Julie Powell, author of the bestselling and beloved book, "Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously," has died from cardiac arrest at the age of 49, according to the New York Times.
Powell first rose to prominence as a food writer after she made the decision to chronicle her year cooking all 524 recipes from her mother's copy of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1." It wasn't going to be an easy road. Powell was an untrained home cook and, as she put it in the book she wrote about her project, her kitchen was located on top of "the rotting floorboards of [her] 'fixer-upper' 'loft.'"
