Iconic Recipes from Julia Child

Those that know us know we love to cook. Yet we have never had the iconic Julia Child cookbook in our library. Still stuck at home and now inside with record low temperatures coming this weekend, we decided to tackle a few recipes.

We never owned this book before. I chose the 50th anniversary edition as it has been updated to some of the more “modern” techniques.

We found through the process that there was still 22 years of “modernization” that had occurred since 1999!

This night it was a classic Sunday dinner of Chicken Fricassee, French style risotto and buttered asparagus. Easy, right?

We started cooking at 4PM and sat down at 7PM, following every step as closely as possible. It was delicious but still a lot to learn!

The recipe calls for 3 separate preps actually. The first was the mushrooms then the pearl onions. The chicken had their own additional prep. If using the cookbook directly there is a lot of flipping back and forth.

Cooked in a beautiful butter sauce they smelled heavenly. The mushrooms and onions can be prepped first and kept warm until time to pull together into the dish.

Now the onions and it smelled even better in the house.

We then pulled the entire dish into the Dutch oven to cook on the stovetop (no, not the oven). For some reason we did not take any photos of the actual dish cooking.

So happy it looked as good as it smelled!

And we had leftovers for days!

The sides were easy, allowing us to focus on the main dish. Julia Child’s version of risotto was very different than what we’ve become used to with Italian dishes. Much more subtle to allow it to soak up the delicious Friccasee sauce.

We paired with a young California Pinot Noir. Delish!!!