by Julie Powell
At about this time I was heavily into legs of lamb. Now, legs of lamb are not cheap, unless you’re in New Zealand, which we most emphatically were not. Eric’s and my bank account was feeling the strain. Which is when Isabel got the idea for the donation button.
A donation button is a link on a blog or a Web site that will take you directly to Paypal or one of the other online money transfer sites, where you can easily and safely donate any amount of money you wish to the person on whose Web site the donation button lives. Isabel’s notion was that should I make this option available, hundreds of dollars would immediately be mine for the taking, and my financial troubles would be put at an end. I thought Isabel was crackers.
But as it turns out, many more people wanted to give me money than wanted to give me Religious Experience hot sauce. Within hours after I managed to get the button up and running, cash started trickling in. Five dollars here, ten there, a buck fifty, twenty bucks. Again, I found this slightly creepy, because it’s hard not to imagine that Osama bin Laden might have made his first million just this way. I did not make a million. But soon enough, I had a nice little lamb discretionary fund. For which thank God, because it would have been such a shame to waste my rent money on roast lamb Marinade au Laurier.
Six cups of red wine, a cup and a half of red wine vinegar, half a cup of olive oil, thirty-five bay leaves, salt, and peppercorns. Lay the lamb roast in it, cover, don’t forget to turn it now and again—and marinate for four to five days.
At room temperature.
We asked four different women over to share our putrefied lamb feast. That all four of them were called away at the last moment by entirely legitimate circumstances is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence I’ve run into that there is a just and protective God watching over us. Well, them anyway.
Over the course of the evening, the lamb, in its stages of preparation, was compared variously by my husband and me to an alien stillbirth and a piece of mystery meat found hanging in the cellar of an aristocrat’s abandoned palace by rabid French revolutionaries. In a way, this lamb marinated in red wine and bay leaves is quintessential French cookery: take some scary-ass piece of flesh and mess with it until it tastes good. I mean, except for the tasting good part. That part didn’t quite work out so well. Eric sensed a hint of Welch’s grape juice, Julie a whiff of sour milk; I suppose we can be thankful we did not end the evening retching into the toilet.
Which is all to say, thank God for bleaders who make sure I don’t pay for the lamb I destroy.
Hello, Everyone.
I’d just like to say how much I appreciate all the support you’ve been giving Julie these last six months. I didn’t know why she started doing this. She’s always been crazy. But she’s lucky to have friends like all of you, and because of you all, I can now see she’s doing the right thing.
Thank you,
Julie’s mom
PS—Clarence, who fucking cares what you think, anyway.
September 1946
Bucks County, PA
“When I came to I was covered in blood. Poor Paulski was white as a sheet; he thought he’d lost his wife before he’d managed to get her.”
“Now, this was yesterday? Julia, you could have postponed the ceremony a day or two, surely.”
She just shook her head, grinning. “He kept trying to hold a cloth to my head, but all I could think of was my shoes. When I was thrown out of the car they’d been knocked clean off—and believe me, when you’ve got feet the size of mine, you don’t take the loss of a pair of shoes lightly. ‘Don’t worry about me, Paul,’ I shouted. ‘Find my alligator pumps!’”
Paul watched her; surrounded by her friends and his, she was dressed in a brown-checked summer suit that made her legs seem to go on forever. She still had a bandage over her eye, but she somehow made it look just jaunty. She was radiant.
“Well, brother, you finally went ahead and did it, and about time, too.” Charlie clapped him on the shoulder. He’d brought him another glass of champagne, though he didn’t remember drinking the first one. “It’s a good thing you didn’t manage to kill her first.”
“Yes, it is. Do you know, I feel downright giddy. Can’t tell if it’s the champagne, getting married, or averting death.”
“A bit of all three, I imagine.”
The cane he’d been given at the hospital kept getting hung up on the fieldstones of his brother’s back patio, but it didn’t matter; he felt like he could do an Irish jig. Julie had Fanny in stitches; even Julie’s sourpuss of a father was cracking a smile. “Look at her, Charlie. Just think I almost passed her up.”
“Aaah, don’t worry about that. Just be glad you eventually got it through your thick old skull.”
Paul caught Julie’s eye, and she gifted him with a broad, glorious smile. “I’ll drink to that.”
DAY 237, RECIPE 357
Flaming Crepes!
It began around the first of April—a throbbing in my head and in the lower depths of my belly, not so much painful as just implacable. Also familiar. The more immediate problems of shopping and cooking, the less ambiguous objectives of the Project, had drowned out this older, more intangible ticking for a while. But as that dreaded zero-bedecked day drew close, my biological clock would no longer be ignored.
“Maybe we should have a baby.”
“What? You want a baby? Now?”
We were eating Wolfman Jack Burgers, which was what Eric always made for Eric’s Spicy Thursday. The institution of Eric’s Spicy Thursday was conceived as a respite from the rigors and creaminess of MtAoFC. After all, Eric and I are Texans, and we had never gone so long with so few jalapenos. Wolfman Jack Burgers are the invention of a particularly fantastic burger joint in Austin called Hut’s. Eric made a version of them with green chiles, Monterey Jack cheese, sour cream, bacon, and mayonnaise. Once, long before the Project, Eric fed a Wolfman Jack Burger to a friend of his from college who had not eaten meat in three years. His friend vomited for two days straight, which is the kind of thing that happens to you when you do something stupid like not eating meat. Anyway, we were enjoying them.
“Well, someday. And you know what all the doctors say. It might not be so easy for me.”
“I know. But now? We don’t have any money. You’re doing the Project, and —”
“You do realize I’m going to turn thirty in two weeks, right? Do you know how much harder it gets to get pregnant after thirty?”
“No. How much?”
“I don’t know. Harder. And I have a stupid syndrome.” I lifted my plate off my lap and took it to the kitchen. “Do we have any more burgers?”
“The patties are in the oven. Well, I think we should wait until the Project’s over to talk about it.”
“Right. We’ll just keep waiting and waiting and waiting, while my syndrome makes me fat and hairy and disgusting, and then I’ll just die. Can we get a dog, at least?”
“A dog? How are we going to take care of a dog? We can hardly take care of ourselves! Julie, this is not what Spicy Thursday is for. You’re supposed to be relaxing.”
“But how can I relax? I can literally hear the ticking.”
“You need to calm down.”
Calm down. As if.
When I told Eric the next night that I was making crepes for the first time in my life, to serve atop a dish of creamed spinach, he’d promptly made himself a cheese and mayonnaise sandwich, predicting a midnight dinner. But it was, shockingly, a snap. The crepe batter is just eggs, milk, water, salt, flour, and melted butter, all thrown into a blender together. Including melting the butter without aid of a microwave, the whole process takes approximately four minutes. And if you ignore JC’s direction to let the batter sit for two hours—which, needless to say, I did—the actual cooking isn’t much more demanding. Or wasn’t that first time, anyway. I got the skillet good and hot, wiped it down with a piece of bacon, poured in some crepe batter, and rotated the skillet around until the batter coated the bottom. I took a
spatula and slipped it around the edges to loosen the crepe—and up it came! I attempted flipping it with my fingers. It tore, but I was not discouraged—“The first crepe is a trial one,” says Julia. I wiped down the skillet with the bacon again, again poured in some batter, a bit more than last time. Again swirled the pan around briefly, loosened the rapidly browning crepe with the spatula. Flipped it over with my fingers.
“Voila! Crepe! I’m the king of the world!”
It was too easy to even talk about. By the time I got to my fourth crepe, I was flipping them over like I’d been born to it. And that night, I didn’t think about turning thirty or my syndrome at all.
Nothing’s that easy, though. I should have known.
The next week was crepe hell. I made sweet crepes and savory crepes, crepes with beaten egg white and crepes with yeast, crepes farcies and roulées and flambées. And over and over again, the crepes stuck. They burned, they shredded. When they did survive the skillet, they came out in the shapes of all the beasts of the forest.
One night Eric went out of town for a conference, and I invited Gwen and Sally over for a girls’ crepe night. I should have known that the stars were aligned against me when, while making the crepe batter, the blender—which I have to set on top of the trashcan to use because of this whole big thing with inconveniently placed plugs and my blender’s three-pronged pluggedness—hemorrhaged milk and water, making a total mess, and this after I had only just barely managed to make the apartment halfway presentable. But I’ve never been much good at heeding omens.
I cooked up some spinach and whipped up some Mornay sauce for the filling for the Gâteau de Crêpes—all seemed to be going fine. Sally arrived bearing Milky Way ice cream. While she walked around trying not to notice the piles of dirty clothes, thick layers of dust, and odor of stale kitty litter, I mashed up a cup of cream cheese in a bowl with salt, pepper, and an egg. Gwen showed up next and immediately got to work, as Gwen is apt to do, on the cocktails, while I minced a cup of mushrooms and sautéed them with some shallots in butter and oil. This got dumped into the cream-cheese mixture. All of this occurred without crisis, which is not to say it occurred quickly. It was nearly ten when I started actually making the crepes.
I heated the skillet; I rubbed it with a piece of bacon; I poured in batter; I rotated the pan to spread the batter around.
The crepe stuck to the skillet like it had been superglued.
Okay, okay. The first crepe is a trial one. Just start over.
I scraped the stuff out of the pan, washed it, reheated it, rubbed it with bacon, poured in the batter.
Which stuck like glue again.
If it had been just Eric around, I’m sure I would have collapsed into an angry obscenity-laced psychotic state—I suppose it’s a good thing that I can be so myself around him. But I had to pretend to be a sane person in front of my friends, so I just gritted my teeth and started over again. For the third time, I did exactly the same thing, poured the batter into the hot pan—and lo and behold, it worked like a charm! In less than a minute I had a lovely browned crepe.
So after that I’m in the zone for a while, helped along by the vodka tonics and Marlboro Lights. I get probably four done without incident before the crepes start sticking again. Then I have to go through the whole scrape-and-wash deal a couple more times before I get going again.
Sally can stay up all night if one of her wide variety of Davids is involved, but the prospect of doing so in order to eat food with three kinds of cheese in it had by this point gotten her looking a little peaked. She was trying to be brave about it. I was supposed to make twenty-four crepes, but when I had sixteen by eleven o’clock, I decided to have pity on all of us and make do with what I had.
The Gâteau de Crêpes wound up beautifully, actually. I layered the crepes alternately with the spinach and the mushroom-and-cream-cheese stuff, spooned Mornay sauce over all of it, and reheated the whole mess in the oven for a bit. While Mornay sauce makes for an odd British-looking beigy-ness, once the Gâteau was cut it was gorgeous, what with all the lines of green and gold and white. It was just too bad everyone was nearly asleep by the time that happened.
So it wasn’t that the crepes never turned out; it was just that they turned out so unpredictably. Sometimes they would stick, sometimes they wouldn’t. Three crepes might be the work of three minutes, the fourth another half hour. I started having anxious dreams about them. In one the entire staff of my office was having dinner together, along with my family and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While I met with Mr. Kline and Nate and Buffy about a plan to fight the minions downstairs in the lobby, there to destroy the world, my mother was left to make crepe after crepe in the staff kitchen, hundreds and hundreds of them, until she was buried amid the piles of golden, feathery pancakes.
And as the week progressed the throbbing of my biological clock syncopated with my crepe anxiety until they formed one jazz rhythm. Because what if I got to the age of thirty without having learned to make a crepe? What would have been the point of this whole exercise then?
Next Spicy Thursday Eric decided to mix it up a bit. I was going to be quite late coming home from work, because of a press conference being held by my government agency, and Eric figured that since I seemed so anxious about things, perhaps he could ease my mind on one issue, at least, and get one of the MtAoFC recipes out of the way.
For his first Project cooking foray, my husband chose to make Foie de Veau Sauté avec Sauce Crème à la Moutarde and Épinards Gratinés au Fromage—that is, sautéed calf’s liver with cream and mustard sauce and spinach gratinéed with cheese. He looked the recipes over and figured they couldn’t be too hard—he estimated that it would take about forty minutes for him to complete both dishes. After work he went to an Eastern European butcher shop in Astoria and picked up the liver. Delayed though he was by the eight firemen in front of him, who would not stop razzing the butcher—Where’d you go to butcher school? Hey, watch it, we don’t like fingers in our meat. Don’t listen to him, fingers have protein!—still he made it home by a little after seven, in time to catch BBC World News with Mishal Husain (the world’s sexiest news anchor, in Eric’s opinion). There was no hurry with the food—I wouldn’t be back home until 9:30 at the earliest. He figured he would start cooking at 8:30 and have everything done when I walked in the door. So he puttered around the house, reading periodicals and picking up dirty socks and such, until 8:40. He cleaned the spinach, and by 9:15 had begun to sauté it. But something didn’t feel right. It dawned on him that he’d picked up the recipe in the middle, that he was supposed to boil the spinach and chop it before sautéing it. He frantically pulled the spinach out of the skillet and set some water to boil, just lighting the flame under it as I walked through the door, back from work, not much surprised by Eric’s predicament.
By 10:30 or so the spinach had been boiled, drained, chopped, and sautéed. Eric added some cream and Swiss cheese to the mix, poured the spinach into a baking dish and sprinkled it with two tablespoons of bread crumbs and some more cheese. This went into the oven for half an hour. He moved on to the liver, seasoning the slices with salt and pepper, dredging them in flour, then tossing them into a hot pan to sauté in butter and oil. They were done in an instant, before Eric had quite gotten his mind around the idea that he had to make a sauce for it. His head was beginning to spin. He added cream to the pan and let it simmer a good minute or so before rereading the recipe and realizing he was meant to reduce a cup of beef broth in there first. It wasn’t until then that I began to hear “Damn! Damn!”s emanating from the kitchen.
“It’s okay,” I called in, prone on the couch and very nearly comatose. “It’ll be fine.” I had no idea what he’d done wrong, and did not care. I just wanted dinner and bed.
At eleven o’clock he decided there was nothing more to be done to the sauce. He took it off the heat, stirred in some butter and some mustard, and called it liver sauce.
We ate our liver and spinach while watching the ri
ght honorable gentlemen of the British House of Commons yelling at each other about the Iraq invasion on C-SPAN. And it was damned good. It was good because it was liver and spinach with cheese, but mostly it was good because I didn’t have to make it. Sometimes I want to beat Eric’s head repeatedly against a sharp rock, but other times he knows just the right thing to do to make me forget about turning thirty—lull me into a comatose state on the couch with British news shows, then dose me with offal.
I am feeling much the failure these days. It is not turning thirty so much as it is the eventual turning forty, the fear that I will go another decade without doing a goddamned thing worth doing. What do I have to show for the last one, after all? A husband—a divine husband, it must be said, which would be a significant accomplishment if not for the fact that by all rights he ought to divorce me—and the Julie/Julia Project.
One thing about blogging is that it gives you a blank check for whining. When Eric simply couldn’t stand another moment of it, I could take my drone to cyberspace. There I could always find a sympathetic ear.
If you think you’re old at 30, just wait until you’re 70 like I am—HOW DID I GET THIS OLD? But I love every minute, especially my wonderful friends who go back to grade school days!! My husband is a treasure, too—a perfect man in all respects—so you and I are very lucky “girls,” Julie. And I know you’ll think I’m really weird, but I loved turning 40 and 50 and 60 and 70 because I have been able to keep learning and doing all sorts of interesting things. The older I get, the more I can get away with, too. . . . I wish I could live long enough to read all the books you will write. Love, GrannyKitty
See? They loved me out here! They just wanted me to be happy, and to blog and blog and blog. They understood my pain!
Whenever I get in an age-related funk, a good friend always reminds me, “THESE are the good old days.” He is right, in ten years I will probably look back and think my life is just hunky-dory right now. Thirty was wonderful; my husband was a great man (he died ten years ago), I had options, job possibilities, etc. I am looking forward to fifty, who knows. Good luck, Julie, with pulling yourself out of your funk. . . .—Cindy