Julia.child Recipes
Athenasby Regalado
While the recipe was straightforward, I made a fatal rookie mistake: cutting into my loaf of French bread before the soup was done. Since I lack all self-control when it comes to bread and butter, I spent my time waiting for the soup to cook by cutting a slice of bread to snack on, and then another, and then another and another, until close to half the loaf was gone. Oops.
Ah, the Holy Grail of French cooking. The puffy, egg-based dish is notorious for being hard to make. One wrong step and the cloud of cheesy glory will deflate like a sad balloon. While I was intimidated, and a little scared of this dish, I knew I had to try it.
How It Went: This recipe reaffirmed my deep love of cheesy bchamel sauce. So easy to whip up, so creamy and cozy. Simply warm butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Once this is foaming, add flour and whisk, whisk, whisk! Then pour in milk to thicken the sauce. Season and add a healthy handful of Gruyere cheese. (I seriously want to cover everything I eat in this sauce.)
Since the only other steps in this recipe were quickly blanching the cauliflower, mixing it with the sauce, adding bread crumbs and cooking, this au gratin was one of the quickest Child recipes to get into the oven. Well played, Julia.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Not the food, you understand, just the book itself. It resided in my mother's rack of cookbooks, an eccentric aunt to the spiral-bound Junior League collections that surrounded it, its cover spangled with an old-world pattern of rose-colored fleurs-de-lys, its pages dotted with French words and occasional line drawings depicting culinary acts beyond comprehension.
Okay, here's a confession: I had never eaten an egg before I embarked on The Julie/Julia Project. Well, only ones that were baked in a cake, or at the very least scrambled with cheese and peppers and tortilla chips and anything else I could think of that would keep them from tasting like, smelling like, or in any way resembling eggs.
I'd never been much of a quiche person. I grew up in Texas, after all, where the saying "real men don't eat quiche" is not gender-specific. But MtAoFC contains nine recipes for quiche, so quiches I made: Quiche Lorraine and Quiche aux Oignons, quiches with tomatoes and olives and anchovies and leeks. By the end of the quiches I could whip the stuff up in seconds, and my crusts turned out buttery and golden and flaky and perfect.
But Oeufs en Gele was the worst. I made the jelly by boiling cow's hooves and pigskin, which made my house smell like a tannery. I poured the jelly over some poached eggs in little molds and let them set. When I unmolded them, they were brownish, quivering cylinders, the little x of tarragon leaves I'd used to decorate them somehow macabre, like a mark on the door of a plague-ridden house.
I think a strong argument can be made that any meat-eating person ought to take the responsibility once in life for slaughtering an animal for food. But I speak from experience when I say that it's probably not necessary to chop the animal into small pieces while it's still alive.
In the recipe for Homard l'Amricaine, Julia instructed me to "split the lobsters in two lengthwise." Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Many people insist that plunging a knife through a lobster's head is absolutely the quickest and most humane way to kill it. I have to say, though, that the lobster I murdered in this way did not seem to think so. It did not think being sawed in half vertically was much fun, either. Even after I'd chopped the thing into six pieces, the claws managed to make a few final complaints about the discomforts of being sauted in hot olive oil.
It is a mysterious fact that I had never once in my entire life watched a Julia Child cooking show before the inception of the project. To me, Julia Child was always the book, plus Dan Aykroyd blithely gushing blood on Saturday Night Live.
So watching my first episode a few months ago was illuminating. I had just had a kitchen meltdown, complete with hurled cutlery and the beating of skulls on door frames. (These incidents occur, it must be said, not infrequently.)
She was always encouraging, gently reassuring, laugh out loud funny, and extremely passionate about her subject, and like all great teachers, she taught her students the why as well as the how of a culinary technique, empowering them to become better cooks.
During the months leading up to the JC100 event, I had started to suspect that I was more enamored with French culinary techniques than with French food. Cooking my way through the JC100 collection of Julia Child recipes helped confirm that suspicion.
When I was in Paris, I fell madly in love with a very charming Charlotte mold (similar to this one). I first spotted it, with its shiny heart-shaped handles, while shopping for souvenirs at E. Dehillerin. Unfortunately, there was no way it would fit in my suitcase.
As is the case with most famous dishes, there are more ways than one to arrive at a good boeuf bourguignon. Carefully done, and perfectly flavored, it is certainly one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man, and can well be the main course for a dinner party. Fortunately, you can prepare it completely ahead, even a day in advance, and it only gains in flavor when reheated.
It's simply this: I love to cook! :)
I've been hanging out on the internet since the early days and have collected loads of recipes. I've tried to keep the best of them (and often the more unusual) and look forward to sharing them with you, here.
I am proud to say that I have several family members who are also on RecipeZaar!
My husband, here as Steingrim, is an excellent cook. He rarely uses recipes, though, so often after he's made dinner I sit down at the computer and talk him through how he made the dishes so that I can get it down on paper. Some of these recipes are in his account, some of them in mine - he rarely uses his account, though, so we'll probably usually post them to mine in the future.
My sister Cathy is here as cxstitcher and my mom is Juliesmom - say hi to them, eh?
Our friend Darrell is here as Uncle Dobo, too! I've been typing in his recipes for him and entering them on R'Zaar. We're hoping that his sisters will soon show up with their own accounts, as well. :)
I collect cookbooks (to slow myself down I've limited myself to purchasing them at thrift stores, although I occasionally buy an especially good one at full price), and - yes, I admit it - I love FoodTV. My favorite chefs on the Food Network are Alton Brown, Rachel Ray, Mario Batali, and Giada De Laurentiis. I'm not fond over fakey, over-enthusiastic performance chefs... Emeril drives me up the wall. I appreciate honesty. Of non-celebrity chefs, I've gotta say that that the greatest influences on my cooking have been my mother, Julia Child, and my cooking instructor Chef Gabriel Claycamp at Seattle's Culinary Communion.
In the last couple of years I've been typing up all the recipes my grandparents and my mother collected over the years, and am posting them here. Some of them are quite nostalgic and are higher in fat and processed ingredients than recipes I normally collect, but it's really neat to see the different kinds of foods they were interested in... to see them either typewritten oh-so-carefully by my grandfather, in my grandmother's spidery handwriting, or - in some cases - written by my mother years ago in fountain pen ink. It's like time travel.
Cooking peeve: food/cooking snobbery.
Regarding my black and white icon (which may or may not be the one I'm currently using): it the sea-dragon tattoo that is on the inside of my right ankle. It's also my personal logo.
More than a century ago, Julia Child arrived on the scene. She was raised to marry and take her place in Pasadena, Calif., society, except she didn't. Instead, during World War II she joined a secret intelligence group, the Office of Strategic Services. That led to marrying Paul Child. He took her to Paris, where she fell in love with cooking.
Eventually we fell in love with her. She put TV food shows on the map. She never dumbed anything down. She did serious cooking but she made it a romp. At the same time, when many pros only did high-profile appearances, Julia was incredibly generous with her time.
When we began this show in 1995, I'd worked with Julia on and off for quite awhile, but her schedule was jammed. When we invited her on this new show with a modest audience, I didn't expect her to come. But she did -- big time.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper: I'm going to take you back now to the mid-70s, the first time I met you. I want to share this because for me, it was really a revelation about what worked for you.
I was running a food program for a department store in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Julia was introducing volume two of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We were going to be the first place that Julia was going to cook in public. We had enough seating -- I'll never forget this -- for about 200 people. Seven or eight hundred people camped out before dawn outside the store to come and see this woman cook.
But you were working in a kitchen that consisted of a pail of water, a counter and I think a hot plate. What struck me was what a teacher you were. You obviously knew your stuff; there was not any question. But you had such zest. You knew how to communicate. You were having such a good time nobody could resist you. When did you discover what a teacher you were?
Julia Child: I'd done quite a lot of teaching and I'm interested in it. I'm very anxious for people to know how to do things and exactly how to do them. I was always very hungry. I think that's necessary, don't you?
JC: Then I got very serious about food when I met my future husband, Paul. It was his encouragement that I think really started me out. We lived in Washington, D.C., for the first year or two. Then because he'd been brought up as a young man in France and spoke beautiful French, he was assigned to Paris by the U.S. Information Agency.
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