Bon Appétit!

I just watched the film Julie and Julia. I had heard that Meryl Streep channeled Julia Child amazingly. She did. I had also heard that Amy Adams paled in comparison. There I beg to differ. I found Adams engaging, believable, and adorable. Of course, I may have been a tad influenced by the project that her character, Julie Powell, was engaged in—a blog.

In order to write her blog, Julie had to fulfill the goal she set for herself, cooking her way through Julia's pièce de résistance, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Blogging I can do, cooking not so much. Those of you who follow my blog regularly may have read my entry, entitled "The Only Thing Julia Child and I have in Common." The answer, you may recall, was not cooking.

But back to blogging. As a fellow blogger, I wondered how exactly Julie managed to create a blog that went viral. Her witty, self-deprecating style probably helped. And her dedication to blogging every day, plus the one-year deadline she set to accomplish her goal, may have drawn readers in, too. Then there was the thing the blog was about—Julia Child and cooking. Every day, Julie would prepare a recipe or two or three from Julia's cookbook and readers would anxiously wait to learn the results. It was an adventure of sorts, Julie's own kind of Mt. Everest. But the greatest thing about Julie's endeavor was that she just plunged in and did it, without expectations of any reward beyond the thing itself, beyond the nightly cooking and eating and communing with Julia through preparing the food and then writing about the experience.

Here's a toast to both Julie and Julia, who were looking for something to do and wound up creating recipes for their own lives—bon appétit!