Book Review: Julie and Julia

In Julie and Julia, Julie cooks her way through every recipe in Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. Julie is from Austin but living in The City with her husband, in a dead end temp job that turned into a permanent job. The book is laugh-out-loud funny, and some of my favorite parts is where Julie yells and cusses at Julia about her commentary on "easy" recipes in MtAoFC.

I love Julie's relationship with her husband and how he encourages her in her crazy, random goal and even helps her cook through the recipes. He knows when she is on a rampage and he needs to duck out of the way and he knows when she needs to be calmed or helped. (Sad that they are now divorced, but that happened post-book. :() OMG Their kitchen sounds so gross, especially since they are constantly feeding friends and even TV crews out of it... the part where Julie found the maggots under the dish rack made me almost nauseous and reminded me of other vivid scenes of maggots (The Dante Club definitely takes the cake - I literally felt sick to my stomach and had to put the book down; the CSI: Miami episode where maggots from a dead body in a condo come through the light fixture to the condo below takes second place).

Throughout Julie's cooking project, she blogs about her trials and tribulations and gains a wide-spread reader base (hence the book deal later). She has regular readers who become a part of her life and are very worried about her if she takes short breaks from her blogging. Her mother reads her blog and at first is very concerned and tries to convince her to stop the Julie/Julia Project. By the end of The Project however, her mother comes around. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Julie goes home to Austin and cooks for family and friends and notes that even her Texan mother was appalled at the amount of butter she was cooking with. LOL Totally like my Texan family... seriously, the only thing you can ever count on finding in their fridge is butter, multiple tubs of butter.

By the end of the Julie/Julia Project, Julie is still in her dead end job, but has found a sense of passion and purpose in her life. (And gets a book deal!) This book made me want to try some more adventurous recipes in the kitchen instead of my usual easy faves... and it probably helped that I was reading this when we tackled the Pupcake Project in Florida!