Julia's oeufs à la bourguignonne

"It's called microblogging--all you do is very quick updates about what you're doing."

Ummm...yeah. (That was me two years ago, when I first heard of Twitter)

I checked it out and all I saw were a lot of "Just got in from a great night out!" and "Finished dinner. Kids in Bed. All's quiet." and "Waiting for the movie to start" type posts.

Ummm...yeah.

I had better things to do.

And in the intervening years, it became the new online it-thing to do. I was still skeptical about it all. But in these two years, it became less about bursted updates and more about community building and knowledge sharing. This is something I could be interested in.

After having a post or two of mine Tweeted and ReTweeted, I decided to give it a shot. I'd known there was a pretty thriving food community there: food is one of the topics groups coalesce over, so I was pretty sure I'd find yet another online home. I was right.

No, don't worry, I'm not going to evangelise about microblogging. All I'll say is that I'm having fun with things, communicating with others, challenging myself to the 140 character limit and trying a few different writing techniques--my favourite thus far is the serial--sequential posts that tell a tale in real time. As usual, if my longposting schedule leaves you hungry for more of my inanities in bite-sized portions, you can find me @cardamomaddict.

Anyway, our dear Hélène of La Cuisine d'Hélène mused about a Tweeted and blogged event celebrating Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and the Julie and Julia film. Truthfully, I don't follow that blog and when I perused the book I thought the writing was pedantic and lacklustre. Yes, I know they're popular--they're just not my cuppatea.

But the idea of a Julia Child blogging event kept hold of my imagination.

To participate all we had to do was blog a recipe from either Volume One or Two of Julia's influential books.

Problem. I don't have a copy of either--they are on my "eventually I'll get to them" list. No copies were found at any of the used book shops I checked and I really didn't want to drop $50 on either tome. Desperate to participate the answer came to me: in the thousands of foodish posts housed on the interweb should be a number of recipes from these two tomes.

I was right.

Shari of Whisk came to the rescue with this post that lists a number of Julia Child recipes as posted by various bloggers. Given my own time and pantry constraints, along with a craving for gooey-centred poached eggs, I found my entry recipe for oeufs à la bourguignonne, courtesy of Melissa of The Traveller's Lunchbox.

Really: mushrooms and bacon in a red wine sauce with poached eggs. It combines so many of life's good things...why would I choose anything else to celebrate Julia?

Red wine sauce is incredibly simple and goes wonderfully with eggs, beef and chicken and really should be part of the usual repertoire. Of course the ideal is to make your own beef stock, but I used water-soluble squeeziebeefie. The sauce didn't take that long and can be left to its own devices for most of the time it's on the hob. I made a full recipe, keeping leftovers in the fridge to be used with a bit of beef and umm...for dipping torn bits of bread and bagel into.

Thanks Hélène for organising the Mastering the Art of French Cooking event. If you're interested in what others are doing, please visit her round-up.

cheers!
jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!