Hello Again!

Well, it's been almost a year since posting. If anyone has been reading this, I'm so sorry for being negligent. I've been posting on Chowhound instead of here. I'm going to resolve that issue now.

What is the reason for this change? Over the weekend, Jennifer and I went to see the movie "Julie and Julia". It's a Nora Ephron movie treatment of a book by Julie Powell in which she wrote about her project of cooking all 534 recipes in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a year and write a blog about it. Ms. Powell wrote the book in 2002 when she was at a very low point in her life and was searching for something to fill a seeming void in her life. There has been much discussion on many different websites both for and against Ms. Powell and her project and her writing. I have not read the book yet (it's on my Wishlist on Audible, so maybe soon). Let me just say that as usual the movie is very "Hollywood", and Meryl Streep as Julia Child is so amazing that you think that you are actually watching clips of Julia's old PBS show at times. Jennifer and I enjoyed the movie for what it was, pure entertainment; but it also motivated us to re-examine the classic French preparations so we made "Boeuf a la Bourgignone" from Julia's cookbook for dinner last night. It was delicious and not difficult, but not simple if one did not have some cooking experience.

Some who have criticized Julie Powell for her project might be a bit elitist in their perspective. I think that it was great that she was able to pick something that interested her, set a goal, and follow through despite the failures and the issues that she encountered in her personal life. Her mother seemingly was opposed to her even trying to do something like this, her college women friends all of whom were so self absorbed as to be the stereotype of yuppie New York women that we all love to hate. I say "Bravo" Julie! But let's see what else you can do now.

I am going to try to post more of my personal thoughts and experiences here as well as on the other discussion areas, which may be redundant, but oh well!

Bon Apetit!

Bottle Shock

The second event of our date was seeing the movie, Bottle Shock. The movie is about the fabled Judgment in Paris of 1977 when British wine merchant Steven Spurrier arranged a blind tasting of California wines and French wines. Based on the book by George Tabor, who was the only journalist in attendance at this historical event. Because I'm such a wine geek, I wanted to see this Hollywood treatment. I very much enjoyed the scenes filmed in Napa and seeing the places that we have been to. Still, it was a "hollywood" movie and focused on the familial relationships of the Barrett's who owned the Chateau Montelena winery and Steven Spurrier's efforts to discover new ways to promote his wine shop in Paris.

I think that more could have been made of the character of Gustavo Brambila, the winemaker at Chateau Montelena at the time, but that was only a back story.