Book 9 - Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously - Julie Powell

I am ridiculously slow on writing reviews because I finished this book weeks ago. Other than this cannonball read, I haven't written book reviews or term papers for at least 6 or 8 years. I still have my 10th grade English teacher snarking in my brain whenever I try to write anything, telling me that it's not good enough. Now, I am the same age that Julie Powell is in this book. I will hit the big 3-0 in August, and I'm probably having my own mini mid-life crisis. I'm trying to figure out when I started giving a shit about what people think of me. I never had that problem before. I guess that's why I joined roller derby, because everybody said I couldn't, shouldn't, or wouldn't do it!

Julie Powell is a low-level secretary who works in NYC. She answers the phone and takes citizen's comments on how the city should handle the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. The comments range from heartbreakingly sad to disturbingly stupid. She is constantly stressed out, and the only outlet for her stress is cooking. One particularly bad day, she blindly picks up ingredients from the market, and unconsciously has grabbed everything to make Julia Child's recipe for potato soup. That's when she comes up with the idea to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and write a blog about it. However, the blog slowly begins to take over her life. I enjoyed reading about how old-fashioned some of the recipes were, and how hard it was to track down some of the ingredients. It reminded me of when I wanted to make a raspberry tiramisu that Giada DeLaurentis made on The Food Network. I went to 5 different stores to track down all of the ingredients, and that damn tiramisu ended up costing about $35. But I had to make it, to prove that I could.

I really enjoyed this book. It was a quick read, and I thought it was cute. Not awe-inspiring literature, but enjoyable. I saw the movie first, then read the book. I enjoyed the movie more, but probably because I was more interested in the Julia Child parts than the Julie Powell parts. The Julie Powell in the book is more fun than the one in the movie. The one in the book is stubborn, swears a lot and has a deep-abiding love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I can relate.