Good Eats - From the Garden to Your Table.

Cooking with Julia

By Julie Powell

The first time I cooked Julia Child's Potage Parmentier, a potato-and-leek soup from her best-selling Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I had no idea it would inspire a yearlong culinary adventure.

I had just arrived home after a difficult day at the office and was flipping through cookbooks in search of a recipe for dinner when I happened upon Julia's famous book, which had resided in my mother's pantry for years. A picky eater but an avid reader, I had perused this cookbook constantly as a girl, mesmerized by the French words, the mysterious diagrams. It held a place in my heart long before I would have eaten anything out of it.

I found myself rereading Julia's words: Potage Parmentier is "simplicity itself to make." As a 29-year-old New Yorker trapped in a long line of dead-end secretarial jobs, struggling to discover where my future lay, I craved but rarely found simplicity. So I made this soup. The comforting ease of it—the peeling and slicing, the butter and salt and cream—lifted the stresses of my uncertain life off my shoulders.

It was wonderful, my first Potage Parmentier. So wonderful that my husband and I each had three servings. So wonderful that I deluded myself into thinking I could be more than I was, do more than I'd done. That was the night I decided I would cook all 524 recipes in Julia's great book in one year, and that I would write about it.

In the following months I burned my fair share of ladyfingers, but I learned some valuable lessons, too. I know now what I can pare down and what is essential. Not just in cooking, but in life. We all know we're not meant to "sweat the small stuff." Julia helped me figure out what the small stuff really is. And it's not the potatoes.

Julie & Julia—the film version of Julie Powell's Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (Back Bay Books, 2006)—starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child, is in theaters now. Read AARP entertainment editor Bill Newcott's five star review of the film.

Try one of Julia Child's recipes

• Potage Parmentier