Julie & Julia - Encore

Since my birthday is in a couple of weeks, as is Christmas, and since I'm likely to spend both alone, I bought myself a birthday/Christmas present today.  God, how I hated hearing that when I was a child!  "Here's a present for your birthday and for Christmas, Kitty."  One present.  I was gypped, year after year.  But, that's another whine, one that I will get over once the dreaded, hated month of December is past.

I love this movie because 1) it's about food. Duh!  and 2) it's the ultimate feel-good movie and right now I need all the help I can get in feeling good.  It joins those rare few movies that I will watch again and again just because they make me feel good.  Escapism?  Perhaps,  but who cares.

Question is, if it makes me feel so all-fired good, why am I all weepy now that it's over?  Okay, so I'm just a bit extra prone to weepiness right now.  I don't remember being weepy when I first saw it, but then, that was in a big theater surrounded by strangers and it simply goes against my principles to weep in a movie theater.  At home, one has no such constraints.  I guess I'm weepy because it was such a happy movie with such a happy ending, and because it was such a wonderful love story -- two love stories, really. Could be I'm weepy because I weep a lot in December, just because it's such a lonely month for me.  I smiled all the way through the movie, however, weepy or not.

Incredible story, wonderful casting and acting.  And I don't think you have to be a total foodie to enjoy it.  I think I need to try Julia's Boeuf Bourgignon again, however, because mine didn't reach that orgasmic 'yum' that was implied here.  It was lovely, yes, but not 'yum'. And it was a lot of work.

As a side note and story, however, there was a passing reference to braised cucumber that really brought back some memories.  I don't know what Julia's recipe for braised cucumbers entails, but I can attest to the virtues of cooking cucumbers slowly in lots of butter. That is a definite 'yum'.  I know it sounds strange -- who cooks cucumbers?  When I was working at Beringer there was a fabulous restaurant in St. Helena called La Belle Helene.  In my job, I had the sad misfortune of being taken to lunch by various vendors on a regular basis at this and other local restaurants.  La Belle was my favorite, hands down.  I came away with a couple of recipe treasures, coaxed from the waiters.  One was a Creme de Laitue (lettuce soup, made of the outer leaves of butter lettuce, a little parsnip and lots of cream) that made me weep for joy.  The other, was the cucumbers in butter.  Were they braised in butter?  Perhaps -- certainly cooked at a low enough temp that it wasn't really sauteed.  (is that spelling right?).  You peel the cukes, halve them lengthwise, scrape out the seeds and then slice crosswise into little crescents about 1/2 inch thick.  Toss in a pan with lots of butter until they are warm and tender, and serve.  Wonderful -- and yet something I rarely remember to do.  Try it sometime.  I don't like raw cucumbers at all, but I love these.

Of course, the book was a constant reminder that I, too, have never really finished anything I started. That's not strictly true -- I've finished many things, but I certainly never lived up to my potential and I quit on some really important things and because of that I feel that I haven't finished things -- such as my life. I want to do that.  I want some big bang of a project that I can pour all my passion into and finish with a flourish.  What might that be?  I wish I had the answer.  The house and garden will certainly be a project, but I think I need more than that, just as Julie in the movie needed more than to simply cook every recipe in Julia's book.  She needed a deadline.  Hard to put a deadline on a house and garden, particularly when there is really no end game involved, and little money to pour into it.  But -- I need that before I die.  What will it be? And, do I have the energy left to do it?