NOT Julie and Julia, but Inspired By

So Mal and I recently went to see the movie "Julie and Julia," which we both really enjoyed. My take: the Julie part was okay, although I honestly didn't find myself personally interested in the Julie character. Julia Child, on the other hand, is my personal hero: imagine, she never even started cooking until age 37! AND it turns out she was lying all these years about being a secretary in the OSS and was in fact an actual spy... Meryl Streep did an astounding job of bringing her to life, and Stanley Tucci was wonderful, as always, as her husband Paul. Theirs was truly a wonderful love story.

Anyhoo, like everyone else who saw the flick, we came out of the theater hungry and rarin' to cook. Now I have a generous collection of cookbooks, certainly more than 100, possibly close to 200; I'm honestly not sure. Inspired by the premise of the movie we just saw, Mal and I have decided that each week, one of us will select a cookbook, and the other one of us will make something from that cookbook. The recipe can be for anything--main course, appetizer, dessert--but it has to come from the selected book. Mal got first pick, and he chose The Good Home Cookbook, which we just received as a housewarming gift from our wonderful sister-in-law. This is a fun book, with very old-school, no-nonsense recipes like those from your old Better Homes and Gardens book: American Food. The special conceit, though, is that the author recruited over 1,000 home cooks from all over the country to test different versions of all these familiar recipes in order to find the best ones, which were then gathered into this volume. So no fancy-schmancy stuff, but a lot of fun nostalgia. (When's the last time you've even heard mention of a Taco Salad, much less seen a recipe for one?)

And what am I going to make? I'm not 100% decided yet. BUT there is a recipe for creating your own sourdough starter and thus your own sourdough bread that sounds very appealing. We shall see.

Jayne