Julie and Julia

The last time I went to the movies I saw the preview of the movie, and I couldn't resist looking for the book - once I found out it was based on one, that is.

Here's the blurb for Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell:

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 rundown 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 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. With Julia's stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver. And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life's ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.

For a memoir, I enjoyed it. It was funny and insightful, and full of yummy french recipes - it's not a cook book, but she does go into detail, and most of the time it left me hungry . Ok, it didn't make me want to go out and try them, but it was interesting to see how the author managed to create them. At times I thought she had beaten more than she could chew, but I found her tenacity, her need to complete her goal inspiring.

After reading the book, I definitely want to watch the movie. I'm wondering how it will turn out. Here's the trailer, you can also find it here.



Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell (4/5) Memoir; Published: Little, Brown and Company (9/2005); 2009 100 + Reading Challenge (80);