Pushing thirty, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is, in a word, stuck. In her desperate search for an escape, she comes up instead with 'The Project' -- a deranged assignment to take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic, 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' and cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.
At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the smooth sailing of Potage Parmentier into the obscure culinary backwaters of calves' brains, she realises there's more to mastering the art of French cooking than meets the eye...
