Author Julie Powell's blog 'The Julie/Julia Project,' was put in book form and is now a film starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie. Powell spent a year preparing all 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. AP Photo/Little, Brown and Company

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Julie & Julia chronicles the real-life story of Julie Powell, a food-obsessed New York secretary and aspiring writer who decided to devote a year of her life to preparing all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Powell blogged about her experiences, then turned the blog into a book, Julie & Julia, which became the basis for the film.

We caught up with Powell by phone last week to hear her thoughts on food and more. Here’s what she had to say:

Question: We came up with our own 10 reasons we love Julia Child. What would be your one reason?
Answer: I love Julia because she taught me to forgive myself and move forward. Her lesson is that mistakes can happen, and making mistakes means you’re learning and growing.

Q: What made Mastering the Art of French Cooking the most logical cookbook to devote a year of your life to?
A: It’s a comprehensive book, and it’s structured like a cooking course. And I don’t know of any other cookbook that is so evocative of a personality. Julia is just infused in those pages.

Q: What was the hardest dish to make from Mastering the Art of French Cooking?
A: There are lots of difficult recipes, but there are lots of different kinds of “hard.” The aspics were involved and had many steps — it was like a moral struggle to make it through them. But in terms of technique, I would have to go with the pate de canard en croute, which required boning a duck and stuffing it with pate. I felt pretty proud of myself when I completed that one.

Q: In doing your project, what was the most indispensable item in your kitchen?
A: I’m not a big gadget girl. But having good pots was important — heavy-bottomed pots that were swag from my wedding. I didn’t need a ton of them, but if I was working with the cheap stuff from Kmart, the project would have been a lot different.

Q: What’s always in your fridge?
A: I always have eggs. And I do always have butter — I don’t have as much as I used to, but there’s at least a stick in there. And I always have wine.

Q: What’s your favorite food movie — or favorite food scene in a movie?

A: Honestly, this is really cliché, but I’m going to have to go with the Tom Jones scene (when a meal becomes a series of sexual taunts). Sex and food are intimately related and seeing that played out in a comedic way is truly fun.

Q: You still live in New York, so tell us, what’s your favorite restaurant there?
A: I kind of have two. The first one is Lupa Osteria Romana (170 Thompson Street, 212-982-5089, luparestaurant.com ) I’d be happy to go there once a week for lunch for the rest of my life. I always have the bavette cacio e pepe (a pasta dish with cheese and pepper). The second is Prune in the East Village (54 E. 1st St., 212-677-6221, prunerestaurant.com ). You go to so many New York restaurants and you pay for trendy food that’s got no soul to it. But at Prune, there’s such passion to the cooking.

Q: Your next book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (to be released later in 2009), is about the art of butchery. What drew you to that?

A: I love butchery because it’s both hard work and delicate work. I find there’s a poetry to that.