Plugs

I believe I have finally, finally, recovered from the exhaustion produced by the recent Worldcon. Or at least I’ve stopped using that as an excuse and gone back to working on the next writing project. Exhaustion aside, I’m still floating on air from the incredible reaction I received from fans over The Moons of Barsk. And it certainly didn’t hurt that two of the three dealers carrying the book at the convention had completely sold out by the time I made the rounds to sign their stock.

But enough about the Worldcon. To introduce this week’a EATING AUTHORS guest I need to harken back to a previous convention. I first met Mareth Griffith back in May during the Nebula conference when I was hanging out with some folks from Parvus Press. She’d traveled a long way to be there. Mareth lives in Seward, Alaska where she works as a naturalist and wilderness guide. Apparently this involves leading the unwary (she calls them “adventurous souls”) on epic quests involving glaciers, bears, and whales. She assures me she comes by this lifestyle naturally, having lived and worked in Scotland, New Zealand, and Northern Ireland – where she claims her nearest neighbors included two thousand puffins and the ghost of a spectral black horse. Sounds like a writer to me.

Her first novel is Court of Twilight, and it surely won’t be her last,

LMS: Welcome, Mareth. Speak to me of your most memorable meal.

MG: For the last four years, I’ve spent most summers sailing around Southeast Alaska, working as a wilderness guide aboard a tiny cruise ship. Being a naturalist with an interest in wild edibles, I spent a lot of time trying to convince passengers to eat things I find growing in the woods.

On one particular trip, a tour company from Japan had chartered the entire boat for a weeklong trip, and brought along several of their own translators. And lots of their own food – suitcases and suitcases full of food the guides had shipped over with their baggage, or specially ordered from vendors in Juneau, or had air-mailed up from Seattle. Sashimi, wasabi paste, soba noodles… It was apparently part of the charter arrangements that the tour group emphatically did not want to chance American cooking. That was, apparently, one part of the cultural experience these travelers were not interested in experiencing. So, our chef gave up his usual array of king crab and sockeye salmon for a lot of stir fried vegetables, sticky rice, and miso soup.

On the last day of the trip, the Japanese tourists and I were spending a full day kayaking around a cluster of islands north of Sitka Sound. For our lunch stop, I decided to head to a particular beach on one of the largest islands of the archipelago. Paddling through a narrow channel, the passage opens up into a small lagoon, where the remains of an old dock sit, crumbling, along the edges of a vast expanse of green. The meadow is carpeted with one of my favorite wild edible plants. Salicornia pacifica, also known as glasswort, or beach asparagus.

Even for someone who loves foraged foods, I will be the first to confess that eating certain wild greens can be about as exciting as the prospect of eating badly cooked kale. Some greens can be bitter and stringy if they’re too old, or watery and bland if picked too young. Not so with beach asparagus. The plant has a thick stalk, as slender as a soda straw, with a crunch to it like a potato chip. Growing as they do on the edges of the tide line, they’re often pre-salted like a potato chip as well. Although stir-frying them cuts down on the crunchiness, I like them best when eaten raw, with that pleasant snap and salty aftertaste intact.

On this particular beach, the asparagus grows like a carpet, covering perhaps an acre altogether. Walking through it reminds me of the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where the kids are wandering through the park, eating everything they see.

As we sat down on the remnants of the dock, and began to unwrap our lunches, I pointed out the beach asparagus, and encouraged my guests to try some. Their eyebrows went up in surprise. A few of them broke off some stalks. One lady tentatively popped one into her mouth. The eyebrows went up some more. Several more of the group broke off stalks, amidst animated discussion in Japanese.

Then, I partially unwrapped my veggie wrap and added a handful of the raw stalks. I usually do this when I’m eating lunch in the field (have I mentioned the crew food on this particular boat wasn’t the most appetizing?) but I have never had a group adopt the practice as enthusiastically or completely as this group of Japanese kayakers. Eyes lit up. Mouths opened in surprise. Immediately, everyone on the beach started disemboweling their own wraps, salads, and rice concoctions, breaking off handfuls of the beach asparagus to add to their dish.

After a moment, one of the ladies, eyeing the line of shrubbery beyond the beach, asked, through their translator, was there anything else growing here they could eat?

Oh yes!

Leaving our kayaks by the old dock, we prowled the edges of the meadow, coming up with smaller quantities of goose-tongue (salty but bitter, with a crunch almost as good as the beach asparagus), beach green (lettuce-like and mild), and venturing a short way into the forest for the cucumber-like flavors of the leaves of the twisted stalk, topping off the resultant salad with a handful of wild blueberries and crowberries.

I couldn’t understand very much of what my guests were saying amongst themselves (I was staying quite busy making sure that the plants being harvested were, in fact, edible ones) but their expressions told me all I needed to know. Even when someone didn’t like a particular plant, they only seemed even more enthusiastic about getting everyone else to taste it, too.

#SFWApro

The seventy-sixth Worldcon ends today (and boy are my arms tired). If you’re reading this before noon and you’re anywhere near San Jose, you may still have time to make it to my reading in 211A of the Convention Center. If not, oh well. As you probably suspect, I’m writing this post before the convention has even begun, so I can’t yet give you my take on all the amazing things that happened there, nothing about the surprising upset at the Hugos, nor the author who said that thing that has already polarized our community, nor even the rumor that the most serene republic of san marino is staging a coup to take over next year’s convention in Dublin. Sorry, no spoilers.

What I can tell you is that this week here on EATING AUTHORS we have another Canadian writer, Omar El Akkad, who, like last week’s guest, is a finalist for the 2018 Sunburst Awards for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.

He was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar, moving to Canada in his teens. As a journalist he’s covered the War in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the the Arab Spring in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, MO.

American War is Omar’s first novel. Odds are good that if you like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, you’ll enjoy this debut.

LMS: Welcome, Omar. Amidst all your travels, what lingers as your most memorable meal?

OEA: I was born in Cairo. I left when I was a child, but the vast majority of my extended family still lives in Egypt. I go back every few years – to see my relatives, to report on the myriad political and social calamities in which the country seems perpetually embroiled, and to visit my father’s grave in the El Akkad mausoleum within the City of the Dead. Like many immigrants, my relationship with my homeland is one of negative space – I feel a kind of unbelonging everywhere I go, but I feel safest in my unbelonging here.

I remember one night, about ten years ago, my cousins took me out to dinner in a restaurant that, for most of the day, doesn’t exist. I was in Egypt on assignment for my newspaper, working on a story about the wild fluctuations of the country’s burgeoning stock market. I was the one who had pitched the story and yet I was now growing sick of it, sick of the fact that I had come all the way to this place that lives in my marrow only to write a throwaway article about such a quintessentially Western phenomenon – a stupid institutionalized greed whose hallmarks were no different here than in London or New York or anywhere else. I asked my cousins to take me to the most Egyptian place they could think of.

That night they drove me to a wide downtown street, its lanes separated down the middle by a tree-lined median. Old buildings towered over both sides of the street, their bottom floors occupied exclusively by small shops whose signage projected a cascade of gaudy neon into the evening.

But the street itself was empty – no car traffic of any kind. On either side of a two-block stretch, a group of boys and men had just barricaded the intersection. I watched as dozens of people began dragging wooden chairs and tables into the newly made clearing, turning the street into a makeshift restaurant. I couldn’t tell if the people doing this work were employees, volunteers, or folks who were simply walking by and decided to lend a hand. Cairo is the sort of place where, if you look even remotely in need of assistance, half the city will come to your aid. There is no quicker way to make ten new friends in Egypt than to ask one Egyptian for directions.

My cousins and I sat at one of the tables. A few seconds later, a kid came over to take our order. There was no menu, no expectation we would not know exactly what it is we wanted. After all, the place only served one thing – an Arabic dish called Foul (pronounced “Fool”). It’s a dish composed of fava beans, olive oil, diced onions, tomatoes, maybe some lemon juice. In much of the country it is breakfast food: cheap, utilitarian fuel that has been a staple here forever. Poor-people food that, like all poor-people food, is eaten by everyone. With the exception of a gilded kleptocracy and an all-but-vanished middle class, Egyptians wrestle constantly with poverty, and poverty produces food that lasts.

In less than a minute there was no more space on our table. Out came the bowls – this one in the style of the Cairenes, that one cooked the way Alexandrians like it. Plates of pickled beets, carrots and turnips, an endless parade of Arabic bread that doubled as cutlery. In the raucous expanse of this street turned dining room, I ate until I couldn’t breathe.

These are the meals I remember, moments of communion with a culture and a history and a people that are at once mine and distant from me. Food is the most effortless vessel of memory, and to break bread is to eradicate exile.

#SFWApro

As you know, Bob, yesterday was World Elephant Day. Tomorrow is the release of The Moons of Barsk, my second novel featuring anthropomorphic elephants. But let’s stay in the present and talk about the elephant in the room (for want of a better segue), which is this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Terri Favro.

Terri lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. She produces copy and content for everything from direct mail ads to websites to print and radio. She’s writes essays and graphic novels and novels. Last month, her novel Sputnik’s Children, landed her on the short list for the Sunburst Awards, which are given out in recognition of Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Really, that’s all the endorsement you should need to go pick up a copy.

Earlier this year she released Generation Robot, a nonfiction volume looking at the history of our ever-changing relationship with robotics and technology that will change the way you envision the future (not to mention your household appliances).

LMS: Welcome, Terri. Let’s talk about your most memorable meal.

TF: I’m Italian. Okay, not a real Italian: I was born in Canada – near Niagara Falls – to parents from the Old Country who grew up (as my relatives in Torino liked to put it) “under the Queen”. Our status as British subjects was their way of distinguishing us from my mother’s American cousins, who ran a restaurant in (ironically) Queens, New York: all of us in the New World were, to the Italian way of thinking, “Americans.”

But other than a taste for Red Rose Tea (a brand only available in Canada, so Mom was in the bizarre habit of carrying tea bags in her purse whenever she and Dad travelled to Italy), my parents were, as all real Italians are, food snobs. My mother judged people by what they cooked and what she saw in their kitchens. A jar of mayonnaise or a potato salad marked you out as déclassé. We lived in an immigrant neighbourhood of Italians, Poles and Ukrainians, and Mom was not above making snide remarks about the neighbours’ perogi and cabbage rolls. Outside of a nice, hot cuppa tea, British cuisine was marked out for particular scorn. Yorkshire Pudding was a mysterious menu item we saw on our occasional trips to restaurants in the big city (Toronto); I assumed it was a dessert until I was invited home for Sunday dinner by an English-born boyfriend in university and discovered it was a cream puff full of gravy. I found it exotic.

Because of my Italian-ish-ness (and despite the Britishness of the long-lost Canada of my youth), life for me has been a series of spectacular meals. My Nonna’s tortellini al brodo and penne arrabbiatta were so good that they set a high bar below which my Nonno refused to limbo: any meal served to him that he judged inferior to Nonna’s, he would throw out the nearest window – and yes, I actually saw him do it. My mother’s polenta with sauce, risotto Milanese, minestrone, creamy Alfredo sauce and the salads she made from dandelion leaves picked near our backyard vineyard were amazing. And those were just day-to-day meals. A special occasion meant she hauled out the big guns, like stuffed manicotti, baked cannelloni or a big, crazy lasagna that was an all-hands-on-deck enterprise for everyone in the family.

So my most memorable meal is not one of the great ones, but the first truly tragic one. It was the one I ate after my grandfather died and my mother was too upset to cook. Neighours rushed to our door laden with home cooked meals (mostly the aforementioned perogis and cabbage rolls) as well as delicacies I had never had before, jello salad being a standout. (Peas and carrots suspended in green transparent slime, like sea monkeys in the backs of comic books – I thought this was very cool an space age-y, if devoid of actual taste.)

But at some point in the grieving process, possibly before the neighbours arrived with real food, we did something that we had never done before: we ordered a meal from a take-out chain: a bucket of Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken.

In the midst of all the sadness, the appearance of the bucket was thrilling. The greasy, bony, stringy chicken eaten with my fingers. The fake-tasting coating. The French fries – chips were a rare treat, something even my mother approved of, but never made.

After consuming all that greasy deliciousness, I was made to wash my hands, put on a scratchy dress and go to the funeral home. I was seven years old. I was shocked by the sight of my grandfather’s corpse stretched out on white satin with a rosary snaking through his fingers, even though he wasn’t particularly religious. Nonno was a much loved storyteller in our family whose recounting of grisly, magical and strangely sexy Italian fairytales probably set me on my way to becoming a writer of grisly, magical and strangely sexy novels. The room was a fug of roses, holy water and old lady perfume.

#SFWApro

Welcome to August. As chaotic as last week was, this month promises an even bigger theme park of rides and attractions including such highlights as my wedding anniversary, the 76th World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, and the release of The Moons of Barsk.

And speaking of anthropomorphic SF, this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest is no stranger to furry fiction. Ryan Campbell has twice won the Cóyotl Award, once for Best Novel (God of Clay) and once for Best Novella (Koa of the Drowned Kingdom). And of course he’s penned other novels and short stories. Rumor has it that he’s hard at work on the third book in his series The Fire Bearers.

Ryan is an alum of the Clarion workshop, and for the last three years has been “paying it forward” as an instructor at RAWR, the Regional Anthropomorphic Writers Retreat.

Meanwhile, back in San Jose, CA, you’ll find Ryan there in November as the Author GoH at PAWCon.

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The last week has been a blur. You’d think that I’d be entitled to recovery time after spending the previous week hanging out with fifty Klingon speakers from around the globe, but no, too many deadlines coincided with this end of the month. Most of them were publishing related, including releasing three books: the Klingon translation of Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, the fourth volume of the novella anthology Alembical, and book two of my collaboration with Jonathan Brazee entitled Scorched Earth.

That last provides a segue to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Chris Kennedy. Ever since my collaboration began, I’ve been getting educated on military SF, and as a result inviting more military SF authors to talk about there meals. And so here we are. Chris is a former naval aviator which probably goes a long way to account for the realism in even his most far future military epics. Somewhere in there he also picked up a doctorate in educational leadership and has been a school principal, which probably goes a long way to account for the realism in his fantasy novels (that’s supposed to be a joke, please laugh here; thank you). Nowadays, he’s a full-time indie author, building an empire, publishing not only his own work but that of eleven other authors as well!

He released his latest book kicks off a new series, the Worlds at War Saga. Book one, The Replicant War was released last Friday.

LMS: Welcome, Chris. So, what’s the best meal you’ve ever had?

CK: The best meal I’ve ever had? It would have to be a dinner I had in Key West, Florida, in the summer of 2005. At the time, I was an officer in the U.S. Navy, and I was stationed at a NATO command in Norfolk, Virginia. As part of my duties, I was on a NATO working group, where we helped develop policy for technology that the NATO nations were implementing. Each of the members of the group took turns hosting the quarterly working group meetings, and it was my turn. I took a poll of the members, and they decided they’d like the meeting to be held in Key West.

In addition to the “nuts and bolts” part of the meeting, including a number of face-to-face conferences where the actual policy was hammered out, at these types of meetings the host normally arranges an evening social engagement, where all the delegates to the conference can come together and get to know each other in a less-formal environment. As we were having the meeting in Key West, I put together a deep sea fishing trip one of the afternoons, and we had enough participants to fill two boats. We went out, had a great afternoon, and returned with a huge amount of fresh fish.

The rest of the attendees met us at the restaurant located at the docks, where we turned over all of our fish to the waiting server, who asked how we’d like them prepared. When told to use his best judgement, he said they’d fry certain ones, grill some of the others, and blacken the rest. They would then serve them with hush puppies and a couple of sides. We sat down with a number of pitchers of beer to await our feast–and boy, was it a feast! Everything was incredible! I’m not a big fried fish fan, but it was the best I had ever tasted, as were the rest of the dishes. Everything was perfect, the camaraderie was awesome, and the weather was perfect to sit in the open-air portion of the restaurant as the sun set.

Many friendships were made that night, which would help smooth the way forward with our meetings both then and in the future. The word “perfect” is often overused, but that evening, that day, and that meal were just that. Perfect.

#SFWApro

I’ve been away for most of the past week, hanging with dozens upon dozens of Klingon speakers, arguing points of grammar, singing songs in a made-up guttural language, and enjoying the fellowship of this unique family that I began bringing together back in 1992. Switching gears back to English and EATING AUTHORS is hard, but bringing you this week’s guest, Delilah S. Dawson, makes it easier.

I’ve only met Delilah once. It was last January during the most excellent convention known as Confusion. Our paths kept intersecting during the weekend, but I think we really bonded as we trudged alongside one another on Diana Rowland’s Frost Fun Run Walk Roll Crawl Gasp Flail. We survived (I have the medal to prove it) and along the way she told me about the book she was working on with Kevin Hearne (which came out last week) and I shamelessly played upon her hypothermia to get her to send me a meal for this blog.

You probably already know her work. She’s the best selling author of several Star Wars novels, the Blud series, the Hit series, and short stories in a wide range of anthologies. She also writes comics, including Ladycastle, Adventure Time comics, and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth 2017 Special, to name just a few. Under the name Lila Bowen she’s written the acclaimed Shadow series. And along the way she’s won the Fantasy Book of the Year from RT Book Reviews and the Steampunk Book of the Year, and more starred reviews than there’s space to go into.

Whether it’s media tie-in SF, Young Adult, Steampunk, or Paranormal Romance, Delilah S. Dawson delivers the goods.

LMS: Welcome, Delilah. Tell me about your most memorable meal.

DSD: Once upon a time, I flung myself into the sea, and the sea threw me right back. It seems strange to condense a suicide attempt into one simple sentence, but I’m a writer, and that is my job. It was over twenty years ago while I was part of a student exchange program in France, and although I know my reasons were justified, I can definitely see the flaws in my proposed solution. When I crawled back onto that beach in Biarritz, squeezing water from my lungs and surprised to persist in existing, I had returned from a very dark, primal place, and I have never been the same since.

My exchange family had no idea what I’d tried to do, what I’d almost done. They were happy on their summer holiday and enjoying themselves, lounging and reading under the colorful umbrella, whereas I had undergone a seismic shift down to my bones. It’s very strange to choose death and then find yourself alive again, especially when no one else is aware that a tragedy was barely averted. There is no guidebook for how to go on living.

I flopped on my back in the sun and realized I had to learn to go on. With my arms flung out, I practically begged the world for clues, but no answer was forthcoming. And as I lay there, I began to catalogue sensations, noticing and appreciating things in a way I never had before. The wind in my hair. The scent of suntan lotion and salt water. The sound of children laughing in the waves and calling to one another in different languages. The world felt entirely new, as if it were suddenly in focus after years of being unrecognizably blurry. When we left the beach that afternoon and walked along the boardwalk to find dinner, I was overcome with gratitude for being alive.

Papa chose a tiny seaside restaurant, the kind with maybe two tables and a basement kitchen, where a younger family member tells you what they have and brings it to you piping hot while Maman shouts orders out the window. The meal was so simple: fried haddock, white rice, green beans, and water without ice. But it was the best thing I’d ever tasted. Even the French word for haddock brought me delight: aiglefin. I ate everything on my plate, marveling at the tastes and textures with each mouthful, overcome with the beauty of the sunset and the feel of salt drying on my legs. My host family continued on as usual, and I was filled with love for them, this family that had taken me in for a month, a complete stranger, and treated me like their daughter and sister.

That’s when I realized what I needed to do. On the way back to the hotel, I asked if we could please stop by a stationery shop, where I bought a notebook and began listing all the things that I loved.

I love the sun on my skin. I love the wind in my hair. I love the sound of children laughing in the waves.

I love the taste of fried haddock, fresh and hot, served over fluffy white rice.

For the rest of my trip, I kept writing in the book.

I love Nutella on day old baguette. I love sitting under dappled trees by the river. I love pluots. I love sitting by a bonfire in the middle of nowhere, translating Led Zeppelin lyrics for cute French boys.

And I didn’t stop writing in that book when I got back home. The entries changed, but the love remained.

I love walking barefoot in freshly cut grass. I love curling up in cold sheets at bedtime. I love eating frozen Twix bars on a hot summer day.

That book got me through one of the hardest years of my life. Even when things got dark, even when I might’ve again considered throwing myself into one sea or another, I could read that book and think of all the things that I had loved, all the things that I did love. I could find some small thing each day to write down. I could go on, knowing that I needed to fill that book completely—and then buy another book and fill that one, too. And I could know in my heart that no matter how hard the present moment might seem, I could find something new to love. If not that moment, if not that day, then tomorrow.

I have never tasted fried haddock again. If I did, I know it wouldn’t taste like it did in Biarritz that summer, in the moment when the world came back full force to remind me why I was alive and to show me, fiercely, that love was worth fighting for.

#SFWApro

Here in the greater Philadelphia area, the first week of July has been stupidly hot, with multiple days hitting 99°. Being the delicate flower that I am, at times like these I cower inside my air conditioned home. Which surely is why my A/C opted like Elvis to leave the building on the hottest day of the year. We went without for a day and a half before we could effect repairs, the digital thermostat taunting me with the news that it was 89° inside the house.

There’s not much to do in such situations but distract yourself with thoughts of cooler and happier times, which is what led me to thinking about the last time I last saw Dyrk Ashton, this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest. It was back in January, in Detroit, at one of the best conventions I know of. It’s always a challenge to fly into Michigan that time of year, but this trip went smoothly, and I enjoyed hours of conversation with Dyrk in the hotel’s bar. It was only months later that I came to learn he’d knocked around Hollywood as an actor in an array of films he insists no one has ever seen (including the role of a “truck zombie” in Night of the Living Dead), before returning to his native Ohio and traded his life experience for a doctorate in film studies and a teaching gig at a university. When he tired of that, he noted that brick and mortar schools were so very 20th century and took his teaching online.

The digital academic life agrees with him, and has even allowed him time to write. The result is his Paternus universe, the second book of which, Wrath of Gods, comes out tomorrow.

LMS: Welcome, Dyrk. Whats been your most memorable meal?

DA: Wow. I have had so many incredible meals it’s hard to choose. Reading through the posts from other authors, I saw that most of them describe meals they had while traveling, and realized – it’s the same for me. I’ve had amazing and memorable meals here in the States, including homecooked dinners with family (my mother’s meatloaf with potatoes and carrots is to die for), but they tend to run together in my mind.

The ones that really stand out as individual experiences are indeed those I had while traveling. An unbelievable steak in Rosarito, Mexico while on a trip with a friend celebrating our birthdays, which are only a day apart. A cut of seared grouper with roasted red-skin potatoes and Caribbean slaw in a dockside café while on the Puerto Rican island of Culebra. A simple bowl of lamb stew at a bar in a small town in Ireland. Maybe a half-dozen others come to mind. So difficult!

For my humble addition to Eating Authors, though, I think I’ll go with the grouper. My mouth is watering right now just thinking about it. I can feel the warm sea breeze, smell the briny air, hear the waves lapping against the dock… Ahem, okay.

For those who aren’t familiar, Culebra is a small Puerto Rican island only a few miles long, east of the main island, San Juan. It’s a wonderful place to get away to, with beautiful beaches but relatively unknown to tourists, mostly because there are no large resorts. A friend of mine owns a house there that sits on a hill. From his pool patio you can see St. Thomas. I have been there over a half-dozen times, but about six years ago I went down on a mission. My buddy had a sailboat he wanted to sail to St. Thomas for repairs and some renovation, the plan being to then sell it, and he needed someone to sail along with him. When he asked if I’d go along, I hummed and hawed – Not. Of course I leapt at the chance and bought my ticket immediately.

After I arrived and had been there a few days, however, he was called back to New York to take care of some business and family affairs. The sailing trip was off. I had nothing to complain about. I would have the house to myself, in the Caribbean. And so it was for the rest of my stay.

One night I decided to drive into Dewey for dinner – the one and only town on the island, and not very big at that. This was something I did regularly but this particular night I found myself at a small, open-air restaurant right on the water of Dewey Bay. It wasn’t a fancy place. Plastic tables, no table cloths, and plastic lawn chairs. There were only four other people there, all sitting together, so I easily got a table at the edge of the dock, where I could look down and see fish swimming not three feet away from my sandals.

The menu had a few regular dishes, but mostly it was a handwritten list of the several items they had for the day. Grouper is my favorite fish, so I immediately ordered that when I saw it. I also knew they caught their fish right off the island, and I was assured the grouper had been brought in only hours before.

I’ve had grouper many times, but never prepared like this. Instead of a filet, it had been cut straight down through the spine, so it looked almost like a fat U-shaped steak, smaller at the ends. It was over an inch thick, and a sizable hunk of fish. My first thought was I’d never be able to eat it all. I was wrong.

It was served with roasted red-skin potatoes swimming in butter and a side of Caribbean style slaw, which is rather sweet. Those were absolutely delicious, but the grouper itself was heaven. I’m no chef, so I can’t tell you how it was prepared other than on a grill. It came apart easily with a fork, and the first bite nearly knocked me over in my chair.

It still had that marvelous grouper texture and flavor, but other than that, it tasted like fresh lobster. I’d never had grouper like that before. I had to force myself to slow down and enjoy it, and I ate every bite.

Later that night, while I swung in a hammock looking over the moonlit sea, I tried to work out some plot kinks in the novel I was working on. But all I could think about was grouper. Having dredged up this memory, I’m afraid it will be on my mind all week. Come to think of it, it has been awhile since I’ve been to Culebra…

#SFWApro

This week’s EATING AUTHORS guest and I share an odd bond. She did her undergraduate studies at the same small and eccentric school where I spent my first years as a professor. Alas, I left a couple years before she arrived, but I know the magic of the place well and I’ve no doubt that it affected her in ways both subtle and profound.

Ellison Cooper has a doctorate in anthropology, so among other things she can say she’s conducted research on the island of Yap. That’s some serious and cool-sounding street cred. From archaeology to cultural neuroscience, the study of ancient religions to human rights, murder investigation to wilderness K9 search and rescue, her full resume reads like a better version of Indiana Jones. It was only a matter of time that she wrote a book, once she paused long enough to do so.

Her first novel,Caged, is being published by Minotaur Books, and comes out one week from tomorrow. It features an FBI neuroscientist protagonist, manufactured DNA, near-death experiences, and psychopomps. What’s not to love? If we’re fortunate, it’s just the first of many more books to come.

LMS: Welcome, Ellison. I’m always especially excited to ask this question of anthropologists: What’s tour most memorable meal?

EC: This was a hard question because I’ve had so many amazing meals! But, rather than dwell on the amazing thiéboudienne (local fish and rice) I had in Bargny, Sénégal, or the unounet (coconut molasses candy) in Yap, Micronesia, I thought I would talk about the tomato I had once in Belize because it is honestly the most memorable food experience I’ve ever had.

When I was in graduate school, I lived way out in the jungles of Central America on a nature preserve right where Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize meet (called the Program For Belize, go if you ever get the chance!). Our camp was genuinely in the middle of nowhere, a two hour drive on rutted old logging roads from the nearest village. We lived in tents without electricity or running water while we were scouting and mapping lost Maya ruins. Because we were on a research grant, our budget only allowed us to make the long drive into town about once a month so we primarily lived on rice, dried beans, and canned veggies supplemented by the meat we (legally) hunted in the area. We would occasionally splurge on peanut butter and jelly or canned tuna, but that was it.

In the summer of ’97, I lived in that camp continuously for six months before I hopped on the back of the monthly truck heading into town. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some beans and rice, and I didn’t even realize how much I’d missed fresh fruits and veggies until a local woman approached our truck in town. She held a basket of fresh tomatoes and, on a whim, I decided to buy one.

The tomato was warm and still kind of covered with dirt, and I remember biting into it and literally gasping at the vivid taste. I swooned so long that I wasn’t able to catch the woman and buy more! Something about sitting on the hot metal of that truck in the scorching Belize sunshine, covered in road dust and months of jungle muck, eating that warm tomato just seared itself in my memory. Which is why a tomato is the most memorable meal of my life.

#SFWApro