Outside A Dog

I finished Julie and Julia last night. It’s fun and kind of fluffy, and isn’t so much about the food and the cooking as it is about how Julie Powell’s attempt to cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 by Julia Child changed her life. I found myself relating quite well to Julie’s sometimes-disastrous adventures in the kitchen, as I’m less of a cook and more of a baker. (You know, people say to me, ‘if you can bake, you can cook’. Which I’ve found to be only partly true. Cooking is like art, and baking is like chemistry, and in college, I was a chem major. But anyway.) Julie took on a monumental task and with a little blood, some sweat (kitchens get hot!) and a lot of tears (and swearing), she managed to accomplish what she set out out to do. Julia Child may not have been impressed, but I was. I also now have the urge to go out and get my hands on my own copies of Mastering… which makes me wonder if my self-imposed ban on book-buying should apply to cookbooks.

One thing really irked me about this book, though: Julie takes political jabs at those who don’t sit on her side of the fence throughout the entire story. The first couple of remarks were tolerable, but by the end of the book I’d had enough. They felt out of place and didn’t add anything at all to the story.