A few nights ago I sat down to watch “Julie & Julia” for the first time, hoping it would live up to the praise that many of my friends and family gave it. Within the first ten minutes, I had my answer.

Amy Adams and Meryl Streep play Julie Powell and Julia Child, respectively. Powell, in a sort of rut in her career, decides to cook her way through over 500 recipes contained in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a year while writing a blog about it.

This plotline is interwoven with a story that took place over 50 years later: how Child became a world-famous cook.  The many similarities of these two women’s lives are cleverly captured in the film: less-than-satisfying original jobs, friends they can lean on and supportive husbands.

Aside from the fact that I respect both Adams and Streep’s work as actresses, the movie was well written, with a good supporting cast. Add the fact that I love food and am writing a blog of my own and you get a movie I was bound to love.

Since I didn’t know much about Child before watching “Julie & Julia”, I was pleasantly surprised with the bubbly, optimistic character I grew to love in just a couple hours. Once she set her mind on learning how to cook, she simply did not take no for an answer. I found myself laughing as she whizzed past the men in her cooking class that was supposed to be for professionals only.

I also found the growling in my stomach to grow louder as the movie progressed, but that’s a whole different story.

Throughout the movie I felt that I could relate to Powell’s excitement as she set up her blog and began her whirlwind adventure of cooking and writing. I appreciate her perseverance: she kept writing while she was unsure if anyone read her blog because it was important to her. It wasn’t helping her career—or her marriage, for that matter—but she stuck it out because she was determined to accomplish her goal. And that is something that everyone, non-writers aside, can admire.