The Julie/Julia Project

Thanks to Salon, I now know about the Julie/Julia Project: a blog on which a woman attempts to cook all of the 536 recipies from Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", in a year, describing her results as she goes. She's hillarious:

On her attempt at Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons

So the fish. The Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons, I should say. I screwed this one up, I'll go ahead and admit it. Which is not to say it wasn't good. The fucker has a cup of butter, half a cup of cheese and very nearly a stick of butter in it, so how bad could it be? But the fact of the matter is, I over-poached my poisson. She said explicitly to poach the fish -- flounder, it is -- in its vermouth and clam juice -- I love recipes that use clam juice, it's so retro or something -- for '8 to 12 minutes depending on the thickness of the filets.... Do not,' says Julia, 'overcook; the fish should not be dry and flaky.' Well, I cook that fish for 8 minutes, and how you do think it turned out? Yup. This flounder would give my college acting teacher a run for his money.

And, the next day:

An aside on food insanity. I just read the article in this week's New York Times Magazine on Raw Foodism, and so this is no amazing observation, but Jesus Christ!! Two things strike me about this unfathomably ignorant trend. The first is, how male it is somehow, how Fast and Furious. "You're a vegan. Big fucking deal -- I don't heat my food. Take that!" And wow, the power of self-righteousness. The guy says he's never felt so good -- well, yeah, because nothing feels better than being better than everybody else. And the third thing is -- yeah, I decided I had three points -- My God, how sad. There is precious little comfort in this world. Why take food, one of the very few simple comforts, and turn it into an obstacle? Why rob yourself of one of the few honest pleasures you'll ever know?

If you read more, you'll see that she doesn't drop the F-bomb in every paragraph , but she's still pretty funny - especially when things get difficult, like when she and her husband attempt to get marrow out of a veal bone:

Then I go after it with a knife, and manage to worm my way into the interior. The pink stuff begins to drip out. This is somehow not how I imagined beef marrow. It's like guts, kind of. I stick my smallest paring knife into the center of the bone past this hilt, and scrape the stuff out. "Once we get our place in New Mexico," murmurs my husband as he looks on, mesmerized, "We're going to have to get ourselves a rescue cow. And treat it really nice."

Fun, for foodies.