Posts tagged ‘julie and julia’

After weeks of celebrations, vacation days, and indulgences I have excused and forgiven because of the frigid temperatures, I am full.

On January 1st I nursed a hangover with a day indoors and a tray of potato and zucchini chips with gorgonzola cheese.  I saw Anthony Scotto make this on the Today Show and Erin Burnett nearly lost her mind when she tasted them. Dear God in heaven, this recipe is good! Don’t wait for your next hangover. Make them now.

I spent the weekend reading a new book that I had received for Christmas.

As well as a screening of my own copy of Julie & Julia! Having a full weekend after the holidays were all said and done was blissful. Really calendar makers, can we do this every year?

 The thing about overeating is that it’s like marathon training. Your capacity, your drive, and your desire grow bigger every day.  That’s why when I was out walking Rocco on a freezing cold Monday night and my phone rang, I immediately answered and told my friend Kristen that yes, I would love to come over, order burgers and re-watch the first season of the Sopranos!

By mid-week I was feeling gluttonous. The burger was over-the-top and I listened to Michael Pollan on the radio speaking about the value, both to the environment and our personal health, of eating less beef. Good. Done. I won’t eat beef for a long time and I will be a better human being. That was until my beloved called and invited me to join his family at BLT Prime for a special birthday dinner. I thought about Michael Pollan for a minute more, but hey…it’s a birthday! Of course, I had to go! I had to share the porterhouse for two, soft and tender like meat mousse, with sides of creamed spinach and potatoes au gratin. Oh, and did I mention the seafood platter appetizer? This was one of the best meals I have ever eaten.

But the over-indulging stops today. Really. As soon as I finish off the leftover buttermilk chicken I made in my new deep fryer.

 

On Wednesday, my favorite Russian emigre and I packed a lovely dinner courtesy of tbsp. (and our favorite Bandit single-serving boxed wine from Bottlerocket) and snuck it into the Chelsea cinemas for our overdue viewing of Julie & Julia.

Confession: I went to the movie not for Julia Child but for Julie Powell.

Yes, everyone agrees that Julia was a domestic goddess, that she fundamentally altered the way we cook and think about cooking, ad infinitum, but Julie had a pretty profound effect on a certain food-obsessed writer as well.

While toiling away as a young, unhappy, low-level women’s magazine editor in the wilds of northern New Jersey, I read through the original Julie/Julia Project blog in 2003-2004 as JP was writing it.

Although a few years behind Julie, I was already grappling with many of the issues — career ambivalence, the grind of New York, and the search for a purpose-driven life — that she was cooking through on the blog. It was gutsy, ambitious (and yes, foul-mouthed), and it struck a deep chord.

The book, with its print format-imposed narrative structure, diluted some of the blog’s raw spark, and that’s true for most of the movie as well — especially the the Julia Child moments filmed in the dreamlike environments of post-war France. Red-banquette bistros in Marseille and charming ancient fishmongers don’t lend themselves very well to bile, but there’s also a gloss to the modern New York scenes that manages to polish even a subway commute. You know you’re in a Nora Ephron movie when even Long Island City gets a glamorous sparkle.

But despite the sanitized Hollywood treatment of both journeys, the movie powerfully clarified one fundamental truth. We all want Julia Child’s life, but even though most of us end up with a version that falls closer to Julie Powell’s, we can still revel in the transformative impact of food.

For those of us who can answer Paul Child’s question to his wife, “What is it you really like to do?” with the same answer as Julia: “Eat!”, the sense of purpose and fulfillment that comes through cooking and sharing food with an appreciative audience can truly change a life.

As Jeffrey Steingarten noted in his August Vogue column, “This is precisely where the true stories of Julia and Julie intersect most closely. For both women, different as they are, cooking — even an obsession with cooking — lifted them out of a sense of uselessness, of dilettantism.”

Yes, the movie is a fantasy that smudges away a lot of difficult moments, but it’s also a validation of our most basic happinesses. When I stand at my kitchen counter slowly stirring a risotto, painstakingly icing mini veggie cakes, or working my way through the millionth step of a Thomas Keller recipe, the whole world falls away. There is nothing more important in that particular moment than the task in front of me and nothing more pleasurable. And absolutely nothing wrong with that.