My take on the movie "Julie and Julia"

I just saw this movie for the first time this past weekend, courtesy of Netflix. And yes, I immediately recognized the parallels between my life and the life of Julie Powell (both writers, both young-ish, both feeling that we would be farther along professionally, both like to cook). I do have the point out, though, that the movie was released nationally in August 2009 and I started this blog in December of 2008, so no direct copying there. Also, I honestly hadn't heard of Julie Powell and her blog before I started this one. Besides, our goals were totally different. And why am I defending myself to y'all anyway?

I can appreciate wanting to take on a task as monumental as cooking/blogging through the entirety of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and then debating whether you were actually sane when you decided to undergo such a feat. That's pretty much the feeling I have toward this blog. If you've been paying any attention to my original list of recipes, you would see that I am about five short from completing my goal. However, life gets in the way of these things sometimes and I think it's important that I'm continuing to blog regardless of the actual recipes I make. But to Julie Powell's credit she trudges through the whole cookbook, even cooking more than one recipe per day since the cookbook's 524 recipes divided by 365 days equals 1.4. I wonder how that worked out.

Julie is also comparing herself to people around her who are much more professionally advanced than she is and feels that she will never compare to them as long as she stays in her current job. From what I gather, she was able to stop working post-movie or post-book deal, whichever came first, and now spends her days as a full time writer. Jealous, party of one. But her feelings of inadequacy didn't immediately spur her to start the blog to one-up her friends or land a book deal. She had no idea that would ever happen. She just thought she would be spending time doing something she enjoyed that didn't revolve around work. She liked cooking, she liked writing, so she combined the two. She also wanted to have something she could finish for once. A goal she could work toward and be able to say at the end, "I finished something." Honey, I know the feeling.

So in the end, and I'm really not spoiling anything here, both Julie and Julia get their desired results (Julia with her cookbook and Julie with her new found fame thanks to the blog) and they all appear to live happily ever after. The only problem I have is that the movie ended so abruptly, but hey, they didn't consult me. But what I loved about the movie is that they actually showed the Julie character cooking throughout the movie. She makes lobster, hollandaise sauce, poached eggs and even bones a duck toward the end of the movie. I'm not into boning any ducks, but the recipe of Julia's that I would love to make is Boeuf Bourguignon, which you can retrieve here from the website of the company that originally published her cookbook back in the day. I am totally going to do this meal, but it will have to wait until a weekend so the proper amount of time can be devoted to it.

So, the movie was good, the lesson was even better, and I loved the connection with cooking and blogging. Highly recommend it.