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Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen

by Julie Powell

Little, Brown, 309 pp., $23.95

Austin native Julie Powell might just be the first culinary star to emerge from the blogosphere. Powell was a young married woman living in New York City, unsatisfied in her job and frustrated with her lack of career direction, when she came up with the idea that ultimately revealed an entirely new path. She "borrowed" a 40-year-old copy of Julia Child's seminal work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. I, and set out to prepare all of the recipes within one year. With her husband's urging, Julie chronicled the entire experience in a blog. The Julie & Julia Project blog attracted a diverse and loyal readership, so much so that Powell's endeavor eventually began to generate national media attention. A book contract ensued, and this delight is the culmination of the whole process.

Powell puts on absolutely no airs; she makes no pretense of being either a chef or a food writer, and therein lies the freshness and charm of the book for me. Powell's kitchen is far from perfect, and her batterie de cuisine is incomplete. Failures produce the occasional screaming tantrum, she sometimes indulges in too many gimlets, and she always swears like a sailor. All of these things tend to make her a woman after my own heart. But Powell also comes across as a regular gal using an expertly written cookbook exactly the way Child and her co-authors intended – cooking French food every day, developing relationships with purveyors on her daily shopping excursions, and sharing the often wonderful results with her family and friends. The author's exercise and discipline of daily cooking (and frequently channeling Child) evoked a genuine intimacy with food that comes alive on the page. Powell discovered her voice and an enviable new writing career through this project. This book is the freshest, most irreverent piece of food writing to come out of New York since Kitchen Confidential. Share it with someone who likes to cook and appreciates a good laugh.