Mastering the Art

I moved into my apartment in Virginia site unseen, and the first room I saw was the kitchen. I use the word "room" lightly. The kitchen was probably normal by the standards of someone living in the big cities on the coast, but for a Midwest girl, it was tiny. You might even say teeny tiny. It was a galley kitchen, probably 4 feet by 6 feet. On one side there was a fridge, the sink, a sliver of counter space and a narrow cupboard. On the other side there was a 3 foot work counter, but my microwave took up about half of that space. Beneath the work space, there were two pull out drawers and larger cupboard. That was my first kitchen.

Yet this was the place I remember learning to love the art of cooking. It was the place where I mastered the art of crock-pot cooking (in a bright orange crock that belonged to Ben's great-grandmother), so that after evening classes, I would come home to a meal and not just an empty apartment. It's the place where I became an expert at flipping a quesillda. And it's the place where I pounded ginger snaps with a hammer at 10:30 pm because I decided I wanted to try to make a real cheesecake from scratch to take to a Thanksgiving dinner.

I really thought a lot of the cooking I did in that apartment. This is laughable, considering that I was reminiscing to Ben the other night about that summer in Virginia when I ate Edy's popsicles for dinner nearly every night. I had no idea what cooking was or, for that matter, how good of a cook I could be. But on the other hand, my modest attempts were something to be proud of. Here I was, 1,200 miles away from my family and my fiance, in the tiniest kitchen I had ever seen, and I was cooking increasingly complex meals for myself. Every day. In chopping, stirring, and baking I was finding sustenance, confidence, and peace.

Julie Powell's kitchen in the film Julie & Julia is nearly identical to the one I once called my own in Staunton. Seeing this kitchen really drove home to me how amazing Julie Powell's feat was. In 2002, about a year before I moved to Staunton, Powell cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of a year in a tiny New York apartment. She blogged about the experience and later wrote a memoir.

I had read Powell's memoir awhile back and gave it to my friend Mindy this past Christmas. We were both incredibly excited for the film, and we had long-standing plans to see it on opening day. I expected this blog entry to be about our fun "theme day," in which Mindy, her Mom (who speaks fluent French and used to cook from Julia's cookbooks) and I went to Croissant du Jour in Cedar Rapids for lunch (amazing!), talked about food, and then saw the movie. All these things happened, but I also found that the movie left me more introspective than I expected.

It is a fantastic movie. I was afraid it wouldn't live up to my hype, but it, in fact, exceeded it. Nora Ephron is a goddess, Amy Adams is fantastic, Stanley Tucci is adorable, and I'm actually starting to tip-toe my way onto the Meryl Streep train. The soundtrack is reminiscent of Ephron' s other films Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. I want to see it again. Every day. For the rest of my life.

Maybe it's because I saw so much of myself in that movie. And it wasn't just the nearly identical kitchen or the Penzsey's spices that were tucked away on Julie's shelves. This movie was like watching scenes from my life played out before me. The scene where Julie screams to her husband to come in the kitchen to look at what she's just taken out of the oven and, "See how beautiful this is!" The scene where her husband calls her out her exaggeration. All the cussing in the kitchen (seriously, I have the mouth of a sailor when I'm cooking). And there were also the more raw scenes - the fights, the disappointment, the tears. Everything was there.

Julie and Julia are two women who looked disappointment in the eye and set crazy goals for themselves. The faced obstacles, often not with large reserves of grace, but with a great deal of fortitude nonetheless. They pursued their impossible goals with abandon and were rewarded, tenfold, in the end. All I could think of was that younger version of myself, in a tiny apartment kitchen, as I cooked my way through a master's degree and a long-distance engagement - two things that, at times, seemed impossible. Now here I am in a beautiful kitchen, ABD, with my husband and my dog at my side. I'm not saying that things are easier. They are, in fact, more complex and seem even more impossible than anything that I faced during my Staunton years. But you know what? The things I make in this kitchen are far beyond anything I dreamed I could make five years ago: I flip crepes; I cook whole Thanksgiving dinners; I can and freeze produce; I make artisan bread nearly every day. Like Julie and Julia, I find assurance in what I can do in my kitchen. I know that with each recipe I conquer, I am one step closer to being the kind of person who can accomplish incredible things, the kind of person who person who can look a challenge in the eye and say, "So what? I've done crazier things." Maybe this is why I rarely make the same recipe twice. Because what's the fun in making something I've already mastered?

So tonight I came home to a freezer full of meat and watched my husband happily grill sirloin steaks and boil fresh corn. Relieved from chef duties, I hatched yet another crazy plan. I cleared the table, put down place mats, dug out some candles, and put on some music. Then I went to my jewelry box and dug out my pearls. Ben asked, "Um, what are you doing? Are you dressing up for dinner?" I, like Julie, was invoking my inner Julia. I wanted to make the meal look like what every meal is, a celebration - a beautiful, joyous celebration that we have made it through another day wiser, stronger, and ready to face whatever life has in store for us next.

Bon Appetite!