Gifts for Cooks: Movie and a dinner

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Call it the “Julie & Julia” effect: Walking out of the theater after seeing the movie with friends, we instantly canceled our dinner reservations, stopped at the grocery and then went to our house to cook.

In case you somehow missed it, “Julie & Julia” is director Nora Ephron’s brilliant splicing of food blogger Julie Powell’s book based on cooking her way through Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in one year, and Child’s own memoir “My Life in France” (co-written with her nephew Alex Prud’Homme).

Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Jane Lynch, Stanley Tucci in suits you’d kill for -- it’s the movie that launched a thousand dinner parties. And now it’s out on DVD. All I can say is I hope it’s going to be a long winter with many boeuf bourguignons.

“Julie & Julia,” $28.96 for DVD and $39.95 for Blu-ray disc.

-- Russ Parsons