Free Julia Child Rules by Karen Karbo

adults, with the awful pressure on them to decide on a career path by sixth grade, are too frantic with worry to succumb.
    The thing about whims is that most of the romantic ones involve a serious outlay of cash. Even hopping in the car for a weeklong road trip across a state or two will set you back a few hundred dollars; here on the West Coast one of the whims that makes you feel like your life is not in a rut—“let’s go to Mexico!”—will set you back thousands. You used to be able to dream about the sun on your face on a Monday, and by Friday your toes were wriggling in the sand at Puerto Vallarta. Now, you’d have to be a part of the 1 percent to afford those tickets.
T HE O NE R ELIABLE W HIM
    The most obvious whim, given the subject of this book, is what to eat. Every day we’re faced with satisfying a food or cookingwhim. Because when it comes to cooking I’m tortured with ambivalence, * my culinary whims are perpetually at war with each other. On a daily basis, I experience opposite urges. I long to both flee the kitchen † and devote myself to cooking in Julia-holic fashion. But my behavior is purely whim-driven.
    Nothing was left to chance in my mother’s kitchen. She wrote out her weekly menus on Sunday and shopped for the week the next day. Monday night was pork chops; Tuesday night was hamburger pie, a stewed tomato–heavy take on Shepherd’s Pie, with hamburger substituted for lamb, and including frozen French cut string beans; Wednesday night was reserved for “something new”; Thursday was beef stroganoff or beef bourguignon or something that involved simmering; Friday night was Taco Night; Saturday night was Chef’s Salad; Sunday night was pot roast. I live in a permanent state of rebellion against this regimen. The thought of writing out a weekly menu makes me want to tear off my clothes and run down the middle of the street, so slavish and restrictive does it seem. My cooking life is all whim, all the time. Even before my kids went off to college, I would often find myself standing in the middle ofthe kitchen at 5:30 p.m. wondering what to make for dinner, waiting for my taste buds to speak up. Sometimes I would race to the corner Whole Paycheck for a rotisserie chicken and broccoli. Sometimes I would throw open the cupboard and make Something with Noodles. Sometimes I would make “breakfast dinner.” Sometimes, in a burst of inspiration, I would make something fabulous, coq au vin or grilled halibut. Sometimes, we would just go out. I prefer to think this refusal to plan means I’ve embraced the French attitude about eating. I’m allowing the spirit to move me. Unfortunately, the spirit is not as epicurean as I would like it to be.
    I envy people for whom cooking is their true, abiding creative outlet, people who arise every morning and as their coffee is brewing plan what they’re going to cook that day. Julia famously said, “People who like to eat are the best people,” and presumably she’s not talking about the people who stand in the middle of the kitchen eating Wheat Thins with a squirt of aerosol cheese.
    When Nora Ephron died, Joan Juliet Buck, who played Madame Elisabeth Brassart, the director of the Cordon Bleu, in Ephron’s
Julie & Julia,
wrote a droll, fond remembrance of her friend for
The Daily Beast,
in which after extolling her Renaissance woman genius, she said, “She also had a real life, two early marriages and then one great one, and two sons, one of whom I know and adore. And she cooked.”
    And she cooked
.
    There are few three-word sentences that so perfectly evoke a superior sort of down-to-earth femininity. Nora Ephron cooked. This did not mean she threw some Annie’s white cheddar mac ’n cheese into a pot of boiling water and emptied a bag of pre-washed romaine hearts into a bowl and called it dinner, like some people I know. Nora cooked, which meant she was warm, generous, sexy, sensual, passionate, and life-loving.
    There’s a little shop not far