The Crabby Cook - by Jessica Harper

I’m blown away by the NYTimes story about the woman who has written down everything she’s made for dinner for the last fourteen years.I can’t help but imagine what my own dinner journal would look like, had I undertaken such a project. Read More

Okay, today is Day 3 of The Hell Of Lasagna, a mini-series inspired by my friend Jeffery who claims that making lasagna is easy. (I know, WTF, right?) If you missed Day 1 and want to catch up, click here. If you missed Day 2, click here. If you are bored with this whole exercise, just go watch Hulu or something.

As the next in what seems like an endless series of steps towards eating this damn dish, I was planning on roasting a chicken today. I should have roasted the chicken yesterday, probably, and made the white sauce today, instead of the other way around, but crabby cooks are not known for expertise in food organization. Read More

When people ask me for advice on cooking (this rarely happens except in my imagination), I usually begin my response by saying, “Don’t ever  make lasagne. You know the Spanish Steps in Rome? Well, lasagne has more steps than that.” So I was immediately attracted to an article my friend Suzanne sent me about a restaurant that serves lasagne with 100 layers. I have to recline in the Baracalounger just thinking about this.

Mark Ladner is the chef at Del Posto restaurant in New York, where he says it takes three “departments” to create the lasagne (which sells for $30 a serving). One group makes the three sauces (yep, three, trois, a full trio) that go into the dish, one makes the giant sheets of pasta (I have no idea how this happens so don’t ask me) and one assembles it all in a giant baking pan. So, Ladner does have help. No wonder I find lasagne challenging. The only extra “department” besides myself I ever had in my kitchen was the fire department, that time I forgot I was broiling garlic bread.

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I’ve found that this is one of those dishes that make men want to marry you. I could be imagining things (moi?), but I don’t think so: if you serve this pasta at a dinner party, the men look at you differently after the first bite. This causes their wives to look at you differently, too, of course, in a way that’s less friendly. Since I only have dinner parties once or twice a century, this is actually not much of a problem for me, but you should be forewarned.

In my family, only me and my dog Oliver love this dish.  The rest of the group are frightened by foreign cheeses. But if your family are more adventurous (and sick of mac and cheese), or if you’d like your male dinner guests to want to marry you (you homewrecker!), this is the dish for you. Read More