Julia & Julie

Hello,

I have just finishing watching the film Julia & Julie for the second time. It was this film that first inspired me to start the cooking journey I am currently in. Julia was in her 40's when she did it, Julie had just turned 30, but we are all women that came to a point in our lives that we didn't know what to do, we seemed to have exhausted all resources.

The 3 of us are married to a nice, supportive man, not possessive, not jealous and the 3 of us do not have children. Like Julia Child I might have married too old to conceive, though this was the thing I wanted the most in life and maybe so did she.

Like the Julies and Julias, I also have a passion for cooking, I come from a family of cooks, good, very good, excellent, outstanding cooks.

When I reached a point in my life when I thought everything had been a waste of space, I had too many deceptions to count, I lost my dad, I gave up a career, I am a foreigner wherever I go, I have the feeling I never fit, I don't fit and I am so very often misunderstood.

I had near me a Jamie Oliver book and I grabbed it and cooked my way out of depression, because it is true, in a world of chaos where so little seems to be controllable, you know if you put a raising agent in a cake, it will infalibly rise. If you put the dough in a round tin it will be a round cake and in a square tin it will be a square cake. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Jamie, although not being a girl like the rest of us, was a special needs education and he cooked his way through success motivated by the aim of making people cook. Maybe he was also wondering what his place in the world would be?

Food has the incontrollable way of bringing joy to others, making people bond and share, and it sends me to Babette's feast, where this woman who was a cook bring a whole village together in friendship and forgiveness. Jesus broke the bread, drank the wine with his apostles in his last supper and asked us to keep drinking and sharing our daily bread in togetherness, in his memory.

I am overweight but I just can't find in myself at the moment, the strength to deny the pleasure of flavours in my mouth. I am in a 'carpe diem' mode and I really do not know where this cooking adventure will lead. In the meanwhile I am trying hard to help those lost girls in Romania, lost like myself, trying to help them get a chance in life, another lease of life, like myself and I am also modestly trying to remind Great Britain of its beautiful cooking heritage, by inviting people over to try again the food their ancestors created, the long forgotten British cuisine, just about to be revived and relived.

I do not try to be pretentious, It is even hard to keep going somedays, I am just trying to fill in my days, day by day, and hope each day will lead me to a better future. I hope i will help leading those girls to one.

With much love to you all,


Gisele

This is Julia Child in action!