Julie and Julia.

I finished reading Julie and Julia this morning. I am at home due to a snow day which is no big surprise because Seattle shuts everything down if anything white hits the streets. I spent my morning reading underneath my new flannel sheets (Thanks, Mom) and thinking that I would just get so much more done, so much more cooking done, if I didn't have a pesky old job.

That's beside the point.

Julie and Julia is by Julie Powell, a frenetic writer and seemingly even more frenetic cook. She up and decided one day, during her very own quarter-life crisis, to make her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her idea was to cook everyday for a year to complete the book - 524 recipes in 365 days. That's a whole lot of butter. This makes for an interesting plot and should be able to carry the book. Here's the thing: the book is based on her blog and is more about her blog turning into a book deal than the actual process of cooking. Julie does share with us triumphs as well as disasters and what taking on a project of this magnitude can do to a marriage but I didn't get the sense that she actually enjoyed her own culinary endeavor. Perhaps I am missing the point but I was looking forward to reading a book about a woman like me making extraordinary food instead of some fairytale that goes something like this: start blog. cook a whole heck of a lot. have famous food critics over to dinner. get on television. land book deal. Julie, who I actually would love to have over for a cup of coffee or her much talked about vodka tonic, is a funny woman. But instead of feeling encouraged by her story, I felt a little bummed out at the end. There are only so many of us "ordinary" food-loving ladies that will live out that fairy-tale and I couldn't help but feel like Julie got really, amazingly lucky. You should google her blog, though. It has all of the food-centered writing I was missing in the book.

On the menu tonight: Corey will be making us deluxe hamburgers under the broiler. I have a feeling he's going to give it his all. I'll let you know how it turns out.