Picture Perfect Cooking

When C & I recently spent the weekend in Lexington, we shopped at the Joseph-Beth Bookstore which is one of my favorite places to browse.  If you are a book-lover like me and you happen to find yourself in Lexington, please take the time to visit this wonderful place!  I could spend hours just browsing their shelves…fiction, cooking, gardening, decorating, Kentucky books…you name it and I think they will have it!

The real reason for this post is the paperback book I purchased that night, Julie & Julia by Julie Powell.  Many of you may had probably already read this, but I had not had the opportunity.  I grabbed it up and started reading it that night.  Maybe it is because the writer and I are close in age or maybe because our love of cooking is a respite from the daily grind, but I loved this book! For those of you that don’t know about this book, the author attempts and succeeds in cooking all of the recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in exactly one year and blogs about it.  Ms. Powell’s writing is sharp, poignant, funny, and sometimes a little profane, but she definitely gets her point across in a most entertaining way.  Her experiences with these difficult, detailed French recipes that included killing a lobster and boning a duck were hilarious!  She wrote that her bedroom white noise machine was really singing “lobster killer, lobster killer, lobster killer” all night long, but she gathered her strength and did what she had to do for the greater good.  Ok, maybe not the greater good, but definitely for her blog readers.

Tonight, I watched the movie that was made based on her book.  It was good…very good in fact.  It stars Meryl Streep as Julia Child (which was perfect casting) and Amy Adams as the author.  I really should know by now that I need to watch the movie first because there are always so many details that are left out.  If you are a “foodie”, you should definitely watch the movie and read the book, but be warned that they are not the same.  The movie focuses much more on Julia Child’s life than the book does.  I really enjoyed both, but the book was my favorite!