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"  Julie &amp;amp;amp; Julia, the movie about the late great Julia Child has to be one of the highlights of the summer for me. I went to see it with a group of foodie friends that I met right here at Good Housekeeping and it couldn&amp;#039;t have been a better girls&amp;#039; night out. (Wondering where we had dinner before the movie? At a greasy spoon next door to the theatre---we wanted to be first on line to get good seats.) When I got home I couldn&amp;#039;t resist pulling out my tattered copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (pictured left) which I credit with teaching me how to cook. Unlike Julie Powell, the other subject of the movie, I didn&amp;#039;t cook every single one of Julia&amp;#039;s recipes, but I cooked an awful lot of them and in fact prepared some of them so many times that I could tell they took some liberties with the recipes in the movie..there are no carrots in the Boeuf Bourguignon or peas in the Coq au Vin and the Queen of Sheba chocolate cake was much too high!   But back to learning to cook: Yes, I watched Julia on TV but it was following the recipes religiously that really taught me the basics of cooking so that now I feel confident enough to create my own recipes and deviate from the rules at times. Do I believe in following recipes to a T? Yes, if it&amp;#039;s the first time you try a recipe, especially if you&amp;#039;re a beginning cook. Stick to the directions a few times and before you know it you&amp;#039;ll learn how to improvise. For today&amp;#039;s beginning cook, there&amp;#039;s no better primer than our own The Good Housekeeping Cookbook. You can purchase it and other great Good Housekeeping cookbooks right from our online bookstore. And to quote from the foreword of Mastering: Keep your knives sharp. Above all, have a good time.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/food-recipes/a22566/julie-julia/>