Mondays are hard enough for most people, marking as they typically do the return to the work week. Mondays that also happen to be beautiful Spring days (as is the case hereabouts) are tougher still. To help ease your soul, here’s another installment of Eating Authors, the weekly blog segment that asks Science Fiction and Fantasy authors about their most memorable meals. Our guest this week is Jim C. Hines. I had the great pleasure to include Jim in the pages of Prime Codex, the first book from Paper Golem. On the (ahem) off chance that you haven’t read that anthology, you might have come across Jim’s work in his Jig the Goblin series (Goblin Quest, Goblin Hero, Goblin War, and Goblin Tales), and his Princess series (The Stepsister Scheme, The Mermaid’s Madness, Red Hood’s Revenge, and The Snow Queen’s Shadow), and more recently Libriomancer , the first of a promising new run.
LMS: Jim, welcome to the blog. Because you write series of books, I suspect you’re not going to give me a single answer to your most memorable meal, so tell me about two instead.
JCH: My two most memorable meals are closely related, though they’re memorable for very different reasons. It started twenty years ago. I was over at my girlfriend’s house, and she decided we should make pasta together. Not the “Empty box of noodles into boiling water†spaghetti I make for my kids these days, oh no. She wanted to go all out. We made the dough for the noodles, rolling it flat, and cutting them into thin linguine-sized strips. We made the sauce, using a wine-flavored vinegar and various other ingredients I’ve long since forgotten. If memory serves, we rounded it off with French bread and sparkling grape juice.
This was one of the most delicious dates I’ve ever had. So much so, that a year or so later, I tried to recreate the experience on my own.
That was a mistake. My girlfriend was a very skilled cook. I was not. I didn’t have the recipe or the ingredients for making my own pasta, so I started with boxed macaroni. I didn’t know how to make sauce, but I remembered the wine-flavored vinegar. Sadly, all we had was regular old vinegar, and I had no wine to mix with it … but I did have Grape Kool-Aid!
I would not recommend these particular substitutions, especially in combination.
And this is why, when it’s time for me to make spaghetti for the kids, they get noodles out of a box and sauce out of a jar.
Thanks, Jim. I think this is the first don’t try this at home segment we’ve had here.
Next Monday: Another author and another meal!
Tags: Eating Authors
