The Crabby Cook - by Jessica Harper

I am currently in a cooking rut.

This happens occasionally. I cook something new that accommodates the tastes of my diners, decide I like it very much, and then, too lazy to come up with a fresh idea that caters to everybody’s extreme pickiness, I repeat the recipe until I feel like I am in the movie, Groundhog day and change is essential. I just completed such a cycle with Sunday Hash. Read More

I am assuming that Italian Wedding Soup was so named due to its popularity at Italian weddings. I’d like to posit that, because of its ease of preparation, the soup is especially suitable for a shotgun wedding, when celebratory food is needed in a big fat hurry. Read More

This is the sort of recipe that you come up with when you are too lazy to go to the market to buy real ingredients but you have to eat so you make something up based on the limp contents of your fridge. Read More

The trouble with going to the farmers’ market is that everything looks so gorgeous I buy enough to feed everyone in my zip code. Then I go home and realize that I actually have to do something with all this bounty, as in, cook it, at which point I have been known to utter a mild curse. Read More

Because of its color, it took years for me to get my kids to eat pasta with pesto sauce. Pasta was one of their favorite foods, but only if it came in white. The girls even found red sauce undesirable for a long time, but green was completely out of the question. It was way too suggestive of the odious world of vegetables. Read More

My daughter Nora is tweeting from Florence, with pics of her wine tasting in Tuscany, eating local pastries, partaking of her Italian mom’s home made jam and sampling pasta in local restaurants. This is giving me a bad case of Eater’s Envy. My most recent brush with Italian cuisine was in a restaurant in Sherman Oaks called La Dolce Vita or something whose menu featured “Spaghetti a la Bb Hope.” Read More

I am in Cape Cod today, on vacation with my husband’s extended family. Yesterday it was my turn to make dinner, and I envisioned a gorgeous piece of broiled bluefish. I made the fatal mistake of sharing this vision with my in-laws. Read More

Anne, my sister-in-law, was having a ladies’ potluck dinner for her sister-in-law. Well, actually it’s her soon-to-be sister-in-law, who is marrying Anne’s brother, who also happens to be my friend Amy’s brother-in-law. I know, don’t even try to figure that out. Read More

Sometimes I like to go to the farmers market and buy something I haven’t cooked with before, that I can’t even identify, whose origins are unknown to me. I’ll go home, Google it, get familiar with its ancestry and quirks, and figure out a recipe for it. Read More

My older daughter is a college senior, living in an off-campus apartment with two guys. I just went to Providence to help her get installed and, while I was already happy that she was rooming with Ned and Adam, I am even happier now. Not only are they kind, gorgeous, and tidy, but Adam can cook. (That’s him in the pic, displaying his baking skills.) Read More