Happy Birthday Julia Child!

If you don't know what's for dinner tonight, my suggestion is to pull out a Julia Child recipe and start there.

Julia would be 100 today.

I learned a lot of my bread and soup skills from the VCR tapes that my old and current library have. She was so fun to watch. And there was the one spot where the editor missed her wrap skirt exposing her thigh! Woo!

Last year a book club friend died in a car accident and her books were donated to the library.  Unfortunately, many of them had been temporarily stored in a musty garage, and so the library could not take them. I was left with a musty car and stacks of books. 

Not being able to just throw them out, I went through them and found one lovely copy of Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.  I also adore Jacques Pepin. My Kristin and I would watch the cooking show on PBS where he shared recipes with his daughter. We would giggle at her slow, unpracticed skills that made her dad squirm. But it made us more comfortable in our own kitchen experiments. From him we learned how to use "real" garlic.

I decided to wrap Julia and Jacques for Kristin as a Christmas gift.  As I leafed through, I came back to the title page. There I found autographs of both the authors. What a thrill! 

I miss my friend who loved all these cook books, and I hope she is with Julia watching us share their love of cooking today.

Bon Appetit.