Julie and Julia

For the last couple days I've been laughing my butt off reading Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. In a nutshell, a woman, Julie, who is nearing 30, stuck in a dead-end job, and feeling generally hopeless with how life has turned out, decides to make every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She will make all these recipes within one year's time and she will blog about it.

And hilarity ensues.

It briefly crossed my mind to repeat this experiment until I read some of the ingredients this project includes. I am a picky eater (even before I had a dietary disorder to hide behind). I have been very brave over the last few years trying some new things but I have to draw a few lines:

I don't ever want to eat a cooked lobster, let alone vivisect a live one. (Great word though, vivisect.)

I'm thinking any sort of aspic made from calves' hooves gelee would taste like feet. Or worse.

I never eat eggs. (Julie also hated eggs and didn't start eating them until the project. I'll take her word that they are good without actually eating them myself, thank you very much.)

So, I certainly would not eat poached eggs in aspic.

Brains.

I hate having to write conclusions to reviews and essays and the like. They always seem so trite. "Julie faces trials and tribulations but learns something about herself in the end." Actually, I haven't finished it yet so I don't know exactly what happens in the end.

This book is freakin' hilarious. That's all you need to know. I don't think you have to be a cook or lover of cooking to enjoy it. Julie works and blogs and cooks and does every day stuff just like the rest of us, so it's really a book for anyone.