Julie and Julia
by Julie Powell
Pushing thirty, living in a tiny, rundown apartment in Queens, New York, and working in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell regularly finds herself weeping on the way home from work. Then one night, through her mascara-smudged eyes, Julie notices that the few items she’s grabbed from the Korean grocery ‘store are the very ingredients for Potage Parmentier, as described in Julia hilds’ legendary cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And The Project is born. She decides to take her mother’s dog-eared copy of Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking and cook all 524 recipes, in the space of just one year. This is Julie’s story, as gradually, from oeufs en cocotte, bifstek sauté au beurre, to preparing live lobsters, she realises that this deranged Project is changing her life. The richness of the thousands of sauces she slaves over is beginning to spread into her life, and she begins to find the joie de vivre that has been missing for too many years.
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