Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

by JuliePowell (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.46

  Trapped in a boring job and living in a tiny apartment in New York, Julie Powell regularly finds herself weeping on the way home from work. Then one night, through her mascara-smudged eyes, Julie notices that the few items she's grabbed from the Korean grocery store are the very ingredients for Potage Parmentier, as described in Julia Childs' legendary cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking . And the project is born. Julie begins to cook - every one of the 524 recipes in the book, in the space of just one year. This is Julie's story, as gradually, from oeufs en cocotte to bifstek saute au beurre, from Bitch Rice to preparing live lobsters, she realises that this deranged project is changing her life. The richness of the thousands of sauces she slaves over is beginning to spread into her life, and she begins to find the joie de vivre that has been missing for too many years.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $4.25

  Pushing thirty, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is, in a word, stuck. In her desperate search for an escape, she comes up instead with The Project - a deranged assignment, to take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking and cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the smooth sailing of Potage Parmentier into the obscure culinary backwaters of calves' brains, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye.For every triumphant Bifteck Saute au Beurre there is a disastrously soupy Creme Plombieres. Still, with Julia's stern warble steady in her ear, Julie carries on. She haunts the city's butchers buying kidneys and sweetbreads, whilst her husband endures the crying fits and midnight dinners. Together they discover the importance of blanching bacon, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the (kinky) thrills of eating liver. And somewhere along the line she realizes something has changed. With spectacular humour and a dash of hysteria, she begins to master the fine art Julia has really always been about - the art of living with gusto.