Channeling Julia Child, one recipe at a time

Powell was shocked by the attention. “So many people did teach themselves to cook with this book, there’s nothing unique about what I did,” she says.

But what made her stand out was her self-imposed timeline: to cook all 524 recipes in the book in one year. Writing about it for a national audience helped, too.

At the time, Powell struggled to explain the reasons behind the project. She moved to New York right out of college and got married. An aspiring actress who was terrified of auditions, she feared every temp job would become permanent.

“I was painted into a corner. I was completely lost — I didn’t know what I was going to do,” says Powell, a sassy, foul-mouthed

32. “I wanted to learn to cook. ... It wasn’t until the project was nearly done that I really understood that what I was trying to do was figuring out a new way of living and finding new experiences in life.”

Those new experiences — from battles with sauces that separate and searches for obscure ingredients — nearly gave her an emotional breakdown. She would wake up, blog for a bit, go to work, shop for ingredients on the way home and cook into the wee hours of the night. A disastrous attempt to cook sauce diable and chou-fleur en verdure (puree of cauliflower and watercress with cream) prompted her to call off the Julie/Julia project. Fifteen seconds later it was back on.

“I realized that if I didn’t have the project, I didn’t have anything,” she says. “The project had become the center of my life.”

From blog to book
Powell finished it in August 2003, and her book deal was lined up the next month. Her next challenge was turning a few paragraphs a day into a book with a beginning, a middle and an end.

“It was somewhat of a gamble, but once we got into the process, we stopped thinking of it as such,” said senior editor Judy Clain at Powell’s publisher, Little Brown. “It’s such a strong, original idea. And then there was Julie. Her voice is so acerbic and clear. There’s almost a performance artist in her.”

Critics, however, have gotten snagged on the transformation. Some say the book is too, well, bloggy. Yet the reviews have been generally favorable — Publishers Weekly calls it “feisty and unrestrained.”

The book had a first printing of 150,000 copies and 25,000 more have been ordered.

So what does a blogger do when the blog and ensuing book are finished? She blogs about the book tour, of course.

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