Free Julia Child Rules by Karen Karbo Page A

from my house that describes itself as “a home decor and flower store in Portland, Oregon, offering a clever mix of modern, vintage, and organically inspired products.” Among the clever inventory are cookbooks where every author is a windswept blonde who looks as if she stepped straight from the pages of Robert Redford’s Sundance catalog, in jeans or a vintage dress, her white chef’s apron tied snugly around her waist. And she always has a waist, this hip and competent cooking beauty, giving testament to her ability to spend her life cooking fantastic food, but never eating too much of it.
    If I could genetically modify myself, I would make myself over as one of those people who feels joy at the thought of food every minute of every day, in the hopes that I might capture some of the joy that everyone who loves to cook—and everyone who enjoys cooking
loves
to cook—seems to have. Am I the only one who’s noticed this? These days there seems to be an unspoken competition among people who consider themselves to be cooks. No one says “Sure, cooking’s okay,” or “Yeah, I like to cook,” or “Cooking’s a nice way to pass the time,” or“Sometimes I’m in the mood to cook, but just as often I could go for take-out Chinese.” These days, cooking is a sacred calling that must be pursued with religious zeal. So intense is even the home cook’s love of cooking that Jerrod, the man of the house, and I have devised a TV cooking show drinking game wherein every time a contestant proclaims his or her passion for cooking we drink. Fifteen minutes into every episode of last season’s
Master Chef,
we were slurring our words.
    I read and admired Bill Buford’s
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
about his own obsession with cooking (unlike me, he suffers no tortured ambivalence), and the time he spent working in the kitchen of super-celebrity chef Mario Batali. Once, after a long and brutal shift, * he rhapsodized: “I was a member of a team of cooks, closed away in this back room, people’s knives knocking against cutting boards in the same rhythmic rocking way: mine as well; no windows, no natural light; no connection to the outside world; no idea, even, what the weather might be; only one phone, the number unlisted; unreachable—a great comfort, surrounded by these intense association of festive meals.”
    I long to be one of these passionate people, but I can’t help but wonder whether they possess the same passion for kitchen cleanup, because that crap ton of work accompanies every great meal ever made unless it’s this one, perfected when I was a juniorin college and had my first apartment and had vowed never to learn how to cook:
    Saucisson Hebraïque Nationale en Fourchette Plongé dans la Moutarde Dijonnaise
    Ingredients
    1 all-beef hot dog (best you can afford)
    Grey Poupon mustard
    Skewer hot dog on fork, cook over gas burner, unscrew top of mustard, dip hot dog in mustard, stand in the middle of the kitchen and eat.
    Several summers ago we hosted an exchange student from Spain. Her gift to us upon her arrival was a small cookbook featuring authentic tapas recipes. Little did Lucia know that one of our favorite local haunts was a tapas place; that her host family was, in fact, a little mad for tapas. * We decided we were going to have a Spanish-American tapas-themed Fourth of July. There was going to be
Patatas con Chorizo
(potatoes with chorizo) and
Tortilla con Alcachofa y Jamon
(artichoke and ham tortilla),
Pinchos Morunos
(pork brochettes), and
Tartaletas con Pisto Manchego
(ratatouille tartlets). We also made four batches of Lucia’sfavorite,
Croquetas de Queso
(cheese croquettes), as well as a few other things I’ve forgotten. Creating this feast required every cooking implement we have in the house, in part because Jerrod, who fashions himself a great cook when he’s in the mood, is also impaired when