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I rescued a turtle from the road while I was running this morning. He was a cute little guy. Small enough for me to pick up with one hand, with yellow markings on his shell. Pretty brave for a turtle, too. He didn't start to pull back into his shell until I was a couple feet away from him, and didn't pull all the way in until I picked him up. I carried him to the side of the street and put him in the underbrush, about six feet from the road. He came out of the shell and started reaching for the ground before I had even finished putting him down. I stayed for a minute, watching to make sure he didn't head back out into the road. (Lower animals are sometimes stupid that way. Come of think of it the higher mammals can be too.) But he just hunkered down in the underbrush, waiting for me to leave probably.

The amazing thing is that two cars had passed right before I saw the turtle. I didn't see them swerving, but they managed not to hit him. That was one lucky turtle.

I just finished reading a Julia Child biography called Appetite for Life, by Noël R. Fitch. Child has had a fascinating life. I knew that her husband had worked in foreign service, but I didn't know that when she met him, they were both working for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA), during World War II, in Ceylon and China. Apparently she knew nothing about cooking and had little interest in food until falling for Paul Child, who was quite the gourmet. She learned to love food in China, and learned to cook in Paris when they were stationed there after the war. Just think if they had stayed in China. Would she have learned to cook Chinese instead of French? Would public television have given a show to "The Chinese Chef"? What would that have done to American cuisine in the 60s and 70s?

So I was expecting a great read, and got it for the most part. Unfortunately my enjoyment of Child's life story was marred a bit by bad writing. The book was poorly organized; for one thing, Fitch has a bad habit of dropping in names a few paragraphs, pages or even chapters before explaining who they are. Which reminded me a bit of talking to some self-important name-dropper who keeps mentioning people that you're supposed to be impressed by, except you've never even heard of them. And when you say, "who's that," they give you this smirky look because they're so happy to have the chance to explain how extremely important this person is. At which point you suddenly have a desparate need to refresh your drink / use the restroom / say hi to someone across the room / anything to get you away from such a bore.

Another problem I had was Fitch's frustrating vagueness on some points. For instance I really wanted to know more about Child's relationship to Jacques Pépin. As they're both teachers, authors, and TV hosts in French cooking -- the only two French TV chefs at one point -- I wondered whether they were friends, just professional acquaintances, competitive with each other, what. The book mentions that they did many cooking demonstrations together, including the infamous one where Child badly cut her hand and did the show anyway, but that's about it.

The structural frustrations got to me so much that by the end of the book, I was snarking at Fitch's writing style, including excessive use of parentheses which may or may not be relevant to the previous sentence. In one place I counted parentheticals after eight sentences in a row! I have a bad habit of overusing parentheses myself, but that's a bit much.

Because of the writing, I really can't recommend buying this book. However, Julia Child is an incredibly interesting person who had an tremendous impact on the way Americans cook and eat. So it's probably worth a read if you find it used or in a library, and you're interested in food. I paid $8 for it at that big used bookstore on Franklin St., which was a bit too much. If it had been $5 I would have felt like I got my money's worth.

The funny thing is, whoever owned the book before me had left two reviews tucked into the back flap. A good one from a Columbia, SC local paper, and a really negative one from the NY Times. Typical quote from the Times: "The indigestible result [of Fitch's research] -- ungainly, repetitive and unnecessarily gushing -- reads like the world's most heavily annotated resume." Alas, I would have to agree with that assessment. This is going to sound really cold, but I hope that when Child dies someone else writes a better biography.

On the bright side, reading about Julia Child inspired me to drag out my yellowed (older than I am!) copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Last time I tried to work with this book, I made a mess of things. I didn't know enough about cooking at the time to know the importance of the order of the steps, especially in sauces. I remember an attempt at a bearnaise sauce that ended with a horrible, curdled mess that literally made me vomit just from looking at it. (Have I ever mentioned how much I hate eggs?)

But now, *ahem* years later, I feel much more confident of my ability to a. work in the kitchen, b. follow a recipe, and c. choose a recipe that won't make me ill. Seriously, what was I thinking, trying to make a bearnaise? I can't stand eggs. I guess I thought it woud be lush and elegant and somehow wouldn't taste or smell like egg when it was done. Which might have been true if I had done it right.

So anyway, I saw several recipes that piqued my interest in Mastering. All the ones I liked seemed like cold weather fare (roasts, gratins and so forth) so I think I'm going to give them a try this fall. Georg told me that he was reading a blog somewhere by a woman who's working her way through Mastering, recipe by recipe. I'd love to read that, but he can't remember the URL. darn!

Speaking of food, a couple nights ago we went to our friends Christa and Ray's for dinner. They've been doing an amazing amount of work on their house, including a total renovation of one bathroom. Which impressed the heck out of me, considering how much work our bathroom was, and we paid someone else to do it. Christa kept apologizing for the state of the bathroom, but jeez, for a half-finished room it looked pretty damn good to me. They've already got the laundry machines in, and there's another working bathroom in the house, so they're in pretty good shape.

Well that wasn't about food, was it? The food part is that I had already run through all my good low-carb dessert recipes with them, so I tried a new one: panna cotta and balsamic strawberries. I hate making a new dish for the first time for company, but it turned out pretty good if I do say so myself. I think by itself the panna cotta would have been too much, but the vinegary, peppery strawberries cut the richness. It called for black pepper on the strawberries, but I used white pepper instead, thought that would be a little more subtle. I always make the dessert when we eat with friends, because desserts without sugar or flour require a bunch of specialty ingredients, which I already have. The funny thing is, now I feel all this pressure to come up with an even better dessert next time! I mean, you can't just make a different flavor of cheesecake every time. That's no fun.

We tried -- and failed -- to figure out what "panna cotta" means, an attempt which was hindered by my incorrectly remembering it as panne cotta. Bizarrely, it isn't in my favorite Italian cookbook, The Splendid Table, but I looked it up online and it means "cooked cream." It's interesting how dish names from other languages often sound all exotic to us, but in the language of origin are simple and prosaic.