judy and JULIA

12-22-09 culinary brain
A Christmas story to illustrate why I don’t spend much time in the kitchen:

After enjoying the movie about Julia Childs (Julie and Julia) on Saturday evening, I felt motivated to do some Christmas baking Sunday. After Ann, Sue and I had finished the movie on Saturday, we couldn’t help ourselves and we were having fun by all talking like Julia Childs.

Sunday afternoon, since I was alone in the house, I again got into the spirit of Julia Childs by imitating her voice some more and I pretended I was giving a cooking demonstration. I was having a grand old time spending time being silly with myself! I seem to be good at that.

I decide to prepare our traditional family Christmas Eve special dessert, Creme De Menthe Pie. You’ll find the recipe below. First, I started with a cup of milk and sampling a few (at least 10) of the Oreo Cookies, making sure they were fresh enough…. They were “splendid”!

Then next step is to melt the marshmallows with milk in a double boiler as you can see here. I was doubling the recipe to make two pies instead of one and all was doing well, until I realized that I had quadrupled the milk amount instead of doubling the amount.


No problem, I got a larger bowl, and I had enough marshmallows and ingredients to do this, except for the whipping cream.

Luckily there is a period in this recipe where you need to let this mixture cool, so I had time to take the quick walk back over the to grocery store, for the second time in one hour to retrieve more cream.

After I returned and was trying to get the liqueur amount correct to quadruple the recipe, the phone rang. I was still channeling Julia Childs and when I saw it was a telemarketer, I couldn’t resist answering the phone in her voice. “Hel..loooooow, you’re going to have to jingle me back, I’m in the kitchen baking a Cremmmm DE Mennnnthe pie”…… Then I had to hang up because I started to laugh and couldn’t keep in character any longer.

Now where was I? Had I added 14 or 16 Tablespoons of Creme de Menthe? Oh well a few more splashes won’t hurt!

Since I didn’t have four pie tins, I ended up putting some in muffin tins, which actually works well for cute little individual servings.

Finally all was done, two pies went into the freezer and the rest to chill outside on the recycling bind, because “there was no room at the inn”… as I opened the backdoor I was startled by a baby opossum eating Big Head’s cat food. He was surprised by me also. No harm done, he scurried away.

The main part that keeps me from enjoying kitchen time, is the clean up time, which this time consisted of me having to wipe off splattered whipping cream from the kitchen wall and window, and tackling the pile of dishes.


By then I was coming down from my sugar high, and it felt like it was time for bed, however it was only 6:30PM. I wasn’t hungry for dinner, so ate an apple to purge my gallbladder from all that fat I had digested in the last few hours.

One last step, after the pies had set up for a time, you must not forget to add the final touch of red……. cherries on top. “Bon Appetite!”



Sticky Note to Self: Even though you are now intrigued by Julia Childs, do NOT try anything like this again for at least a few more months.

(click on picture to enlarge)