Julie and Julia Julienne
Categories: Cookbooks , Entertainment , Movies & Books , Nonfiction
It seems my goal of finishing a book by week’s end pales in comparison to the substantial ambition of author Julie Powell. The book is Julie and Julia 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen. The goal implicated in this title is astronomical yet entirely doable. Sometimes we need the astronomical to make us feel alive, or make us hungry at the very least.
Transplanted Texan, now New Yorker Julie (actual birth name Julia), is on her way home from her temp job and calls her husband Eric. She discovers Eric failed to acquire dinner for the evening. Julie pops into the only shop that’s open at that late hour and wanders aimlessly in her painful pumps picking up random vegetation in the produce section. Once home, Julie discovers she’s obtained, quite by accident, the ingredients to one of Julia Child’s recipes. This is where the notion to cook every recipe inside of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking classic cookbook was conceived.
When Julie isn’t cooking, she works as a temp. When she arrives home, its straight to the kitchen. When she wakes in the morning and in the middle of the night, its straight to the kitchen. She takes us on culinary journeys through poultry, fish, vegetables and soups. Beef marrow, meat cleavers, mussels, aspics and gizzards grace every mouth-watering page. Each chapter features Julie embarking on a new and enlightening culinary experience gleaned from MtAoFC. Julia executes each dish with confident and eager hands. Not all of the recipes turn out as planned causing some frustrating moments but nothing a little vodka gimlet doesn’t soon cure and luckily gimlets complement French dishes very well.
The book however is both about French cooking and the art of self-discovery. There are those of us, namely me, who are still searching. J & J is inspiring in such a way that we witness Julie find that something or at least that temporary something she didn’t know she was searching for.
Julie inspired me to try it, it, being anything, everything, no matter how others feel about it and maybe… just maybe the journey to self-discovery will get a bit shorter. Julie made me grow a spine. Thanks Julie.
This is Julie’s first book and she maintained a blog charting her progress throughout the entire year and beyond. A most anticipated motion picture starring Meryl Streep based on Julie Powell’s book; Julie and Julia is scheduled to enter theatres in August 2009.
Julie, Eric,
I hope that ship you mentioned came in.
