Cooking With the French Chef: Introduction

Et voilá, here’s a new series! As of today, it’s sixty-one years since Julia Child’s peerless first show, The French Chef premiered, and a few months ago a fancy new edition of The French Chef cookbook became available. Naturally, I want to review it, but instead of publishing one post with the results of a few recipes, I thought I would pick a recipe or two per month and make it a series. I kind of got the idea from Jamie Tracey, better known as the Anti-Chef, because he recently mentioned the new edition of Julia’s cookbook in one of his videos and a light went on in my head (Watch the Anti-Chef YouTube channel here).

Since the book is structured by episode, I thought I’d review French Chef episodes where possible as well. There will be a lot more photos of the cooking process, and I may or may not be tempted to add video (“May not” is more likely, though, seeing as my kitchen isn’t exactly YouTube-friendly and I can’t light videos the way I would want to).

Full disclosure, though: This is not going to be a Julie/Julia kind of series so I won’t be cooking everything in the book, and certainly not every day or in the order the shows were broadcast. The organ meat recipes? Sorry, but no, we’re not going to be doing that (Ick). Aspic? No, because again, ick. I may just watch those episodes and make commentary as necessary. The other thing is availability. Whole live lobsters, for instance, aren’t exactly common in my neck of the woods, not to mention they’re freakishly expensive, so we’ll do the best we can.

I’m also not going to restrict myself to a year. We’re just going to start at the beginning with Julia and her book and see how it all plays out.

Finally, in yet another bit of unpredictability, these posts will happen on the eleventh day of every month, wherever that may fall. It seems kind of hokey but it’s not commonly done, at least not on Taking Up Room, and I welcome the opportunity to go hopping all over the days of the week.

All right, look for the first installment on March eleventh, and I hope everyone enjoys what may lie ahead. As Julia would say, “Bon appétit!”

Another post is coming up on Friday. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…

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