Julie and Julia

Looking back on it, I actually saw a good number of movies over the break...although none of them new releases! The closest to that would be "Julie and Julia" which Mom, Gran, and I watched on Christmas night. Such a treat!
I'm not about to give up my day job (or all of my other hobbies) to cook my way through Julia Child's cookbook and blog about it - although that might be fun! But it did inspire me to shake things up. Cook some new things. And perhaps tackle my own little cooking project for 2010 - cooking one new recipe a week. (Don't worry, friends, I will probably not use you as guinea pigs unless I'm repeating a recipe because it was so good!) I think that my first adventure will be Boeuf Bourguignon because it just looks SO good and it is chock full of protein...and if I can get lean beef then it won't be totally bad for me. (I love that I'm writing about this after just having met with Meredith to talk nutrition...)
I should note that I'm also writing this after having caused my first kitchen fire. In Gran's oven. The culprit: corn souffle that was in a dish that wasn't quite large enough. Oops. Good thing I learned that day - I can remain calm even with a "fire in the hole". That's what they used to shout in a coal mine when a charge had been set. I could have yelled it in Gran's house a few days ago. But I didn't. I calmly turned the oven off and watched the flames die down. No need for the fire extinguisher, although I was hoping it was terribly intuitive or had great instructions. Needless to say, glad that the "event" didn't get any bigger than some smoke in the kitchen. Phew. Good thing I'm not really trying to cook my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking as I'm not quite ready to become a firefighter.