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Hi Guys-

Well, it's happened, five years after her death and thirty eight years after it was first published, Julia Child's quintessential French cookbook, ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking' has made it to the New York Times bestseller list.

To this day, it remains the only cookbook to explain how to create authentic French dishes in American kitchens with American ingredients. By teaching techniques of French cooking, Julia Child singlehandedly turned American housewives into gourmet cooks.

I used to race home from school to watch old reruns of Julia (as I called her) cooking everything from soufflé to lobster (yikes, that was awful, I must say). She was masterful and goofy, funny and wise, graceful and clumsy and I loved her and her cooking. I was hooked, something that many people who make their livings in kitchens will admit.

I remember meeting Julia for the first time. I was brand new to television and we were both at a national public television event. I was dying to meet her. As I stood in a hallway one day, lo and behold, Julia Child was walking toward me in all her height and eccentric splendor. She was with a young woman and as she strode past me, she said,' Now remember, I want to meet that new young woman who doesn't cook with butter.'

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Ethanol has been viewed as the motor fuel of the future for more than a century--Henry Ford, anticipating eventual petroleum shortages, designed the Model T to run also on it--but it also has many disadvantages, both economically and environmentally, and it is not the energy panacea it is often presented to be. U.S. ethanol production is still minuscule, relatively speaking. In 2006, it amounted to less than 5.5 billion gallons. Alcohol, when burned, yields only about two-thirds as much energy as gasoline--a fact that explains why your car gets better mileage on pure gasoline than it does on any ethanol blend--those 5.5 billion gallons provided the energy equivalent of 3.5 billion gallons of regular unleaded, or about enough to keep all of America's gasoline-powered engines running for something like two weeks. Yet producing even that modest amount required 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop that year, along with billions of dollars' worth of ill-considered federal subsidies and import restrictions, and contributed to higher prices at American gas stations and grocery stores. It also boosted consumption of natural gas: corn cultivation depends heavily on nitrogen fertilizers, which are manufactured primarily from natural gas, at the rate of approximately 33,000 cubic feet of gas per ton of fertilizer, accounting for approximately 5 percent of the world's annual gas production--and exacerbated food shortages all over the world. Global food prices rose 83 percent between 2005 and 2008, mainly because of increases in direct energy and fertilizer costs but also partly because of the diversion of foodstuffs, in the United States and elsewhere, into the production of biofuels. (The price of corn alone rose 124 percent between early 2006 and early 2008, from $250 a metric ton to $560.)