What's cooking

The release of the film Julie & Julia and Julie Powell's recent visit to Seattle resulted in a Seattle Times interview with Powell. I read Powell's book , a chronicle of her attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking despite living in a very small New York City apartment with an even tinier kitchen. It's a fun book which began as a blog, and now Powell has left her life as a clerical worker behind (and her tiny kitchen), and has a new book coming out on the art of butchering meat.

I've long been a fan of Calvin Trillin's light-hearted eating adventures, and you can enjoy a collection of them in The Tummy Trilogy. For a not-so-light vision of cooking and relationships there's Betty Fussell's My Kitchen Wars. Fussell was the wife of historian Paul Fussell, and as a young faculty wife she was caught up in the one-ups-manship that resulted when Julia Child's books on French cooking opened up a new world for American cooks.

The Times interview lists some of Powell's favorite food-centered films. But she missed a few of mine, and since they're in the library's collection, you could check them out. Tampopo,a parody of a samurai film, tells the story of a young widow trying to make the perfect bowl of noodles with the help of a truck driver. In Eat,Drink, Man, Woman a retired chef is worried about his unmarried daughters.

If you'd rather be cooking than reading about people who do, you can find plenty of inspiration in our cookbook collection. After years of buying cookbooks, only to find I end up using only one or two recipes per book, I now turn to the library when I feel like I'm in a food rut. So far it's working pretty well.