Sometimes things just don’t go as planned, the other night was no exception. The plan was simple and I had high aspirations. I was going to introduce my wife to the epitome of cooking with wine, the extravaganza of culinary wonderment and simplicity that is beef bouguignon (beef burgundy). Not only would it be a wonderful dinner for a cold, rainy Texas night, but it was the perfect excuse to pull out my new casserole/dutch oven.

Unfortunately for me, that’s not the way things turned out. I don’t know if the cards were stacked against me, or if Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Goulet got together and decided to play a prank on me. In any case, the dinner I planned was apparently not meant to be.

I was sure I had everything I needed. I’d been planning to make beef burgundy for weeks, and had stocked the ingredients well in advance. Here’s how it played out.

• I bounced excitedly into the kitchen to slice the beef… Not gonna happen, it was still frozen in the middle.
• I went to pull out the mushrooms… Ugh! Those were white mushrooms when I bought them, weren’t they?
• Fine, I can live without the mushrooms, I suppose. I’ll just grab the egg noodles… That I used last week for a pasta salad.

After sputtering expletives and downing one or two glasses of the Gallo Twin Valley Hearty Burgundy that I’d picked up especially for this meal, I gathered myself together and hit the internet for some ideas I could use with the ingredients that were in my pantry.

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As a kid my culinary heroes were Martin Yan, Graham Kerr and Julia child.

Martin made it seem manly to cook, with his constant banter and signature chopping cadence. (I’ll still stop flipping channels today if I hear that sound. It’s as distinctive as his voice.)

Graham Kerr was, in my father’s opinion, “A Fruit.” But his energetic style captivated me, and I happily flipped to PBS to watch when I could.

But Julia.

What can you say about Julia? She was iconic. She was two of my aunts and my grandmother all wrapped up in one very captivating package. She talked about foods I, in my young life had never heard of, it was all so exotic and enrapturing.

She’d make mistakes and then quip happily “don’t worry, this won’t happen when you make this!”, when every other cook would have made another take. She dropped things. She sometimes seemed on the verge of spewing a string of expletives that would make my father blush.

Julia’s kitchen was as much a part of my home as my own. And I got to revisit it this morning, virtually at least.

The Smithsonian Institute has a new website on Julia Child’s kitchen. It includes a 360 degree panorama of the kitchen and a detailed look at 66 kitchen objects which are interactive with stories and videos. www.americanhistory.si.edu/juliachild

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