"Crazy Sista Cooking: Cuisine and Conversation with Lucy Anne Buffett" is the next best thing to being there. Inside you’ll find laugh-out-loud anecdotes, wit and wisdom from Lucy’s own kitchen, festive party menus, Buffett family favorites, and plenty of telling it like it is.

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A Letter from LuLu

Dear Friends,

This is not your basic “how to” cookbook. I like to think of it more as a visit to my kitchen.  You’re sitting at the counter as I vigorously chop vegetables and loudly tell stories with a sometimes annoying drawl.  We’re drinking some iced tea or something stronger, in which case, I tend to get louder and my drawl gets crazy lazy.  Good music is playing in the background, and I mean good songs with melodies and lyrics that rip out your heart or make you feel like a princess, like Frank Sinatra, Jackson Browne or Seal (not that devil music that sounds like a lot of scratchy screaming and passes sometimes for a song).  There is plenty of laughter bouncing off the walls as tree frogs squirm across a picture window overlooking the bucolic river.  Pick any random day; that is where you can find me, cooking up a storm and talking up a blue streak with family and friends around the stove.

Sample Recipes

LA Cavier

L. A. (LOWER ALABAMA) CAVIAR
This is one of my favorite LuLu's dishes and I make it at home all the time. During one memorable chapter of my life, I ran with a group of highly disreputable folks who lived in lavish historic homes on Washington Square in Mobile, Alabama. We had weekly soirees complete with costumed cabaret numbers around a white baby grand and copious amounts of cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. Right before I opened LuLu's, we had a reunion celebrating my friend Suzanne Cleveland's 60th birthday. One of our "partners in crime", John Coleman, arrived with a great black-eyed pea dip. John is a barbecue aficionado, redneck lawyer and rogue gourmand; so, it gave me great pleasure to steal his recipe! I had just returned from living in Los Angeles so I gave it a little LuLu's twist and the L.A. reference: a perfect fit for my high-class dive. It has been on the menu at LuLu's since day one and is one of the restaurant's signature dishes. Today, we make it in twenty gallon batches.

Dressing:

  • ¾ cup balsamic vinegar
  • ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
  • ¼ cup sugar
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper
  • 4 (15-ounce) cans black-eyed peas, rinsed and drained
  • 1 cup chopped green bell pepper
  • 1 cup chopped yellow bell pepper
  • 1 cup chopped red pepper
  • 1 cup chopped red onion
  • 1 ½ cups cherry tomatoes, quartered
  • 1 cup chopped fresh parsley

DIRECTIONS

  1. Combine all dressing ingredients in a jar; cover tightly and shake vigorously to dissolve sugar. Set aside.
  2. Rinse and drain peas well. Place in a large glass or aluminum bowl.
  3. Add remaining ingredients and dressing. Toss well. Transfer to plastic container, cover and refrigerate for at least two hours before serving.
  4. Serve with tortilla chips or saltine crackers.

Makes 20-25 Servings