Julie and Julia and Me

It's 10 pm and I am making a big pan of baked macaroni and cheese and broccoli. My usual choice post-work (which is now) is some form of sandwich, but sometimes you just feel like cooking, and the fact that I just finished reading Julie and Julia probably influenced me in some way. And it's rainy out, which automatically means I want pasta (even if it will only be ready, oh, one hour from now.) The roux looked too soupy (as my roux's often do, probably because I dumped the milk in all at once) but now that it is mixed together it looks pretty good. I drew the line at making my own bread crumbs, so I'm deluding myself that the Italian ones from the can taste the same.

It wasn't a terrible day of work, but I forgot my fork and had to eat my lunchtime salad with chopsticks that I borrowed from a co-worker, and saw a kid bite his mother, and witnessed a marital fight on the way over, and got out late and missed my bus. Worst of all, I had to do a shipping order for a woman who was buying girlie magazines to send to her son in jail, and had to spend some time explaining her why he might not get them right away, because the guards have to search incoming packages. "He really wants them," she said, and the thought of this woman buying "Hooters" for her incarcerated child was just really sad.

Macaroni and cheese makes you feel good, though, as did Julie and Julia. It's a fun, fast read. Julie Powell is sassy and (sometimes) likeable (sometimes she is heavy on the whining, but she usually redeems herself), and you really root for her (the premise of her blog and then book was that she would cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year; and she did.) AND she lived in Brooklyn! (Bay Ridge, I think, so well south of here, and she defects to Queens early on...but I still feel some solidarity.) Some of the recipes are just craziness, like Pâté de Canard en Croûte, which is duck stuffed with pork and veal and truffles and baked in a pastry crust. I also realized how many meats I've never actually tried: brains, liver, kidneys, marrow, veal, lamb--and I think I've only had duck once (that Julia is not big on vegetables, unless they are in some manner of sauce). I'd like to see the movie, too, since I think there is more Julia in that.

Julie mentions in her afterward (which is a few years later, and Julia had just died) that what really comes through in Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a woman who has found her place and purpose in life. Julia is joyful, and that's what is so groovy about her. You can see that when you watch old clips of her tv shows (and I watched a lot of Julia Child as a kid): the woman likes what she does. And she is not perfect and she occassionaly busts an omelet, but she doesn't let that stop her. GO JULIA!

If I ever get up the courage to make anything with pastry, I'll let you all know.