web-toedchloeOG 2001

If eZabel had a kitchen, Diana Jovanis would have claimed it on day one, hung a sign that said "Don't Touch My Knives," and spent the next six years turning it into the best restaurant nobody could visit. From the moment she started posting detailed cooking tutorials in the Food forum -- the kind that ran longer than most people's journals, complete with technique notes, ingredient substitutions, and gentle warnings about the consequences of burning your garlic -- it was clear that web-toedchloe wasn't just someone who liked to cook. She was someone who thought about food the way other people thought about music or philosophy: as a craft worth mastering, a creative outlet, and a way to take care of the people she loved. Her meatball recipe alone read like a love letter to her Italian and Greek grandmothers. Her Manestra -- orzo roasted with chicken, tomato, and parmesan -- was her childhood on a plate, and she wrote about it with the kind of reverence most people reserve for sacred texts.

But Diana was far more than the site's unofficial chef. She was a voracious reader with a deep love of dystopian fiction -- 1984 was her all-time favorite, read seven times and counting -- and she could hold her own in any literary discussion, from Vonnegut to Huxley to the merits of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. She had strong opinions about punk rock, arguing passionately with rocksupastar that Fall Out Boy was not punk and never would be, that lyrics were poetry and deserved to be judged as such, and that the scene she and katiedid had lived through was dead and irreplaceable. She related to John Cusack in High Fidelity and was unapologetic about it. Jawbreaker was her favorite band. The Get Up Kids' 4 Minute Mile was the album she bought right before pioneer school, the one she fell in love with her husband to, and she still got misty hearing "I'll Catch You." She was a paralegal who dreamed of being a chef, a writer who once had a full scholarship to study architecture at NJIT and turned it down, and a woman who could explain the difference between Le Creuset ceramic and enameled cast iron with the same precision she brought to dissecting a Dashiell Hammett novel.

Her relationship with Donovan Remaley -- doonavin on the site -- was woven through nearly everything she wrote. They started dating before she joined eZabel, got engaged in early 2004, and married that fall. She chronicled the wedding planning with spreadsheets and bridal shower surprises, navigated the in-law dynamics with a frankness that was sometimes breathtaking (her novel-length post about the cultural gulf between her fiercely independent family and Donovan's close-knit one was one of the most honest things anyone ever posted on the site), and eventually followed him from New Jersey to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and then to Connecticut -- each move a little further from the NJ friends she adored. Her closest bonds were with socalgal, iwz, fivezero, and juicymango, but she had a gift for the kind of thoughtful, specific advice that made everyone feel like her close friend. She helped tesoro troubleshoot tomato sauce, walked beachbum through real estate paperwork, gave ekulu a measured but devastating response when he took criticism of his writing too personally, and once spent an entire forum post teaching a complete novice how to cook chicken from scratch -- starting with "heat a pan" and ending approximately two thousand words later.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFJ -- "The Protagonist." She was a twin -- her brother Anthony went off to college while she went to pioneer school, and she chose the school -- and she carried the loss of her mother with quiet grace. Her office stories were legendary in their own right: the receptionist who buzzed her about the office fish, the coworker Robin and her theatrical stomach ailment, the attorney who couldn't understand that 11 plus 69 equals 80 when the 7 is already counted. She told these stories with the comic timing of someone who genuinely could not believe the world she'd been dropped into, and they became a running feature of the Musings forum that people looked forward to almost as much as her recipes. She was blunt when she needed to be, tender when it mattered, and had a particular talent for the kind of advice that starts with "I understand what you mean" and ends with something you didn't want to hear but needed to. By 2007, she was exploring the idea of leaving law entirely to pursue cooking professionally, eyeing a chef position at a gourmet market and reading molecular gastronomy textbooks. Her final return in 2011 was a single post promoting her massage therapy website -- Diana had reinvented herself yet again, but the instinct to nurture and feed people, in every sense, had clearly never left.