tesoroOG 2001

If you wanted to understand the heart of eZabel's mid-2000s community, you could do worse than following the trail of garlic, punk rock, and exclamation points left by Jahanna Crocevera. An OG member since August 2001, tesoro arrived from Long Island with an Italian last name that means "true cross," a screen name gifted to her by ilikebirds (Thai, who once tried to woo her by speaking Italian and started calling her tesoro -- "treasure"), and an energy level that never dipped below eleven. She posted 3,336 comments across a decade of activity, peaking at a monstrous 995 in 2007, and somehow managed to make the Food forum feel like appointment television.

Jahanna was the site's unofficial food correspondent, and she took it personally. She chronicled her kitchen adventures with the passion of someone narrating a boxing match: the triumphant leg of lamb stuffed with garlic, parmigiano, and fresh herbs that wowed her in-laws; the turkey chili she declared "BA-GANGING!"; the homemade tomato sauce that came out terrible and left her "quite upset"; and the meatballs that twice defied her, their insides stubbornly mushy despite her Italian pedigree. She posted entire recipes -- gyro meat with tzatziki, chicken pot pie, split pea soup, a not-sagna she swore she invented before Rachael Ray -- and tracked her daily meals on eZabel like a public food diary, confessing her weekend sins of Taco Bell and Rita's Italian Ice before repenting with bananas and grilled chicken. She once admitted she refrained from ice cream solely because she would have had to post it on eZabel. The woman held herself accountable to a forum.

But tesoro was far more than recipes and restaurant reviews. She was a punk rock girl who adored Goldfinger, worshipped small venue shows, and would fight anyone who compared Sugarcult to Midtown. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of drive-thru records bands, confessed to a guilty pleasure love of Sarah McLachlan and the Backstreet Boys, and maintained that the Goldfinger lead singer was "SEXY! not hot...totally different" -- a distinction her best friend punkprincess (Tina) flatly refused to accept. The two of them were inseparable, a matched set right down to their alt account names: tweedledum and tweedledee. They called themselves cousins -- "we get along way too well to be sisters!" -- and thefunkyfresh helpfully clarified that one was a chimpanzee and the other a monkey, which Jahanna owned completely: "because I climbed trees frequently as a youngin." Their inside jokes, finished sentences, and synchronized opinions on everything from Britney Spears to the lead singer's attractiveness were the stuff of eZabel legend.

She married xboarder72 (Austin Duchaine) on January 17, 2005 -- her first boyfriend, first love, and the source of some of her best stories. There was the time he surprised her at Blockbuster after she had given him grief for skipping a weekend visit, and the elaborate Baltimore anniversary getaway where they watched a lightning storm from the tenth floor of a Marriott. She wrote about married life with the same candor she brought to everything: the frustration of cooking for three hours only for Austin to eat one and a half plates, the weird realization that they were "allowed to be alone in a house together," and the fact that she never cried until she fell in love with him, after which she couldn't stop the tear ducts even while opening presents. She defended their relationship against self-righteous congregation members, fiercely supported his drywall business, and joked that she needed four kids just so all her food would get eaten.

eZabel Personality Type: ESFP -- "The Entertainer." Her crew was tight and loyal. fivezero was her top interaction partner; socalgal, iwz, juicymango, and forrestina rounded out her inner circle. She attended 40 events, started 34 forum threads, and shared conversations with 126 different members. She was proud of her Italian heritage without being obnoxious about it -- she could rattle off the history of Margherita pizza, school you on the difference between pecorino romano and parmigiano, and lecture you on why Prego was "sacrelige" -- but she also genuinely loved exploring other cultures, geeking out over Greek mythology, planning trips to Greece and Turkey, and dreaming of learning Spanish at her doctor's office job. She was fiercely opinionated, openly emotional, relentlessly funny, and utterly incapable of cooking in small batches. She counted steps without realizing it, hated the word "ROFL" because it looked like "ralph" (which meant throwing up), invented the acronym ALAP ("As Late As Possible") for reluctant pioneers, and once posted every single type of pickle in existence in response to a poll.