I’ve probably watched Julie & Julia too many times, who doesn’t love Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci and Amy Adams? They could act out a supermarket shop and I’d be scintillated. My brother and I were early Tucci fans-repeatedly watching Undercover Blues (1993) in which he plays a character called Muerte, adopting his catchphrase, ‘my name is Muerte,’ and driving my mother completely mad. If you don’t know the film, and I’ve got no idea if it’s worth knowing, you can see 9 minutes of Muerte’s best scenes on YouTube. Typing ‘YouTube’ is making me wonder if anyone has a cooking channel where they make all kinds of stew, the name writes itself.
But as with any journey in which you set out only to realise you are in urgent need of a new thermos, I digress. This blog is accidental fan fiction (not of Julie Powell’s book/blog which I haven’t read, but of the Adams/Streep/Tucci combo). I decided a few days ago to do a Julie and cook my way through Claudia Roden’s cookbook, following her journey from Samarkand and Vilna to the present day. It’s beautifully written, a favourite of Jay Rayner’s and took 16 years to research and write. Given how many iterations of carp there are in the book, I think it will probably take me as long to make everything.
When I mentioned my plan to my friend Katie she said that I should introduce my own twists. She’s referring to the time I made her salmon and cream cheese on potato waffles (as a gluten free/what do I have in the freezer panic moment), so don’t hold out hope of culinary greatness. As Julia apparently said of Julie when she heard about the blog, I am ‘not a serious cook.’
The plan, twists aside, is relatively simple. I’m going to make the dishes, a few recipes per week, mainly around the contents of my Oddbox, which given that sometimes I get just a handful of any particular ingredient will mean downsizing the recipes. Things tend to go wrong for me when I have to do maths. When we’re all allowed back into each other’s homes, I’m going to cook with friends (some of them know this already, others will be taken by surprise). Laying out plans to cook a meal together, chopping, stirring and watching as those plans inevitably and comically go awry, is one of the things I’ve missed.
Thank you to Mark for the punny name (yom is day in Hebrew), to Stephanie for the website and taking photos (my attempts will be dismal) and to the friends who will be cooking with me (you know who you are and if you don’t…SURPRISE!).
Nom Nom Yom 