Seven years ago, a bored and canny New Yorker -- ''too old for theater, too young for children and too bitter for anything else'' -- set out to cook and blog her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Julie Powell clearly had ambitions, but she never could have dreamed that her 365-day, 524-recipe odyssey would lead to Julie and Julia the book and, opening Friday, the Meryl Streep movie.

Nor could Powell have imagined that she would inspire a very Miami homage to another towering culinary figure. On July 15, MomsMiami.com blogger Christina Gomez-Pina declared her intention: ''I'm going to tackle Nitza Villapol's Cocina al Minuto -- yes, the Cuban Julia Child's guide to Cuban cooking -- from cover to cover.''

Villapol, a home economist who was also compared to Betty Crocker, was Cuba's most enduring radio and television cook. Launched in 1951, her Cocina al Minuto (''Instant Cooking'') was on the air until 1995, a year before her death in Havana at age 74.

Villapol's Cocina al Minuto cookbook traveled to Miami with countless exiles and has been published in many subsequent editions (a good number of them bootlegged). It remains the Cuban cookbook you are most likely to find in South Florida kitchens.

When we heard that Gomez-Pina, The Herald's marketing director, had undertaken her ''Christina and Nitza'' project, we knew we had found the perfect Miami nod to Julie and Julia. The edited excerpts from her blog that follow will give you a taste of the undertaking so far.

-- KATHY MARTIN

JULY 15

I love cooking and trying all those Food Network-style recipes that require lots of chopping and prepping and little gadgets and containers, pots and pans. But to really cook, like my abuela -- now, that's a different story. So, yesterday, I started my project.

Recipe #1: Caldo de Res (Beef Broth). I took out the pressure cooker -- yes, by myself. My husband has always helped with the tricky gadgets. You know, there's a guy my grandmother knows who lost an arm opening the olla de presión before he should have -- those things are scary! (Urban legend.)

I got the soup bone, water, salt, tomatoes, green peppers, garlic and perejil (parsley) and I was set. Nitza said to let it cook for 2 hours, but since she didn't have a pressure cooker, I had to call my references for a conversion.

''15 minutos,'' said my abuela. ''30 minutos,'' said my suegra. Since my grandmother had been the one to instill the fear of the pressure cooker in me, I went with my mother-in-law and she nailed it. Once the cooker stopped making the ''chaca-chaca'' noises, I transferred it into my kitchen sink to run cold water over it so I could open it.

When I took off the lid, it happened. I had made soup, from scratch, without anything fake or premade. By myself! Wow!

Then I counted the rest of the recipes in the soup section: 49. Then I had to sit for a second and think . . . Maybe I'll post all 49 times but maybe I won't. I can't make any promises, but I'm on a mission.

That soup tasted so good; I was cooking like I should be. . . . But it's just beef broth? All this for beef broth? Yes, all this for the base of getting started. Buen provecho!

JULY 23

Recipe #2: Caldo de Pollo and Recipe #6: Sopa de Pastas. Nitza shows you how to make caldo de pollo and lists a sopa de pastas a few recipes down, which pretty much gives you the green light to add pasta by the tablespoonful for each cup of broth. There we go -- two soups, chicken broth and chicken noodle soup. Brilliant!