I Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Recipes For My Boyfriend. Here’s What Happened.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s new cookbook, It’s All Good, is based around her elimination diet, which requires her to eliminate… well, almost everything: soy, coffee, alcohol, dairy, eggs, sugar, shellfish, deepwater fish, potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplant (WHY?!), corn, wheat, meat, and processed food.
So how does she write a cookbook with all these restrictions?
She cheats a bit. The recipes do include some of the banned ingredients, like meat and fish. Gwyneth also casually mentions that sometimes she lets “a little bit of gluten slide,” which is alarming for people allergic to gluten, since a little slip could make them seriously sick. But hey, it’s all good!
I appreciate Gwyneth’s commitment to healthy food. I like eating healthy! So I tested out some of the recipes for you. I made them for myself and my boyfriend. While he’d be happy eating chicken wings and beer every day (making him a really good test subject for my experiment), he does like to eat healthfully, too. But neither of us would last very long on the elimination diet. We wanted to see if we could do it for just one dinner.
I decided to try Super-Healthy Kosheri, Mostly-Mushroom Soup, and for “dessert,” Nori Sesame Crunch.
Looking at the food before we sat down to dine made me sad. The dishes were completely colorless. I would have loved to add some pops of colorful vegetables, at least. But rules are rules. Is the food supposed to look like this? I wondered. Did I do something wrong? I was worried I’d made a meal of orphanage gruel.
But for the most part, the food was not that bad. The Many-Mushroom soup was inoffensive, and you’ll enjoy it if you loooove you some mushrooms. After one bite, though, my boyfriend and I had to slather on hot sauce and add salt. Next time I would thicken it up with beans or tofu. The pictures I have seen in magazines and online of the Mostly Mushroom Soup do not resemble my Mostly Mushroom Soup. I think that’s because the GOOP team uses pictures of the dried mushrooms soaking in broth, and not the actual soup. Because the actual soup looks like my cat’s dinner.
The Kosheri was disappointing. It needed another texture. I found it hard to believe I’d followed an actual recipe in an actual cookbook to make what was sitting on my plate in front of me—it was incredibly mushy and way too cinnamon-y. I hardly ever leave food on my plate, but I left food on my plate and went to the fridge for some of last night’s leftovers, and they sure were delicious. I would make this again, if only to change every single thing in the recipe. Add eggplant, cheese, take out quinoa, use pasta. I guess we’re not eating Kosheri anymore. Already, I had almost halved the amount of quinoa and added extra lentils and onions, but it still just tasted like a big heap of quinoa.
I was initially unexcited about making Nori Sesame Crunch. I think if you’re going to eat a dessert, you should eat a dessert. Baked Nori sheets don’t seem like too much of an indulgence. Top Chef’s Carla Hall (and my great-grandmother) used to say that if you don’t cook with love, it’s apparent in the final product. So maybe the Nori Sesame Crunch was disastrous because it could sense I was at odds with it. It came out angry the first time I tried it. Obviously it’s because I didn’t use parchment paper. When Gwyneth Paltrow says to use parchment paper, she means it. So I tried again.
“This is actually kind of good,” my boyfriend said as he crunched on the baked Nori sheets. I eyed them like they were my number one arch nemesis. But I was pleasantly surprise: the sesame seeds make them pretty satisfying, and I liked the saltiness of the Nori. We ate them all up. I wouldn’t consider them dessert, but I’d make them again–probably with a little sprinkle of cayenne.
Basically this food was fine, but it all seemed to have something missing. I wouldn’t cook it for guests, I wouldn’t cook more than one recipe per meal, and the recipes probably won’t make it into my regular repertoire. When I’m cooking, I like to cook meals that knock my socks off and make me happy to prepare and eat. I didn’t have that feeling here. Cooking, I felt wary. And eating, I felt underwhelmed. And though the meal certainly wasn’t flavorless, we were a few glasses of wine in.
Do these recipes appeal to you?