Julie & Julia & Lauren

Hi all!

I am creating this blog as a digital diary of the triumphs and failures in my attempts at learning the art of cooking (possibly baking too, if I get brave). For the next four months, I am on a mission to teach myself the basics of cooking and to learn the answers to some simple questions, and the questions are these...
1. Can I, with only four months experience, host a party and cook (a decent meal) for my friends and family?
2. Will learning how to cook my own meals make me more responsible and aware of my daily life?
3. Lastly, could I be Julia Child's child prodigy? :)

I plan to go through Julia Child's book, Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom – essential techniques and recipes from a lifetime of cooking, and pick a good thirty different recipes and try them out for myself. I also intend to interview some local chefs.
*(if you happen to be a chef, or just a cooking legend in your family, please contact me! I can really use all the outside tips/support I can get!)
My goal for this project to to host a dinner party at the end of four months for my family and friends, and (hopefully) make them a delicious meal. I am also going to create a recipe book of my favorite recipes that I can take with me into college and beyond.
*(If you have a favorite recipe that you want me to try out, email it to me! This would definitely help me pass up the trial and error stage of finding a few recipes out of the millions that are out there. :) Thanks!)
Now, I should warn you: I have attempted to cook only twice in my life time, and both times turned out to be disastrous. I have been all but banned from the kitchen at this point, which admittedly hasn't bothered me all that much; I never saw the point of learning to cook if someone could make my meals for me. But now, I'm about to go off to college where I'll eventually have to fend for myself in the food department. Not to mention the fact that my future kids will no doubt go hungry if I don't.
So, with that said, I have decided to do this! I bought the book; I've got my apron, and I'm ready to go...I hope. Anyways, I've started my experiment in the culinary arts, and I can't turn back now (especially because I don't want to fail my AP English project, which this is. Leave it to school to get me going on something I actually need to do.)
For any cook enthusiast who comes across my blog, or just anyone who wants to follow my journey into cooking genius, I encourage you to come along! I also would love anybody's feed back; it helps me digest (cooking humor) an outside point of view on a project that is very personal.
Stay tuned for some culinary craziness, cooking conundrums, and delicious disasters...

Your enthusiastic acquaintance,
Lauren

PS ~ My computer as been having some difficulties, so please ignore the wacky text changes, I promise to have it fixed soon. And you didn't even notice, thank god that you aren't obsessive like me. :)