“Julie & Julia. 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen” By Julie Powell

Never fear, Jen is here, and if you are in need of last-minute inspiration for the perfect gift for anyone from your closest friend to the mother- (or even father-) in-law, consider Jen’s book choice for this week. It’s the excellent, “Julie & Julia,” which documents Julie Powell’s decision to cook in one year all 524 french recipes in Julia Child’s seminal culinary work.

I would be a very rich girl if I had a nickel for every time i’ve mumbled about making better food if I only had a better kitchen. Hogwash. (Although we all know I’ll keep doing it … the mumbling, that is.) Meanwhile Julie Powell, an almost 30-year-old Texan New Yorker wants to do something worthwhile but what? Job is a bust. Apartment is cruddy. How about Julia Child- worship?

Worship/cursing is the inevitable outcome of the Julie/Julia journey. With blatant disregard for a small budget, even smaller kitchen and full job schedule, Julie decides that in one year she will cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s epic tome, “Mastering The Art of French Cooking.”*

She starts a blog and develops a small, but rabid, following, eventually ending up on TV and in the New York Times. She documents her every move and, despite quite the mouth, she is a riot.

How she accomplishes what she does in that nasty kitchen is awe-inspiring. She succeeds, despite dreadful odds, and, as proud as she is of herself, we are too.

With hard-won, rare ingredients, she bones ducks, sears foie-gras, jellies aspics and whisks up mayonaises. Whip up a béchamel at 2 a.m.? Pas de probleme …

Occasionally without water or heat, with only the tiny, fearless Gimlet at her side, she conquers meals that would leave me hiding in the downstairs loo. Riz a l’Indienne, for which she has a much better name, springs to mind. Veau-Prince-Orloff for a packed house makes me sweat just thinking about clean-up. Uh.

Her mother thinks she is crazy. Julia Childs herself finds her a tad disrespectful, but do we? Nonsense. Julie is a coup de cuisine foudre on a pizza delivery landscape.

Her accompanying comments and stories are, much like the esteemable Ruth Reichl, as much the story as the food.

What a fun book. I defy you to not want to present both Julie, and her tolerant husband, with your heartfelt congratulations.

* Having yet to unpack some books from our last move, I just trudged happily off to the garage in search of the familiar fleur-de-lis covers only to come back dejected and covered in fertilizer chalk. I suppose I’d hide from me too if I was a French cookbook.