Bon Appetit

In addition to seeing 500 Days of Summer last weekend, the ear doctor and I caught a showing of Julie and Julia. What can I say...after hours of walking through ugly houses on our house hunting endeavor all we wanted to do was sit in a cool air conditioned room and be entertained.

Here is what I thought of the movie....AWESOME.

There's moment when Julie drops a stuffed chicken on the floor. The stuffing explodes out and she just melts into a ball of hysteria. She just can't take the utter despair associated with the culinary calamity. The same exact thing may or may not have happened to me a few weeks ago when, in mid-flip from cooling rack to presentation plate, my flourless chocolate cake ripped into 5 ugly pieces.

Turns out food induced disappointment has no bottom limit.


At the end of watching the movie I felt so excited, empowered and inspired. I felt that I wanted to really accomplish something in my life...not just fill my time.

And I couldn't think of a grandiose direction to follow or amazing goal to set. So I decided to make Julia Child's ratatouille.

I'd never tried it and Disney has tried it's best to convince me that it is wonderful. But guess what. Do you have any idea how many green peppers are in ratatouille? A ga-zillion. And did you know my most hated and absolutely despised food on planet earth? Yup...those nasty green suckers.

As I chopped...and chopped...and chopped I kept looking at the ominous green pile building higher and higher. Surely there was no way this would taste good, right? No way. And I do not have Julie Powell's blind faith in Julia Child's cooking.

After hours of tedious work I stared down at my plate of colorful tender vegetables. I was dubious at best. But guess what....it was amazing. Somehow the flavors of all those ripe summer vegetables melded into a flavor I slurped up with the glee of a kid eating her birthday cake.


And now I know what my direction will be. Take life as the sum of it's parts. Sure sometimes it may seem like a whole pile of green peppers are headed my way but if I chop them up, let them saute until soft, cover them in onions, tomatoes, eggplant and zucchini, and then let them steep in their own juices it'll all come together in the end.

Either that, or I'll get to the end and it'll totally disappoint me by fracturing into a few ugly unusable pieces.


Hmmmm...maybe I should be careful about using cooking metaphors for life...?