French Cooking ~ Bonjour, I’m back! Wow I really am finding my mojo again and you know what? I think it’s got a lot to do with taking a social media break. Do you ever find too much scrolling on social media stifles your creative side? I do and I really feel this is why my blogging has suffered so much over the last few years…I love Instagram especially but find it’s becoming so much about monetizing content over being a creative space as it was in the beginning. Oh well, c’est la vie…I’m just happy to be back once again, so onto today’s post.

I think I might be crazy for taking on this challenge and I have no doubt I’m going to have a hissy fit with it at some point in time but I need a change. I feel like life is in a rut and I need to shake things up a bit. Do you ever feel that way? Well I do quite regularly and that’s why today I’m rearranging my whole house!! But that’s for another post.

My inspiration (or delusional thinking) for 52 Weeks of French cooking came about from watching one of my favourite movies a hundred times. Ok well maybe not 100 but I’ve watched it a hell of a lot since it’s release in 2009! Any guesses what it might be? No? Ok I’ll tell you…..my favourite movie I watch at least twice a year is…..Julie & Julia!! Hands up all the Francophiles that new the answer!

Julie & Julia was also the movie that inspired me to start blogging and although it took me a couple of years to get going, I’m still here 50,000 blog names later, barely any followers and a mish mash of blog posts spread through over three blogs in an 11 year period. That even sounds painful to read and somewhere in my blog lists I do have a post on the movie Julie & Julia that I’ll share with you one day.

So why French Cuisine I hear you ask. Well if you know me, (and lets face it most of you don’t but you’re about to) you know I love everything about France and if someone said to me right now, ‘you can move to France but you have to live there for the rest of your life.’ I’d be packed and gone in under an hour….providing I can get an emergency passport that fast lol. But seriously I’ve always had an affinity for France ever since learning as a child there was French DNA in me from my Grandfather and I started taking French in high school. My French is anything but fluent but I could get by on the basics, oui!

Whenever I watch Julie & Julia (and just for the record I watched it last Saturday night) I long to got to France, I want to meet Julia Child (yes I’m aware she’s died but I still want to meet her) and I want to go to those French Marchés and buy all that wonderful fresh produce, a big baguette and a ton of camembert fromage. If you’ve watched the movie and read up on the making of the movie then you know that the actors are really eating everything in front of them and the sight of that beautiful food makes me want some too.

In the movie Julie is also feeling she’s in a rut and decides to take on the challenge of cooking her way through Mastering The Art of French Cooking in one year! My hat goes off to her because that’s one hell of a challenge to cook 521 recipes in 365 days! I’m not that game and I know I would lose the plot trying to do something so intense. I only have so much sanity to spare these days but I applaud Julie for making it through to the end and accomplishing her goal of getting every recipe cooked and finally becoming a writer as she’d always dreamed of doing.

Me, well, I’m inspired but not crazy lol……I’ve had a fair few French dishes over the years and all I can say is, YUM! There is something so different to French Cuisine that Australian cooking just doesn’t have. In fact I’m always saying Australia doesn’t really have its own food cuisine (except for the indigenous people who were here first) as the bulk of our cuisine came with each different immigration group that came out to Australia from Italy, Ireland, Scotland, England and many more. So to me Australia is a mish mash of cultural foods and while I enjoy most of it sometimes the every day Aussie way of eating gets a little boring with no pizazz.

So here I am attempting between 52 to 104 recipes from my three favourite French cookbooks. I will make one to two recipes a week, so probably a main meal and a desert and maybe petit-déjeuner on the weekends if I’ve got the motivation in the morning. I’m a slow morning person and I like my day to start free of stress and pressure, so we’ll see how I go. The books I’ll be using for inspiration will be Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck & Louisette Bertholle, Little Paris Kitchen and Little French Kitchen by Rachel Khoo. I have watched Rachels shows many times and am always fascinated by how much she manages to cook her her little kitchen in Paris and they are simply amazing meals and have my mouth watering as I watch her cook.

Today is Sunday and I have no idea of which recipes I’ll be making for the coming week so I guess I better go and do some research very soon. I have a plan to start off with things that aren’t too difficult or time consuming and work my way up to more intricate meals. I’m not a terrible cook, in fact I can whip up a mean slow roasted leg of lamb that melts in your mouth with the most delicious jus (gravy) you’ve ever had but it’s always good to learn new skills and that’s what this year is all about for me.

So wish me luck as I attempt this crazy challenge and hope my family enjoys the new way of eating as much as I know I’m going to. Each week I will share the recipes I make with a post called This Weeks French Cuisine and I think I better mark a calendar somewhere too so I don’t forget how many weeks I have left. Well if you have any words of advice now is the time to give them to me or, you can just sit back enjoy the ride and laugh with me as I cook my way through 52 Weeks of French Cooking.

Oh and one last thing, to make this all the more challenging, I will be converting all the recipes I use to gluten free and dairy free recipes as yep you guessed it, we’re one of those family’s with dietary issues. But I do love a bit of Butter 😉

À bientôt….Michelle x