French Food.

I am pretty much a cooking genius.

Last night I made a Shepherd's pie for dinner.  I even made a menu for the week... which included 16 bean soup with ham on Saturday, baked chicken on Sunday, a chicken pot pie on Monday and Shepherd's pie yesterday.  The mashed potatoes and gravy that I made on Sunday were pretty much an epic fail, but I recovered nicely with the chicken pot pie on Monday and the Shepherds last night (secret to a fantastic chicken pot pie: phyllo dough for the crust.  FORGET ABOUT IT!)

I rented Julie/Julia on Sunday to watch.  It makes me want to Master French cooking.  Which brings me to another point:  I <3 Meryl Streep.  I know- thinking Meryl Streep is a great actress is about the same as liking Apple Pie.  Boring.  I know.  But I just love her.  I really liked her as Julia Childs... but even more in the Devil Wears Prada as Miranda Priestly.  One of my favorite quotes from a movie is in the Devil:

This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

LOVE. 

In any case, I am tempted to learn french cooking.  But I suspect I do not have the time to commit to such an endeavor.  So maybe I will shelve that till later.  At least till I get a dishwasher :)