Cooking, Writing, then Cooking Some More

Today, the last day of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I'm writing... writing... writing.... I finished an earlier draft for a post but, once I read it to Frances, she suggested I save it for a few days and reread it. Then I can decide whether I really want it to merge with traffic on the information superhighway.

I admit. The writing was a bit sarcastic. "Not your typical style," Frances warned, even as she also admitted that it did reflect my Winter family sensibilities, especially those of good old Dad.

I'll give you a clue to the topic: "What $$$ were $$$ those $$$ people $$$ thinking?" That line refers to Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the couple who crashed President Obama's first state dinner at the White House last week. Okay, so maybe it wasn't as witty and charming as I thought.

I think that my writing may be under the influence of the book I'm currently reading: Julie & Julia 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living. Its author, Julie Powell, has a keen mind and an uncanny ability to throw an idea up into the air, catch it in the other hand, then add additional ideas and stories--one by one--until she's juggling a multitude of topics with words and images that are frequently fresh and startling.

Julie doesn't confine her book to the original plan, a.k.a. cook all of the recipes out of Julia Child's masterpiece: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (also known as MtAoFC) in one year's time. No. She adds her own flavorings and spices: tales from her married and family life, sexual exploits of her female friends, illnesses and injuries endured by her husband and herself, trials and tribulations involved in buying obscure ingredients for unfamiliar recipes, and the mundane and mind-numbing effects of working as a secretary for a government organization dealing with the aftermath of 9/11.

Powell describes in delightful and gross detail the method she employed to extract marrow from a cow bone (see pages 73-75). It's purpose? To garnish her rendition of Bifteck Saute Bercy. This segment ends with a promise from her husband:

Someday our ship is going to come in. We are going to move out of New York, and we are going to have our house in the country, like we've always wanted.... When this happens, we need to get ourselves a rescue cow. We will buy it from a slaughterhouse. And then we will treat it very well.

Powell admits in her Author's Note that she's altered identifying details throughout the book and made a lot of stuff up, especially scenes from Paul and Julia Childs' life. Yes, this is far more than a book about Powell cooking her way through a leap of faith.... It is the travelogue of a 20-something woman who writes about her life in a style that makes you hungry for more.