Thanks to Camp Soaring Eagle, where they give seriously ill children a chance to get out into nature and laugh and play, we had a chance to meet Julie Powell of the blog The Julie/Julia Project which turned into the book Julie and Julia that then was made into the movie Julie & Julia with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams playing Julie Powell. For those of you who don’t know Julie made and executed a plan to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and the plan turned into a lot more.
A Honeycrisp Apple (courtesy of honeycrisp.org)
What did we learn? Julie shops weekly at the Union Square Green Market in NYC, she loves Honey Crisp Apples, her husband does most of the cooking while Julie laughs at his mishaps, she is very informed and involved in the local and sustainable food movements and she has a new book called Cleaving and is working on a post-apocolyptic comedy of manners. It also seems that the nuns from her last stop in Laredo, Texas like to have a little more fun than nuns, even Texan nuns, are known for.
Julie Powell Shares Pearls of Culinary & Social Wisdom
Working at an Online Culinary school, we are interested in cooking and how beginners take the first steps, and handle the hurdles of more advanced techniques. The video above was an attempt to learn if Julie had any cooking “epiphanies” during the Julie/Julia Project. The unstated answer, from Julie’s reply is that she became comfortable in the kitchen, and though she modestly claims to still be a home cook, we suspect she has advanced.
The other thing we wanted to know, was how the movie distorted the picture of her life at the time. In the order relayed to us, her biggest pet peeves about how the movie portrayed her are:
1. Julie does not ogle the aisle at Dean & Delucca. She is a Queens and Brooklyn girl.
2. The distilling down of her ambitions down to the dramatizable ”writing a novel.”
3. The use of only a single “F” word & we don’t mean Filet, Fry or even Fricassee. To put it delicately, Julie did not find that “representative.”
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