École des quatre gourmandes?

I read the book "My Life in France" about a year ago. I couldn't put it down. I was going to do my presentation for my class French Cuisine and Culture on Julia Child last semester, but had to drop the class midway through. There went mastering the art of French speaking. When I first caught wind of "Julie and Julia" the movie many months ago, I couldn't wait for it to come out this August. August rolled around, and I promptly lagged at seeing it, but finally did this past weekend. What I saw: my life unfolding before my eyes on-screen.

Julie Powell and I don't share much in common, short of our affinity for cooking, we both have blogs, and the fact that we've each spoken to Amanda Hesser about our ideas (hers the blog, and mine my cookbook). But the Julia Child side of the movie, I felt much more of an attachment to than her modern day shadow.

Some of you (whoever you readers are) may already know this. Others probably do not. Until recently, it's been un petit secret. Come next February, I will be a cooking school student in the South of France. I'm quitting my job and going for it. The intersection of two passions is a powerful thing, like Julia's love for Paris and her love of cooking. While I love Paris indeed, my two passions are cooking and the French language. So after finding a school in the South of France that offers both simultaneously, I made the decision to take the plunge. I'm trading in my college counseling hat for chef's shoes and baggy checkered pants.

I've had the idea for my cookbook swirling around upstairs for some time now. Unfortunately, extracting my thoughts and putting them down on paper has been more challenging than I originally had planned, and without any formal culinary training, I've been wondering who would want to hear from me anyway. I'm hoping this journey will give me the chance to gather material for my book (my weekends are free to travel about), learn some more formal techniques, and also the space to actually sit down and write. It's one of those "me projects," and if the book never sells a single copy but is someday bound with a spine, I will feel that sense of finishing something that Julie Powell talked about in the movie. I guess we are more alike than I thought.

So, here I come, France. Le quatre gourmande. Julia Child never had any offspring, but in the interest of keeping her dream alive, I'm going to volunteer to be the granddaughter she never had. And after I get through Larousse Gastronomique all in French, a feat I'm not sure Julia Child ever accomplished, I'll lift up a bite of sole meunière to Julia and say, "Bon appetite" to the original American French chef.