet...cleaner, and both her own recipes and the ones she endorses from other sources generally do that.

For the other part...just think of the delightfully trainwrecky potential. Pages and pages of GOOPy prose, bound in an aesthetically pleasing package that I could treasure for years.

My Father's Daughter (we may talk more about that title -- and her recent appearance on Who Do You Think You Are?, and how I hope Blythe Danner's feelings aren't easily hurt -- at a later date) officially drops today, after a launch party that afforded Ruth Reichl and her cape of hair an unprecedented opportunity for name droppage (and misspelling. Gyneth? Really? Sounds filthy).

Through the magic of the interwebs, though, I got my copy last Wednesday, and I have to say... I really like it. It's the most aesthetically welcoming cookbook I've bought in a long time (and I buy more cookbooks than I need), and her co-writer deserves mad props for curbing the typically GOOPy prose so that it sounds like a suggestion rather than a royal decree ("here is what I do and why" rather than "one simply must").

I started tackling the recipes with her white bean soup, because my relationship with white beans is almost as troubled as my relationship with Gwyneth. I love them now -- in fact, I have a bunch of photographs saved up for an entire post on the different ways I love to eat white beans.

But when I was younger, I hated the things. In fact, one of the reasons I've held off on writing the aforementioned post is because I kept imagining my mother reading it, steam coming out of her ears as she thought back on all the dinners where I refused to eat pasta fagioli because I thought white beans were disgusting.

Anyway, Gwyneth's white bean soup starts off by heating some olive oil in your large soup pot over medium heat, and then cooking a thinly sliced bulb of fennel in it for ten minutes. This bit had me full of trepidation as my relationship with fennel is not at all complex -- I do not like it. It makes me think of Jaegermeister, which makes me think of the night I got my concussion, which is not a pleasant thought.

But I dutifully heated it, and then added a large yellow onion and 3 cloves of garlic (the recipe says two; I know myself and my needs). And then you clap a lid on that and cook it at low for about half an hour. Then you throw in a pinch (or more, in my case) of red chile flakes and a 1/4 tsp of oregano and a bit of fresh ground pepper.

To that, you pitch in 28 oz of cannellini beans (Gwyneth says two 14 oz cans; my cans are 15 oz each so I reserved a bit for use in a salad or something later in the week) and 2 pints of vegetable stock.

This gets brought to a boil, and then you lower the temperature to a simmer, clap the lid back on, and let it do its thing for an hour.

The result is this rich golden broth, and a house that smells quite lovely. You've then got two options as to how to serve it -- either tossing a bit of kale in, or serving it "French Onion" style by popping a bit of bread on the top, grating some Parmesan over it, and throwing it under the broiler for about a minute.

I went with the second option. I hadn't any kale around the house, but I did have a bit of leftover French bread going stale. And I always, always have Parmesan cheese.

Also, French Onion soup is one of my all time favorite things. Although I suppose you could say I have a complicated relationship with it too -- once, at the Red Robin at Tucson Mall, I got a piece of cheese that wouldn't tear off, and it just kept going and going down my throat until I nearly choked to death on it, and ended up having to gag it up at the table to save myself from an ignominious death by choking on cheap cheese at the Red Robin at Tucson Mall where I was at a table for one during my half hour break from my shift at Dillard's.

So like Gwyneth, French Onion soup had tried to kill me. Would the two of them together hatch some diabolical plot to put me out of business once and for all?

Nope. In fact, they would come together in a brilliant festival of deliciousness.

(note: clearly I did not use enough cheese, or I grated it too fine or something. I used a microplane. Maybe use a regular grater)

This soup? So good. Everything I love about French Onion soup, except without the murderous cheese. It tastes really rich and wonderful and warming, and there's something vaguely Thanksgiving-y about it. It was great for dinner on Monday night, and a perfect lunch for the crap rainy day we had yesterday.

So you win, Gwyneth. You win this round. I like your white bean soup a lot.

I still hate you on Glee though. (But in fairness, the things I don't hate about Glee has been awfully short this season)