Dan and Annie Shannon are offering a "humane alternative" to Julie & Julia — by "veganizing every recipe in The Betty Crocker Cookbook." The results — despite lack of meat, eggs, and dairy — look pretty delicious.

Julie Powell: "Somehow, it seems to me, there's something particularly eye-opening about the pans for Cleaving...some way in which writing about the book seems to reveal as much or more about the reviewer as about the book being reviewed." [XX]

A combination of the writer-learns-to-clown/cobble/farm genre and that newish breed, the personal-meat-journey, with the subgenre that might be called the infidelity-food memoir (a venerable oeuvre pioneered by M.F.K. Fisher, advanced by Ruth Reichl and Judith Jones), Cleaving gives good blood.

Critics say the Julia Child half of Julie & Julia is wonderful, thanks to Meryl Streep's predictably excellent performance, but even Amy Adams could not make modern day blogger Julie Powell likable.

• Lindsay Lohan is on the cover of Elle UK — the shoot where jewelry went missing! — and here's what Editor-in-Chief Lorraine Candy writes in her Editor's letter:

Writes pantry-saint Michael Pollan, "You may think of [Child and Steinem] as antagonists, but that wouldn't be quite right. They actually had a great deal in common... and addressed the aspirations of many of the same women."

Julie & Julia is based on one great book and one okay one, so it's no wonder that the film's premiere, at Mann Village Theatre, should be a mixed bag - and full of food and Hollywood celebs...plus Alice Waters.

Despite being the horseman of the inevitable movies-from-blogs apocalypse, and the fact that the actors involved look approximately 0% like the real people, we are extremely excited by this preview for Julie and Julia. [ONTD]