Doing A Julie-Julia

Julie Powell started The Julie/Julia Project in 2002 to tackle 536 recipes in 365 days. Basically trying out every single recipe in Julia Child-Louisette Bertholle-Simone Beck's Mastering The Art of French Cooking and chronicle them via a blog. I have volume 1 of that book and you know what? I take my hat off to Julie for having the patience to go through that now nearly 50 year old, recipe book! Don't get me wrong, the book is wonderfully-detailed and would be perfect for a new bride who wants to learn the ropes of cooking per sé. It's just too detailed for me, too much to watch out for that it can become quite stressful cooking... Though, after playing housewife in the last 12 years, I still do enjoy leafing through the book and picking up a few pointers here and there for my day-to-day cooking. See...that's the problem. I have a lot of such books - recipe books. I LOVE books and I LOVE good recipe books. And I think I LOVE collecting recipe books. To be fair, I do cook and bake from these books or else, how would I have managed to cook 9072 meals (minus the weekends ;-) in the last 12 years? The important thing is that the family is still happy eating stuffs that come out of my "crappy outer borough kitchen". Bottomline: recipe books are good investments IF you use them. Otherwise, they'll just be what your interior designer ordered to have your kitchen look like a kitchen.

Now, back to the Julie-Julia Project. After re-reading Julia Child's My Life in France a couple of days back, watching the movie Julie&Julia again and staring at my rows of recipe books, I thought what Julie Powell did was a great inspiration! I need to do something like that. I need to do something fun. I need to do a Julie-Julia.