Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

As the Festival of Lights comes to an end, I’m feeling very blessed. The year is winding down and despite more than a few troublesome bits, I’m still here and the universe still smiles upon me. A recent reminder of that was last week’s return of my tablet which went missing when I passed through TSA on my way home from a conference in Las Vegas a month ago. Perhaps most incredibly, the device still had about ten percent power. There’s an obvious metaphor tying back to Hanukkah, but instead of going down that path let’s get on with this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest.

Every once in a while an author of my acquaintance reaches out to me and says something like “hey, there’s this new writer who’s really awesome and I think you should have them over to your blog and ask them about their most memorable meal.” This doesn’t happen often, but when it does I’m usually so moved by the level of enthusiasm that I’ll check out that new writer and extend an invitation. Which is how Brian Trent, comes to be here.

Brian is a blend of journalist and genre novelist, and his keen interest in science and society pervades his writing in both domains. He appears equally at home in science fiction and fantasy and brings a fresh voice to them. Sampling his work I can see why he was recommended to me and I’m very glad I listened. You should too.

LMS: Welcome, Brian. What stands out in your memory as your best meal?

BT: The best meal I’ve had was in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Rome. The city–and indeed the country itself–had already been surprising me with its constant generosity and commitment to delivering memorable culinary experiences. That might sound obvious: it’s Italy, right, so of course the food would be great! Yet my dining experiences in the country had included places I wouldn’t have thought to have dining experiences, like a wine shop in Assisi, where the proprietors plied me with remarkable cheeses, delicious pastries, rich olive oil, and local black truffles over crispy bread while I sampled their Chianti. I have yet to be fed at any liquor store in America.

In Rome, I was already on a natural high from seeing the millennia-old ruins. My explorations of the city had been so relentless, in fact, that I had forgotten to eat that day, and was suddenly exhausted, hungry, ravenous. Having freshened up at my hotel and realizing how late the hour was, I sprinted off to see what was available in walking distance of the hotel. There was, alas, little to find. Apparently, my little rented corner of the Eternal City was situated in some Twilight Zone borderland where restaurants were somehow rare.

I did end up discovering a small, unassuming place. Upon entering, the proprietor greeted me, and I quickly exhausted my paltry knowledge of Italian in those opening seconds. Studying the menu, I decided on a seafood appetizer (as in, a single appetizer) and a pasta-with-mushroom main dish. Trying to place my order, however, yielded a great deal of confusion with the waiter. I pointed to the item I wanted. He nodded uncertainly, and left.

When he returned, he was accompanied by a phalanx of other waiters bearing what must have been a decent sample of the existing life in the Atlantic. I blinked, bewildered as the table vanished beneath all the plates. What was going on here? Was I being swindled? Had my wonky knowledge of the local language unintentionally invoked Neptune Himself, resulting in this startling bounty of the sea in gratitude for summoning Him? Before I could protest, the waiters were gone. My stomach, already hijacking my higher functions, demanded I eat what was before me. When in Rome, right?

Any residual protest I may have felt suddenly dissolved as I indulged in one fresh-from-the-sea dish after another. There was shrimp, there were clams, there was fish, there were mussels. I felt like Commander Riker from that Star Trek episode, when he decides to prepare for his Klingon exchange program by sampling the entirety of Klingon gastronomy. The preparation was simple yet masterful, flavorful and pure.

After a time, the proprietor came by to see if I was pleased. I scraped the bottom of my Italian vocabulary to try expressing that yes, I was more than pleased. He asked if I was ready to order my main dish. I explained that I wanted the pasta with mushrooms. Immediately, he shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said, disapprovingly. I stared at him, brandished the menu, and pointed directly to what I wanted. Again, he shook his head, waving his hand as if wiping away my suggestion from the air itself.

“Si,” I insisted, trying to reconcile what was happening. It was like arguing with a pharmacist over medicinal properties, or challenging a wizard over spell components.

“No,” he countered, and pointed out three alternate menu items that apparently would please the cosmos considering what I’d already had as a starter.

“Um, okay,” I said at last, selecting the scampi from his approved list. I liked scampi. Why not have it in Rome? After stressing that I only wanted the scampi (and not a cornucopia of every entrée available), I let him scurry off.

Was the meal that arrived actually scampi? The question deserves better than a binary “Yes” or “No” response. The scampi I had at that Italian restaurant was not mere scampi. One bite in, the scintillating flavors spreading like a prismatic supernova across my tongue, I realized that I had apparently never had scampi before. The thing that passed for scampi in American restaurants were anemic shadows on the wall of this ur-and-ultimate scampi. Each bite was a deeper revelation, a repositioning of myself and what I thought I knew. To paraphrase Mouse in The Matrix: “Maybe the machines didn’t know what scampi tasted like…” and here I was, unplugged from the illusion, eating the best meal I’d ever encountered in the real world.

Lesson learned: Don’t argue with Italian kitchen wizards, and be nice to Neptune.

#SFWApro

If it’s December, then it means I’ve survived the stupidity of doing four conventions in the month of November. I’m expecting this to be a quiet month, where my focus will be on finishing a novel, lowering my weight and blood sugar, and exercising regularly. Today is also the first day of Hanukkah, and for those who celebrate, a hearty Chag Urim Sameach to you. Wow, Kislev sure came early this year. I swear, it seems like only yesterday all the stores were playing traditional Cheshvan music.

As a writer, I believe that all quality fiction deals with some aspect of the human story. How we struggle with the tribulations of life, how we celebrate our successes, how we treat one another, how we summon the future. That may not seem like a segue to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, but in point of fact following S. L. Saboviec‘s account of her battle with cancer (stage 4, metastatic breast cancer) has been both moving and inspirational in ways that most fiction can only aspire to.

She’s a year and a month a few days past her diagnosis, marking her as a survivor. She’s been maintaining a blog of her journey (a bit less regularly than she’d like), and I highly recommend it for anyone who is or knows someone who is dealing with similar straits. Here’s a link.

She’s also written three novels about angels and demons. When time and circumstances allow, when she gets to draw on the experiences of the past year, I have no doubt that her fourth book will set the world afire. Until then, here’s her take on her most memorable meal. It’s awesome.

LMS: Welcome, Samantha, what’s your most memorable meal

SLS: Sixteen years ago, when I was but a young, carefree college student, I had dreams of saving the world. My ideas, back then, were a jarring contrast to those I currently hold, and indeed, at the time, I wouldn’t have even recognized thirty-seven-year-old me. Time and life experience has a tendency to change a person, but even I marvel at the jarring contrast between myself now and myself then.

I would describe myself presently as a liberal, feminist, trying-to-be-woke, supporting-marginalized-people, almost-socialist. Then, I was a conservative, small-town-living, born-again Christian, raised to believe the world needed the message I carried in my heart. This impelled me to go on summer mission trips at 18, 19, and 20; this story concerns the mid-summer after my junior year at Iowa State University.

I, along with about one hundred other students and leaders from across the United States, spent a month in southern Africa. We prepared in Maun, Botswana, camped outside a small village called Nxamasere for the bulk of the trip, and finished up with a couple days in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. We built huts, ran a week-long Vacation Bible School for local children, and helped teach locals how to stop the spread of AIDS.

Africa.

Any words I might choose seem overwrought, cliché, or both. It is exactly as you see on TV, only more real, tangible, and beautiful than a picture can convey. Merely seeing the landscape changed me; interacting with the locals sent me on a path toward who I am today.

My most memorable meal happened on the last night we were in Victoria Falls. Our leaders took us to a buffet with a spread of many different kinds of breads, meats, and desserts. I filled my plate with kudu, warthog, and ostrich. My fellow missionaries urged me to try their signature dish: Mopani worm.

I did it. I put the worm in my mouth. I bit into it. It squished apart, and I swallowed it.

I even kept it down.

The meal was a culmination of the whirlwind I’d been through those past few weeks. Yes, people exist who eat insects was a concept that encapsulated my experience. Before then, I knew people like that existed. But I didn’t know know. Eating the worm was as much to solidify the reality in my mind as it was to do something I would not normally do. If I hadn’t eaten it, I was certain, I would regret it for the rest of my life.

But eating a bug wasn’t the most life-changing thing that happened that week. As I sat around the table with the strangers-turned-friends I had made, my thoughts returned to one small occurrence that morphed my entire worldview.

Nxamasere had no electricity. The villagers lived in dung huts and hauled water from one of two wells at opposite ends of their town. My mission group slept in tents about a mile away. One of our projects was to build a latrine for them—with no running water, mind you. Our bathroom was just north of us, a giant sandbox that looked no different from where we pitched our tents.

At night, I sat under the stars and marveled at how brilliant the Milky Way was. Once again, words fail me: we’re all jaded by television and movies, surround sound and IMAX. But something about truly seeing the sky and breathing the African air touched my soul, straightened out my crinkled corners, and gave me new life.

The children who came to the Vacation Bible School ranged in age from three to eighteen. Their skin was obsidian, their hair cut short. They were curious and shy, most of them both at the same time.

During downtime, our translator would allow questions from them to us. They’d heard stories of the Western world, but they’d never been outside their small villages. Where would they go, and how would they get there? As a village, they owned an old jalopy of a car that they would use for emergencies—I never asked where they got gas nor where the car itself came from.

A little boy about seven years old was bursting to ask a question. The translator, who seemed mostly bored by the entire experience, was half-heartedly translating. The boy was bouncing, his hand in the air, so I pointed at him.

He talked animatedly to the translator, who waved a dismissive hand and gave a curt answer in Setswana.

“Wait,” I said before the translator could move on. “What did he say?”

The boy’s eyes were shining. The translator said, “He wanted to know how many water pumps are in your village.”

“What?” I answered.

The translator had been there to pick us up at the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, which was a modern, if extremely foreign-seeming, city. He was clearly not impressed with the wide-eyed naivety of the children. He sighed. “He’s very proud because Nxamasere has two water pumps. Most villages only have one.”

My mind stalled, and before I could think of how to explain, the translator had moved on to another child.

That was the moment my world opened up.

How do you explain to a proud child that in your house, you had more “water pumps” than all of his surrounding villages combined? One room in our homes has three, including one to flush away waste.

It was such a small and apparently easily-dismissed question. Sixteen years later, I still think of it with wonderment. It isn’t about the technology or the living conditions—it was never about that—it was about how different the world can be. The Batswana I met were happy. They didn’t want to live in the Western world. They didn’t seem to feel that anything was missing in their lives. When I looked at them, I felt something missing. But when they looked at me, I saw curiosity, not longing.

For the first time in my twenty years of life, I realized that the world could never fit my preconceived notions. What I had been taught in subtext was wrong. I didn’t need to go out and force the world to fit into my conservative, small-town-living, born-again Christian beliefs. I didn’t have the word for it at the time, but imperialism irrevocably shattered for me.

The night of the dinner, the culmination of the exotic experiences I was finishing, that memory played over and over with me. It simmered for months. It still simmers.

Such a small, innocent question.

Such world-changing ideas behind it.

#SFWApro

I’m writing this from over in Indianapolis where I am a guest of the annual Thanksgiving Weekend convention that is Starbase Indy. Everyone is wonderful here, which you’d expect living in the future, though the qagh in the hotel’s restaurant does leave something to be desired.

And speaking of speaking engagements, a couple months back I was down in Maryland for the annual Baltimore Book Festival. While there I met this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, David Pedreira. David’s novel, Gunpowder Moon, is a science fiction thriller about the first murder on the moon. Cool concept, right? Who needs a locked-room mystery when all your suspects on stuck on an airless world?

David is a journalist turned fiction writer. Gunpowder Moon is his first novel but surely not his last.

LMS: Welcomne, David. Can you tell me about your most memorable meal?

DP: Oh man, this is one of the hardest questions I’ve ever been asked. I’m a food junkie and my tastes run from serious cuisine to burgers and brats on the grill. I did a mental checklist of great meals over the years, and thought of everything from my aunt’s leg of lamb stuffed with spinach and feta cheese to my mom’s homemade marinara, cooked all day on the stovetop with meatballs and hot Italian sausage, and served over linguini. But those are regulars, so I suppose they’re disqualified. I’ve also had many memorable restaurant meals in the U.S. and overseas, particularly in Italy, France, Turkey, and Japan.

But if I had to pick a meal that’s seared into my memory, I’ll go with a campsite lunch of brook trout and fiddlehead ferns at Sawyer Pond, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Sawyer is actually a small glacial lake about 50 acres in size, nestled in between three mountains north of the Kancamagus Highway. It’s about a 4.5-mile hike from the trailhead to the camp site, with terrain involved, so you have to be judicious in what you carry in: tent, sleeping bag, skillet, fishing gear, axe, food, long underwear, toothbrush, and a bottle of whiskey.

The campsite is at about 2,000 feet of elevation, and the lake itself is gin clear, rock-bottomed, and deep. One of the local universities did a survey and found a maximum depth of nearly 100 feet. The indigenous gamefish include brook trout and German browns, but we were fishing from the shoreline so we couldn’t go after the larger “brownies.” They hang out deep.

So the routine is this: you get up when it’s “crackin’” (dawn) and get fishing. By 10 a.m. or so on the first morning, three of us had caught maybe a dozen “brookies”—more than enough lunch for six people. A few of the other campers who weren’t fishing had collected a bunch of fiddlehead ferns. This is a wild mountain vegetable that grows out of the ground like a stalk of asparagus, but with a top shaped like a violin’s headstock. They are delicious; I’d describe them as a combination of broccoli and asparagus, with some artichoke thrown in.

The one camper holding down the campsite had made bacon for breakfast in a cast iron skillet. We cleaned the fish and stuffed them with lemon slices, seasoned them with salt and pepper and a few other spices, and cooked them in bacon fat. Then we sautéed the fiddleheads in the same pan. So, a lunch of freshly caught cold-water trout and wild vegetables, cooked in bacon drippings. It’s hard to describe how good it was. That was about 30 years ago, and my mouth still waters…

#SFWApro

Over the weekend I did my third of the four conventions I’d scheduled for this month — and if I ever post here about my intention to do that many events in one month, please shoot me. This was the shortest of them, as I only popped in for Saturday, mostly to socialize with old friends.

It did get me thinking though, about the author community and the many wonderful and talented people I’ve gotten to meet, both in person and virtually. And in this short holiday week (if you’re in the U.S.), it’s a nice reminder of how much I have to be thankful for.

Which is as fine a segue into this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest as I could ask for, as I’ve known Gustavo Bondoni for ages, ever since our paths first crossed when we were both selling short stories to various anthologies from Hadley Rille Books. That’s not so surprising though, because he’s an insanely prolific short story writer and a regular on the anthology circuit.

Gustavo was born in Argentina, but spent a chunk of his childhood in the U.S. (with a stopover in Switzerland) before returning. He considers himself one of the few Argentinian authors publishing primarily in English. I can only hope that his work is also available locally in Spanish. It would be a shame if it weren’t.

LMS: Welcome, Gustavo. Please tell me about your most memorable meal.

GB: I’m from Argentina, so I’ve been a part of many epic meals involving large chunks of animals roasting on nearby spits, but my most memorable meal didn’t take place in the country, but half a world away.

In 2005, Syria was one of the most peaceful places one could visit. I was in the south of the country in a city called Bosra near the Jordanian border because there is a brilliantly preserved Roman amphitheater there complete with a lot of dust in the parking lot and a guy with a single camel standing in front of the amphitheater and offering rides for a few dollars.

But that wasn’t the part of the trip that stood out most. Since this was a work trip, we actually drove north from Bosra to meet with the food supply manager at a military camp who, it turned out, didn’t have time to meet us. This meant that, by lunchtime, my contact and I were free to do as we pleased. My contact in this case was the general manager of the distributor who worked with us, and he was a middle-aged Syrian who well and truly knew his way around the country.

He said he was going to take me to a restaurant that I would like. I nodded. The man had proven time and again that he knew the kind of food I liked.

We took an empty two-lane running through an empty-looking landscape. On the way there, he pointed to the right, to the east. “Over there,” he said, “is the UN.”

“The UN?”

“Blue Helmets.”

“Oh.” He was referring to the UN peacekeeping force. I didn’t know they were in Syria.

“Beyond the UN is the Israeli Army. On the other side of the road,” he pointed west, “is the Syrian Army.”

Ah, we were driving past the Israeli border. Nice. It looked like any road in any arid countryside anywhere, not a place where CNN would have mounted its cameras if there was a heat-up, but, just out of sight, to the left and right, were three armies, all on reasonably high alert. If WWIII started on that day, I hoped any ordnance would fly over the road!

As usual, he was correct about the food. The place he took me to was a semi-abandoned concrete structure by a pond at the end of a wooded road in the middle of nowhere. Literally in the middle of nowhere, as there was not one other structure visible when we parked our minivan. I have no clue how that restaurant could have survived; most people in Syria didn’t drive in 2005.

We walked up the steps onto a tiled terrace where a couple of long plastic-covered tables had been set up, and sat at one of them. I sat right next to the railing and looked down into the pond, which was maybe fifty yards in diameter.

#SFWApro

I’m catching my breath today. If all goes well (this post being written in advance) then I’ll have just returned from the second of two back to back conventions. It began with World Fantasy running from November 1st through the 4th in Baltimore, which was followed by a flight out to Las Vegas on the 5th, for a business dinner and then the 20Booksto50K conference from the 6th to the 8th. Tack on an extra day to hang around Vegas and add in a redeye flight and I finally arrived home on 10th, and spent all of the 11th playing catch-up with projects and correspondence.

I should also mention that before heading off on ten days of travel, I started the month by launching my new Patreon page (literally seconds before jumping in the car to drive to Baltimore). So, yeah, I’m a little wiped out today, and I still have two more conventions to do this month. What was I thinking?

Unrelated to any of this (because I’m too tired to provide you with a decent segue) is this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Andrea G. Stewart. Andrea is a fantasist, and expresses this both as a painter and a writer. Back in the day, she took first place in the Writers of the Future contest.

Her Changeling Wars series revolves around a young woman who discovers she’s not human at all, but a changeling left behind by the Fae. Add in that her existence is illegal and you’re off and running through what is currently two novels (the second one, Spare Changeling, came out just last month) and a novella. I’m hoping there’s more to come.

LMS: Welcome, Andrea. What stands out as your most memorable meal?

AGS: My most memorable meal was actually quite recent. It was a year ago at Thanksgiving. I’m half-Chinese, and big family meals are an event on my mom’s side of the family. Thanksgiving is just a good excuse to spend the day in the kitchen chopping, pan-frying, grilling, and gossiping. That year we’d chosen to cook Indian food.

The food was great, but that was only half of what made it so memorable.

It was the first big family function I was bringing my boyfriend, John, to, and I really, really liked him. My mom tends to be an exacting judge of boyfriends. Before I met John, when I’d been dating a car salesman, my mom had paused in our conversation to tell me, “Car salesmen…are not good people.”

“She’ll ask you how much money you make,” my brother-in-law and sister-in-law warned John. “Offer to help out,” my siblings told him, “and when she says she doesn’t need help, offer again. If she still tells you to relax, find something to do.” I reminded him, a couple times, “Never eat until everyone is seated and ready.”

I like to tell people my mom asked John two questions when she first met him: “Do you know how to cook?” and then, the inevitable, “How much money do you make?”

Forewarned, John took it all in stride. We ended up making chicken tikka masala; he prepared the chicken while I made the sauce. John was the newcomer to this elaborate kitchen dance–where we traded off cooking stations and asked where the kosher salt was. Despite his confession that he was a mediocre cook, the chicken came out perfectly–juicy, fragrant, and spicy. After a long day, we finally sat down to eat (and yes, he waited). I watched for my family’s reaction and relaxed when they proclaimed the chicken tikka masala “amazing.”

A year later, we’re married, and my parents send him precautionary, parental emails, just like the rest of us. Yes, he too gets to be warned about garage door wires and fish parasites.

And my mom recently paused in our conversation to tell me, “I’m glad you met John.”

I’m glad too.

#SFWApro

As you know, Bob, I’m co-curator of the Galactic Philadelpia reading series, a program which every other month presents two authors. We like to always have a local author, which in turn has led me to discover just how much amazing talent we have here in the greater Philadelphia area. It also, indirectly led me to this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Josiah Bancroft, and in the classic tradition of two birds with a single stone, I set out to secure him not just for the reading series but this blog as well.

It’s been a fraught adventure trying to get him here. There were always deadlines and conflicts and then he and his wife went and had a baby! I tried not to take any of it personally, and lo, I have successfully waited him out and here he is (though it should be noted, I’ve still not been able to lock him down for a date with the reading series).

Josiah is the author of The Books of Babel, a series that revolves around the Tower of Babel, but not quite the one you might be thinking of. This one still stands, big as a mountain, lined with seemingly endless “ringdoms” full of people, both geniuses and madmen, odd animals and odder machines. The range of creativity on display here is breathtaking. I encourage you to check it out.

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

JB: I’m bad at remembering dates, details, and when i comes before e. My talent is for recalling vivid, though often insignificant, tableaus. I stitch together these sensory flashes of recollection to form what passes for a memory. Consider this a sort of disclaimer.

Sometime between 2003 and 2005, during an autumnal month, which feels as if it could’ve been October, I embarked upon a weekend excursion with my wife, Sharon, to Barboursville Vineyards in the piedmont of Virginia. We were going as guests of our friend, Jason Tesauro, who in addition to being an author and a troubadour, also worked to promote Barboursville wines.

At the time, I was a quasi-hipster. I was only “quasi’ because I never cared enough about fashion to go shopping and was I never any good at affecting cool. But I did enjoy the music, the scene, and the cynicism that passed for philosophy. This was before being a white, urban hipster required that one also be a gourmand. Neither I nor my cohorts had the money for indulging in downtown fine dining. Richmond, Virginia had yet to fully develop what has since become a robust community of restaurants and cafes in its historic Fan District, the near-suburb where we lived, which was lousy with college students. We tended to sup upon cardboard-flavored veggie burgers and beans and rice and spent the fat of our paychecks at the record store buying the latest indie gem—Godspeed You Black Emperor or Bright Eyes—or rediscovering the genius of the underappreciated bands of the past, e.g. Captain Beefheart or Television.

We were snooty about which cheap beer we drank, but my knowledge of wine was largely a weekend lark. I couldn’t tell a Chablis from a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Sharon and I kept a wine journal in which we wrote reviews of cheap bottles of wine such as, and I quote:

Merlot, Alterra, Napa Valley, CA – 1998. A cheeky romp through fungus land! Tart and overpowering, this wine then disappears smoothly like a frog in space. Hints of champagne and orange peel. A ruckus encounter, lucky in love!

I can easily discern Sharon’s contribution to the review in the phrase “hints of champagne and orange peel” because she had (and still has) a remarkable palate, whereas I only understood wine by color and opacity. I was able to discern a Pinot Noir from a Petite Sirah based largely upon the fact that one was garnet colored and the other was inky.

We had met Jason through a mutual friend, and he had quickly endeavored to introduce us to rare spirits and the sort of wines that weren’t available on the end-cap of a grocery store. While entertaining us at his house, Jason familiarized us with several novel varieties of grapes: Nebbiolo, Cabernet Franc, and Viogner. He spoke with eloquent passion about the nuances of flavor profiles and general tasting etiquette, which I came to learn, did not include zestful gargling. Later, he would teach me how to behead a bottle of champagne, a pseudo-circus act that I would go on to perform (to disastrous results) using a fry pan instead of a saber. Though this abuse of knowledge was not to Jason’s deficit. He was an enriching force in our life, and slowly, slowly, my palate began to improve.

Our visit to the vineyard began with a tour of the Barboursville Mansion, what remained of it, which had been designed by Thomas Jefferson. As is the case with all ruins, its charm resided as much in its absences as its presence, but it featured a prominent and still-discernable octagonal room, which was the inspiration for one Barboursville’s premier wines called “Octagon.”

Jason took us on a winemaking tour, through Tuscany-inspired tasting areas and woody barrel rooms, and along the verge of the vineyard, where the rows of vines stretched, tidy as corduroy, up the rolling hills. The trunk and stems of the vines were bare, stripped by the recent harvest. He told us of how the vineyard had in the past been compelled to employ helicopters to fly low over the vulnerable fruit in the event of an early cold snap. The helicopter blades blew off the frost and warmed the ground enough to save the vintage. I could hardly think of anything more romantic than preserving a harvest with a helicopter, and if I were in a position to, I would recommend more agricultural industries consider instigating similar practices. I say, let’s launch submarines to break the ice from our cranberry bogs and have our almond groves patrolled for thieves via monster truck.

#SFWApro

I keep telling myself that I’m going to cut back on travel, that I need to cut back, both because of the expense involved and the time away from writing. And yet… somehow, I find myself looking at four, yes, four, conventions in November. Each of them made perfect sense at the time that I signed up, but in every case I did so without giving much thought to what else I had going on other weekends.

Conventions are a good segue to introducing this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest because it’s the only place I can reasonably expect to encounter my friend Christopher Kastensmidt, for the very simple reason that he makes his home in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Although he’s probably most well known for his work in gaming (everything from a technical consultant for LucasArts to the creative director for Southlogic Studios and later the Brazilian offices of Ubisoft), Chris’s fiction has also brought him some serious recognition. He’s been a finalist for the Argos Prize as well as the AGES Award. He also received a Nebula Award nomination for his 2010 novelette “The Fortuitous Encounter of Gerard van Oost and Oludara,” the first in a series of stories involving a Dutch explorer and a Yoruban warrior traveling the wilderness of sixteenth century Brazil. At long last these tales have been compiled into a single novel, The Elephant and Macaw Banner, which comes out from Guardbridge Books in one week.

LMS: Welcome, Christopher. I’ve waited a long time to ask you, what’s your most memorable meal?

CK: Brazil isn’t known as a culinary paradise. The meat is excellent (thus, the proliferation of Brazilian churracurias around the world), but beyond that, there aren’t a lot of well-known dishes.

That being said, I consider Brazil’s finest dish to be the moqueca de camarão (which roughly translates to “shrimp stew”). This is a slow-cooked dish made with palm oil, coconut milk, onions, tomatoes, bell peppers and coriander. It is traditionally served in a clay pot and accompanied by pirão (a thick fish sauce), white rice and manioc flour. Just writing about it makes me hungry…

I ate my most memorable moqueca in an unlikely place: the 400 year-old São Marcelo Fort in Salvador.

My wife Fernanda and I visited Salvador way back in 2007, in a trip which combined relaxation and research for my Elephant and Macaw Banner books. We spent about half our time enjoying beaches and restaurants and the other half visiting museums and historical sites. One of those sites happened to be São Marcelo Fort, a rarity for its offshore construction.

We took a boat out to the fort and were surprised to discover a restaurant inside. Although I admittedly had low culinary expectations for a restaurant located inside a fort, the food looked tasty and we decided to give it a try. We weren’t disappointed, as the moqueca was legendary!

If you ever visit Salvador, don’t miss the historical downtown, the beaches, the street-sold acarajé, lobster on Itaparica Island, and the moqueca at São Marcelo Fort!

#SFWApro

In addition to working on the new novel, October has been my month for buckling down and delving into the arcane sorcery of Amazon ads and promotions. How this affects you (to the extent that it does) depends on how closely you follow me on social media. I’ll be posting notices of sales and discounts regularly, but to ensure you don’t miss anything I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter. In addition to the weekly links to EATING AUTHORS, you’ll be kept current on all the shiny bargains.

But enough about me, let’s get to this week’s guest. While primarily a playwright, this past summer David Demchuk committed novel, and as a result received the best blurb I’ve seen all year. The Globe & Mail has referred to him as “a master of bowel-loosening terror.” Seriously, does it get any better? I won’t even try to tell you anything more, other than his novel, The Bone Mother, was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Toronto Book Award. Yeah, all that and loose bowels. Order a copy today and get ready for Halloween.

LMS: Welcome, David. Spin me a one act play of your most memorable meal.

DD: In spring of 2004, my (now ex-) boyfriend Asif and I arrived in Hong Kong after a 13-hour flight from Vancouver. While we had flown on standby, we had lucked out and had gotten an entire row to ourselves, so we could put up the armrests and stretch out and sleep for large parts of the flight. Even so, we were exhausted when we arrived, and took a short nap once we checked into our hotel in Kowloon. We woke up around 10 p.m. to find ourselves famished. The night market was about two blocks away from our hotel, so naturally that was the first place we went.

Shanghai Street, one block east of Temple Street, is lined with tea houses, salons, food shops, jewellers and seafood restaurants. We quickly learned that restaurant proprietors would entice tourists by standing out in front of their establishments yelling “English! English!” to passersby.

In our case, this tactic worked perfectly. I pointed a restaurant out to Asif and asked “How about this one?” It had a large glass window, through which we could see a number of patrons seated, all seemingly happy as they ate. The manager, an enthusiastic older man, smiled and repeated “English?” I nodded. Asif shrugged and agreed. The old man ushered us in and then stopped us at a large and somewhat murky glass tank at the front near the cash.

“You like fish?” Yes, we liked fish. The manager grinned, picked up a net at the end of a long wire pole, ducked it into the water and slammed something against the glass beside us. “You like this fish?”

We both looked and saw that a large flat yellow and white fish was pinned to the glass, its eye looking right into mine. Great. However we were both tired and hungry, and so we nodded: Yes, we liked this fish. “This a good fish,” the man replied and scooped it out of the water and into a large white plastic bucket. I looked at Asif, he looked at me. Well, this is what we signed on for. The manager directed us to a large round table at the front window–probably to attract even more tourists–and he bustled off into the kitchen with the bucket.

“We should probably order something besides fish,” Asif said.

“I hope he’s not going to serve us the head,” I said.

“The head’s the best part,” Asif said.

“I’ve already looked this fish in the eye once tonight,” I said.

The manager tottered back out of the kitchen, still holding the large white bucket. I could hear the flopping and sloshing inside it. What is he doing? I wondered.

He came up to me. To me. “This your fish,” he said.

I peered down into the bucket. “Yes,” I said, “this is our fish.”

“Bok choy?” Asif asked. “Rice? Tea?”

The manager smiled. “Bok choy, rice, tea,” he replied. “This your fish,” he said to me, and then promptly dropped the bucket down on the floor beside me, turned on his heel and hurried back into the kitchen.

I looked back down at the gasping dying creature beside me. “Hello, fish,” I said sadly.

The manager burst back into the room with a pot of tea, rushed over to me, placed the teapot down in front of us, picked up the bucket. I held up my hand to stop him. “No head,” I said.

“No head?” he asked.

I made a slashing motion across my throat. “No head,” I said.

He nodded sadly. “No head,” he said, and then went back into the kitchen, a little less exuberantly than before.

“The head’s the best part,” Asif said.

“Then the kitchen staff can eat it and enjoy it,” I said.

A few minutes later–literally a few minutes–a younger man came out with a large plate of steamed rice and another heaped with bok choy fried in oil and garlic. Hot on his heels was the manager with our fish, cleaned and filleted and pan-fried and, yes, with no head.

“This your fish,” he said proudly, and set it down before us. “No head.”

“Thank you very much,” I replied. He stood by and watched as we spooned the rice and bok choy onto our plates, then each took half of the fish. I took the first bite, raised it to my mouth, chewed and swallowed.

Even now, I remember it as the best fish I’ve ever tasted–buttery and crisp on the outside, tender and flavourful on the inside.

I gave the manager a thumbs-up, and so did Asif. The manager beamed. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, then hurried off to another table.

I don’t know, maybe it’s because we were starving. The rice was delicious, the bok choy was delicious. Bite after bite, the fish was perfect.

“This your fish,” Asif said to me as we ate.

“Thank you, fish,” I replied.

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