Little Brown & Company
Copyright © 2005 by Julie Powell
ISBN: 0-3161-0969-X
I haven't read this book yet, but I so wanted to give it a "shout-out" because I always admire someone who can give themself a deranged goal and actually go on to complete it!
Here's a brief summary from the book jacket:
With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul. Julie Powell is 30 years old, living in a tiny apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's worn, dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes -- in the span of one year.
At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crepes, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye.
And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her outer-borough kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life's ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.
Ok, so my question to you is this: what insane project would you like to challenge yourself with this coming New Year and do you think you have what it takes to see it through?
I would love to collect every photograph we have collected in our 14 years of marriage and put them into scrapbooks! We must have atleast 5000 pictures lying all over the house, so sifting through them, dating them and then building scrapbook pages around them is bound to drive me over the edge, but I so want to do it!!!
Through her toils, Julie Powell found a crazy inner peace in this almost magical Juliaverse. "In the Juliaverse, the laws of thermodynamics had been turned on their heads," Powell admits. "Here, energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance. Here, I took my anger and despair and rage and transformed it with my alchemy into hope and ecstatic mania. Here, I took a crap laptop and some words that popped into my head at seven in the morning and I turned them into something people wanted, maybe even needed." - "The French Connection", Pages Magazine, Sept/Oct 2005At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crepes, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye.
And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her outer-borough kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life's ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.
Ok, so my question to you is this: what insane project would you like to challenge yourself with this coming New Year and do you think you have what it takes to see it through?
I would love to collect every photograph we have collected in our 14 years of marriage and put them into scrapbooks! We must have atleast 5000 pictures lying all over the house, so sifting through them, dating them and then building scrapbook pages around them is bound to drive me over the edge, but I so want to do it!!!
So you see, this insane project might just turn out to be the sanest thing you've ever done! :)
