Julie and Julia and Carol

"Life itself is the proper binge."

Great quote? Who said it?

The blog title is a clue. It is a tale of inspiration, information, and execution. Flashback to November 2009. I was flying to Perth, Western Australia to visit one of my best friends. What I tell people about going to Perth is that it is far…very far. To get to Perth from Cedar Rapids, it is a total of 25.5 hours in the air. With layovers and crossing the international dateline, it takes two full days to get there. LAX – Melbourne is 15.5 hours trapped in a flying tube. Needless to say, I got caught up on a lot of movies on that trip.

Enter Julie and Julia – the inspiration. This was the 2009 movie with Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie Powell, a woman who blogged about cooking her way through Julia Child’s book "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Watching that movie on my long long boring flight made me (A) hungry and (B) inspired to attempt to master French cooking myself. Before watching this movie, my limited knowledge of Julia Child was that she had some cooking show on PBS when I was a kid and that Dan Ackroyd did a spot-on spoof of her once on Saturday Night Live. It’s no secret that I love food and I enjoy cooking for my family and friends. I thought to myself that French cuisine would be a new challenge for me, and I could impress my friends with my culinary delights. I mentioned this lofty idea to my friend Liz shortly after my return from Australia, and a few weeks later on my birthday, she gave me a copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

I got to the third page of the forward before my blind enthusiasm started to turn to fear. I’ve always been comfortable working in the kitchen and experimenting with new recipes. Part of the forward reads, "Our years of teaching cookery have impressed upon us the fact that all too often a debutant cook will start in enthusiastically on a new dish without ever reading the recipe first." Guilty!! It continues, "We therefore urge you, however much you have cooked, always to read the recipe first even if the dish is familiar to you." I read on. I have been breaking many of Julia’s rules. I needed more information.   

• "Precision in small details can make the difference between passable cooking and fine food." I’m in trouble here…I never measure anything, I just eyeball it.
• "Allow yourself plenty of time." Hmmm, I like to work fast when I cook, it allows more time for the cocktails with my friends...this will be a challenge.
• "Be sure your oven is hot before the dish goes in." Really? I never wait for the preheat bell to go off.
• "A pot saver is a self-hampering cook." Evidently, Julia promotes the use of every bowl and pan in the kitchen.

Oh, I have so much to learn. I read and re-read the cookbook for over a year before I finally worked up the courage to attempt some of the recipes.

Normally, I would invite a group of friends over for dinner whenever I was in the mood to cook, but Julia had me scared of my ability to execute a dinner of French food. For my first foray, it was going to be a party of 1. My selections: poulet au porto, risotto, and peas. The risotto and the peas were fairly straight forward, the poulet au porto on the other hand proved a bit more challenging.

First of all, I had to purchase a whole chicken. Typically I’m a boneless, skinless chicken breast kind of gal and occasionally will buy some wings for the grill. The recipe called for a 3 pound fryer. Well, a lot of chickens must be on steroids these days because all the chickens I saw at the grocery store were more like 5 pounds. OK…I can adapt, right?

The first step in the recipe is to smear the inside of the chicken with 2 tablespoons of softened butter. That is messy. Next, it says to "truss the chicken." OK, now here’s where not reading the recipe in its entirety has already gotten me in trouble. I needed a mattress needle and string for this procedure. I had neither, so I had to improvise with a needle and thread. The goal is to basically tie up the legs, wings, and neck skin so it all stays in a neat little package when you cook it. It was a very awkward procedure. I felt like I was manhandling a baby. That slippery little chicken did not want to cooperate. Per Julia, a 5 pound chicken should take a little under 2 hours to fully roast. I was thinking I’d have a little time to relax before I started working on the risotto. Not so much…I had to baste the chicken with more butter every 10-15 minutes and flip it around in the roasting pan three or four times. I see now why Julia recommended learning how to handle hot food.

In between my basting duties, I was chopping shallots and slicing mushrooms to begin preparations for the cream sauce. By now, I’ve got every burner on the stove and nearly every pan I own in use. The risotto and peas were coming along without any real issues. As the chicken was finishing its roasting time, things got a little hectic. I had to deglaze the roasting pan with the port wine. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be cutting up the chicken into serving pieces and placing them in a large skillet. I’ve never actually cut up a whole chicken and attempting to do so to a chicken that just spent 2 hours in a 350 degree oven was even more of a challenge. I finally managed to hack off the drumsticks and wings and cut hunks of the breast meat off the bone. I’m sure this was totally incorrect, but Julia did not include any instructions on the proper method for carving a chicken.

But, then, came the exciting part. With the cut up chicken in a "well buttered" skillet on the stove, I got to add ¼ cup of cognac and light it on fire. Whoosh! Now, where was my fire extinguisher? After the flames burned out, I added in my mushroom cream sauce and let it simmer. It was time to pull it all together and rate my execution. The chicken was very moist and buttery, the port cream sauce seemed a little on the salty side…my fault for eyeballing instead of measuring. The risotto was a little dry, but I might have bought a different type of rice than what was called for in the recipe. The peas….well, there was more butter there, too. Total execution time, not counting my planning period, was 3 hours. That seemed like it took a really long time. Of course, I was painstakingly slow. Thank God I hadn’t invited anyone over to eat it.

What I learned during this initial foray in to French cooking:  

• Julia was right – Precision in small details. I’ll measure everything next time so I don’t inadvertently get salty food.
• Allow plenty of time – Check! I have figured out where I could do some of the chopping and prep work in advance.
• Plan to use every bowl and pan in the kitchen. Man, you’d have sworn I had cooked a meal for 12 by the amount of dishes I had to wash.
• The French love their butter. Wow…I guess I’ve tried to eat low-fat for so long that I was overly sensitive to the buttery flavor in everything. But, again, I probably wasn’t always precise on the amount of butter I was using.

"Life itself is the proper binge."

That’s what it’s all about…enjoying the journey of life. So I’m no Julia Child…and will never be. I may not master every recipe in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," in fact I may not even attempt every recipe in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," but the joie de vie is trying new things and sharing them with friends and family. It was a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon…in solitude…with my dog watching me and waiting for me to drop scraps of food to her. A day to recharge doing something I enjoy.

Bon Appetit!