We’re used to being a day late.  We’re usually much more than a dollar short.  But we still like our food and one of the best foodies hit her milestone yesterday, even if she wasn’t around to celebrate it. 

Julia turned 100.

For many, Julia Child never died.  Neither did Lucille Ball, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, or Dean Martin.  As long as television reruns and movies on demand, DVDs and U-Tube, video archives and PBS are around, so will be our favorite chefs, singers, actors, and whats have you.

How often have you held this conversation in your house when you heard of the death and/or the upcoming concert of a celebrity?  “I thought he was dead already.”  We aren’t sure if it’s a good thing or not.  We go on watching cooking shows every Saturday morning never even considering how old the show might be.  It doesn’t matter if it was taped in 1967, 1987, or 2007.  Cooking doesn’t change much.  With cooking shows because the hosts are usually wearing aprons, you don’t even have the cues of fashion to narrow things down to a decade.  (Now in the real, real old ones the hair can still give it away and that rarely leaves you muttering “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”)  (The hair, that is.)

But they still make a few like our girl Julia.  You can probably still catch the shows with Julia and Jacques Pepin (who is a very youthful and quite alive 76) and would wonder who will out-compliment the other.  Now there are two people on television who you wish could come out of that box and make us dinner.  But we think we’d like them to do it one at a time.  We can double our pleasure that way.  

John Folse (a veritable television child at 66) could make us dinner also.   His choice of protein might be a bit unusual.  Not often do you see a television chef make goose cacciatore or squirrel with pan gravy but he does and does it in a manner that leaves you wondering “I bet that’s even good with plain old chicken.” 

John’s twists on the prizes of Louisiana leave us thinking a bit of Justin Wilson but with a more understandable accent.  There wasn’t a crawfish that Justin Wilson didn’t like and even though we aren’t sure if we like them, how could you turn down dinner and a show when the show comes in the form of the stories that made Chef Wilson the “Louisiana Original.”  You’ll still see Justin on U-Tube and hear him on radio and he would be closing in on 99 if he was still around to close in on anything.

There are some younger television chefs – yep, even younger than 60! – who we wouldn’t mind if they pulled into our driveways, knocked on the front doors, and greeted us with “Dinner’s on me tonight.”  But we’ll wait a few years before we reveal them.  There’s not as much fun in it if you can’t ask, “isn’t he dead yet?”

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?