I SPENT LAST week in search of the elusive Mojito Man of Central Park, who illicitly slakes the thirst of the park-goer lucky enough to stumble on him. My friend Sigs thought we might find him in the Ramble, so we asked a passerby to point us in the right direction. He obliged but warned that dusk was turning and that the Ramble ought to be avoided, teeming as it is with gay men. When I reasoned aloud these men would likely be looking for one another, not for us, he clarified that "gay" was just a synonym for "unsavory." I suppose I needed a reminder of why I was coming back to San Francisco, anyway.

Even if not for Mr. Directions, I had to come back for my kitchen. In Brooklyn the talk was that I live in a "palace." Correction, I said, I live in a villa. But after guided tours of several friends' minuscule kitchens, I had to agree: if it's the kitchen that counts, my studio apartment is a palace, albeit a linoleum-encrusted one. If I were Jane Jacobs, I'd get started on The Death and Life of Great American Kitchens – maybe shed some light on the why and how of the urban planning decisions that went into making the New York kitchen, even in otherwise spacious apartments (bedrooms that are embarrassingly huge by our standards), standing-room-only.

Judging from experience, I think I can picture Julie Powell's kitchen when she describes her online Julie/Julia project as "One girl in a crappy outer borough kitchen." One girl in a crappy kitchen Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to be precise. That's right, folks: read, mesmerized, as one woman (OK: aided by a husband) attempts to cook all 563 recipes from Julia Child's weighty tome in 365 days. That's more than one a day, in case your math skills are as, shall we say, underdeveloped as mine. I'll wreck the suspense for you: she succeeded. And promptly went on a diet. And got a book contract.

Although the Julie/Julia project came to a close in August, it's still worth checking out her blog if you're a diehard food-drama junkie (or just like some good writing about living and eating). Powell's prose is redolent with such phrases as "Eric managed to calm me down enough to sniffle to a stop and say Fuck Marination." Ah yes, haven't we all been there. Brings back that time when I finally broke down in hysterics after having been asked, for what seemed like the millionth time in the last minute, when a meal would be ready. "I want that in real time. Is that real time?" the intolerable production assistant kept snapping as my fellow craft service drone and I attempted to finely chop 15 onions by hand with knives that had never met a sharpening stone.

On the trail of the Julie/Julia blog, I stumbled on a whole world of Internet food nerds. Just in Salon.com blogland, there's "Simple Recipes to Help You Get Laid," with food-porn photos: food and drink, juicy, dripping, and photographed in compromising positions. (The text of this blog, however, is a yawn.) And "Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen" graphically details a Midwestern mom's efforts to come up with edible dinner recipes: "All looked well enough, but after plating them and finally sitting down at the table, my husband looked skeptically at a little pool of reddish liquid seeping out the tale end of his bird." Then there's "Playing with My Food, and Other Things ..." As suggestive as it sounds, it's just political musings interspersed with recipes and food- and cooking-related anecdotes. And these are just the beginning – each blog offers links to another blog or food-related site. One blogger page I happened upon (MurrayHill5's) presented a photograph of an earthenware pot with a bubbling white substance inside. The caption: "My sourdough starter, the one I refer to as 'the beast,' is one year old this week!"

A refreshing aspect of food blogs is they often detail ordinary people's frustrations with recipes. If you've ever (and show me someone who hasn't) read through a recipe, or, foolishly, not really read through it and just gamely plowed ahead, you'll be familiar with that sudden pause, reread, and reaction that is "I'm supposed to do what??" Or the experience of attempting a recipe and having nothing the urbane, unruffled authorial voice of the cookbook says should be happening, happen.

It's one thing to read Jeffrey Steingarten's books on cooking, in which he spends day and night methodically deconstructing pie dough (my friend in publishing tells me he has assistants), and quite another to read the outbursts of the harassed admin assistant who attempts sugar-frosted berries in her spare time. The latter is kind of like having a support group. So when your icing is hardening into "malformed chunks of crystal" one evening, just picture yourself connected by invisible lines of frustration to other suckers the world over. No cook is an island.