Sophia Serve

Julie/Julia/John/Joel and Karen

   

Nothing like shortening a 2000 mile road trip than reading Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia aloud and laughing across eastern Colorado, (Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana…) My husband, older son and I, all lovers of Merle Streep, had seen the movie and we wanted to know more of Powell’s background story. Furthermore, for a few years, we’d all overlapped with that beloved American culinary icon in Cambridge. “Saw her in the grocery store.”  “Saw her on the bike path.” You didn’t need Dan Akroyd to show you who she was.

From time to time, Julia donated leftovers to our church’s basement homeless shelter. One of the guests was overheard to say one morning at breakfast: “Oh no! Not spinach croissants again!”

I haven’t seen her Cambridge kitchen at the Smithsonian yet, but when I do, I’ll be tempted, as Julie was, to also leave some butter in respectful remembrance.

Nora Ephron is as masterful at the computer as Julia was at her raised counter-top kitchen and Julie Powell, herself, proves to be much MUCH more than a secretary! And here I am as if caught in that famous Escher painting, blogging about Julie’s blogging about Julia's cooking.

“Oh didn’t you love that scene in the movie?” We fondly remembered the onions. “Ya, but the Buick they drove into Paris in 1949 was a 1955.” My husband’s quick to point out car-discrepancies in movies. Just ask him about Sonny driving up to that gory-famous toll booth in The Godfather. “The book says he took the Buick.  In the movie he was clearly shot up in a '41 Lincoln convertible.”

After mile on endless mile of McDonalds and Dairy Queens, I was more interested in real food than moving cars, so when we got back to Vermont, naturally the first thing I did was go to the local farmstand to pick up some new potatoes and organic leeks.  “You’re going to make Potage Parmentier from a novel?”  Yup.  I am ashamed to admit I don’t own a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking so I thought (along with Julie) how hard can this be?

Echoing her mentor, Julie says on page 19, to peel the potatoes and slice them and the leeks up into some water (wash the leeks well, we both agree) and simmer it for 45 minutes with “some” salt. Then mash it with a fork, (a food processor destroys the wonderful bits and as Julia herself put it, turns it into “something un-French and monotonous.”) Add “some butter” and pepper. What could be easier? Like Julie and Eric, we licked our spoons and groaned. It was as Powell put it, “inexplicably good.” We clinked our wineglasses, “bon appetiting” in fake Julia voices.

 But don’t look for me to cook kidneys or brains any time soon.

Handing off the Future

       I went to an organizational learning workshop a few years back led by John Dicus. At onepoint, John asked us to contemplate the question: “What do I need to steward my own future?" 

John passed around a  little crystal ball so we could “gaze into it” and see what came to us. Doubting (as I often do) the efficacy of these sorts of exercises, I sat there waiting for the ball to come my way. When I felt the cool weight of it in my left palm, I dutifully repeated the question to myself, and looked down. All I could see was my left hand. Then it hit me. Of course! My future depends on how I use my hands!

Since that exercise, I've left corporate publishing and have spent a great deal of time at the keyboard writing and helping others write--a "handy exercise." Two books will publish late this year/early next and over the past couple of days I've been handling the page proofs for both, thinking about the various hands I hope will soon hold a bound copy. One of the books, The Green Devotional, leads me ask: "What will we hand off to our children and grandchildren?" The book carries many messages of planetary plight as well as global hope.

And what did our ancestors hand off to us? I mean the ones way, way, way back.