Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

Welcome to another installment of asking authors about their favorite meals. This feature was inspired by my protagonist, the Amazing Conroy, who in addition to being a stage hypnotist is also very much a foodie.

This week we have Walter Jon Williams. I have to confess that for years I went all fanboy around Walter (I’m not proud of it, but I can’t deny it either). Last year I got over it by attending his master class, the Taos Toolbox. It’s hard to be starstruck when you’re busy learning from one of the best in the business.

Walter’s oeuvre is far too massive and complex to go into here, but if you haven’t read Aristoi or Metropolitan (just to name two) then you need to shut off your computer right now and go do so. His latest novel, Deep State, is a sequel to This Is Not A Game and may be one of the best examples of cutting edge (very) near future fiction out there. Walter’s also begun releasing some of his backlist as ebooks, including the delightful trilogy featuring Drake Maijstral, and again if you haven’t read The Crown Jewels what are you waiting for? Huh. I guess I’ve still got a bit of the fan boy in me, but you will too after you read Walter’s answer to the question below.

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Welcome to another installment of asking authors about their favorite meals. Because I never know when I might need to have the Amazing Conroy steal one of these ideas.

Our gourmand this week is Jay Lake. It feels like I’ve known Jay for ages. He’s been my editor, and I’ve been his. To say he’s prolific is like saying the sky is blue. Jay’s a past winner of the Campbell Award, and has received multiple nominations for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. He’s a very busy fellow, but I’m pleased to say that we usually manage a meal when he comes through town. Pinion, the third volume in his Clockwork Earth trilogy (the first two being Mainspring and Escapement) recently came out in paperback (so you have no excuse not to own a copy). Endurance, the sequel to his startling novel Green, debuts in November. Somewhere out there though, is the third volume in his City Imperishable series. That’s what I want to see on the schedule soon.

LMS: Jay, you and I have chowed down together for some fine dining — I’m thinking those amazing lamb chops at that fancy place in L.A — and we’ve tucked in at an airport hotel restaurant. Our tastes differ, markedly at times, but I know you’re a foodie. What’s been your most memorable meal?

JL: The best meal I remember having, ever, was somewhere in the late 1990s in a small, long-gone Portland restaurant called Cafe Lena. This was before I’d moved to the Pacific Northwest from Texas, and at the time I was in town visiting my sister. We stopped there for lunch on a whim. It was a little place with mostly hippie food. (I cracked up the waitress by asking solemnly if the vegan vegetable soup was made with real vegans or artificial vegans.) They had a chalkboard special of chicken breast with lemon-brie sauce.

The chicken was a perfectly good cut of breast meat that had been soaked in lemon juice and black pepper and nicely grilled. I don’t even remember what the sides were. But that sauce… Image a truly world-class Hollandaise that had been mugged by the inmates of a fromagerie. Except richer. And yummier. And incredibler than that.

I have eaten truly fine meals from Las Vegas to Chengdu. I have been treated to, served, and even occasionally cooked exquisite food. But that lemon-brie sauce was like nothing I’ve eaten before or since, and made that lunchtime at Cafe Lena something I can recall vividly fifteen years later as if I had just set down my fork.

Thanks, Jay. This one’s going to haunt me. You know, there’s a story idea in there, something about the ghosts of restaurants past…

Next Monday: Another author and another meal!

Welcome to the fifth and final installment of asking this year’s Campbell Award Nominees about their favorite meals. Because we ran out of Mondays, we’re sneaking this one in on a Friday. Fortunately, you still have a couple days before ballots are due, assuming you have a membership to this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, NV.

To wrap things up for us, we have Saladin Ahmed. Saladin is no stranger to being nominated for awards. Last year his short story, “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” was a Nebula Award finalist. He’s making the jump from short fiction to novels, and his new book, Throne of the Crescent Moon will be on shelves in February.

LMS: Okay, Saladin, so what’s your best, most memorable meal?

SA: I suppose my answer here depends on what we mean by ‘memorable meal.’ All-time best-tasting? Most luxurious overall experience? Most traumatizingly, unforgettably unpleasant dinner company? Meal with the most distinct-in-memory circumstances surrounding it?

I had the best piece of beef of my life in a hole-in-the-wall Paris bistro years ago. I spent ten years in New York City and had jaw-dropping hours-long dinner experiences at Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernardin, Grammercy Tavern, Babbo, and other celebrated restaurants. And from Vigevano, Italy to Taos, New Mexico, I’ve had wonderful wine-soaked meals with other writers, artists, and musicians that I’d pay good money to re-experience.

But when I think about my most memorable meal, it really boils down less to a single meal and more to one restaurant’s versions of two dishes. I grew up blocks from Detroit proper in Dearborn, Michigan, which is equal parts factory town and Arab immigrant enclave. Artery-clogging Midwest meets world-class Mideast here in all sorts of ways, from Big Boy chain restaurants that serve Arabic food to coney dogs made with halal meat. And here, amidst industrial parks and strip clubs, is the original La Shish restaurant. For my money it’s the best Lebanese restaurant in the universe. And when I close my eyes and think “good food,” the aroma of La Shish’s hummus with chicken and their shish tawook are what waft through my olfactory memory. If I went twenty years without tasting these dishes, I’d still recall their mouth-watering scents.

= = = = =

Thanks, Saladin. I’m feeling completely gobsmacked that you can rattle off some of the best restaurants in NYC and then turn your back on them all and order up some hummus. Hmmm… maybe on the way to next year’s Worldcon, I can stop over in Detroit, catch a cab, and order a combo. Or at the very least, some baklava.

That’s it for our batch of Campbell nominees. In just a few weeks one of them will be wearing a tiara, and the other four will be gathering at the Hugo Losers’ party for some consolation and snacks. Been there, done that, and enjoyed it immensely.

Next Monday: Another author and another meal!

Welcome to the fourth visit with this year’s Campbell Award Nominees as we learn about their favorite meals. All of which should be putting you in mind of some good restaurant-hopping when you get to the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, NV.

Today, we visit with Lauren Beukes. Lauren is a journalist, a TV scriptwriter, and the fiction editor of Chew the Magazine. She’s also the author of two novels, Zoo City, and Moxyland, as well as the nonfiction book Maverick – Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past.

LMS: So tell me, what’s your best, most memorable meal?

JM: ‘Best ever’ questions always throw me. It’s hard to quantify experiences absolutely. The five course meal we had in a trattoria just after we got married, having eloped to a 15th century open-air town hall in a Tuscan village perched on a cliff was amazing, as much for the horror music soundtrack drifting down from the art exhibition of remixed fairytales upstairs as the remarkable food and celebratory proscecco.

But how to rank that against the rugby ball-shaped jackfruit I haggled over in the market of Stone Town, that lasted us six days’ worth of breakfasts in our ramshackle guesthouse in the heart of the city, serenaded by the call to prayer and the thrum of streetlife as we cut into the fruit that tastes like melony banana.

Or the insane goodness of the emergency chocolate crepe near the Pompidou Centre when I was pregnant and my daughter growing inside me made me hysterically ravenous at strange times.

Or the simple cheese roll I had after a day abseiling into caves squeaky with bats in Kalk Bay on assignment for a magazine story on spelunking that tasted like the best thing ever.

It’s impossible to choose just one. So I’m going to write about the most recent best food experience I’ve had, in Grey Street in Durban.

I was in the city for the Time of the Writer festival and my journalist friend, Nechama Brodie, absolutely insisted that I had to meet an architect she’d just interviewed, Richard Stretton and his wife, Angela Shaw. It was a blind date. They came along to a reading I was doing and we went for a drink afterwards and hit it off to the extent that I saw them every day for the duration of the festival.

Most of the time, we were eating; finger snacks at a boutique art hotel, pasta at the hip new Italian restaurant in town, stew at an impromptu dinner party at their home, but the best meal was the Saturday, when Angela took us to the area known as the Casbah, where most nice middle class locals don’t venture, let alone tourists. Boy, are they missing out.

I’d spent time in Joburg’s inner city and the pariah suburb of Hillbrow, researching my novel, Zoo City, so I had some idea what to expect. That the inner city defies easy categorisation and lazy preconceptions. It’s bustling, occasionally hustling and it could be dangerous if you went blundering into dodgy areas at night, but it’s not a hotbed of crime and human scum; it’s a place where ordinary people live and work and do their shopping.

We bought kids’ dresses in bright shesheshwe patterns from street vendors with temporary stalls set up next to Zulu women braaing mealies* on DIY stoves on the pavement, we wandered through sprawling markets and open-air cobbled arcades packed with Internet cafés, stores selling ornate saris, Indian merchants selling blankets and coats and other goods for lobola** and ancient tailors working ancient sewing machines in shops that were 100 years old.

And finally we stopped for lunch. Richard and Angela hunted in vain for the restaurant they used to come to and we decided to take a chance on a dubious-looking hole-in-the-wall on the main drag of Queen street, whose name none of us can now remember. It had plastic-coated seating and curtains round the booths and a star motif and one wimpy desk fan churning in vain against the Durban humidity.

Richard took charge and ordered half the menu – all North Indian dishes – from dhal curry to lamb korma, lamb kebabs and palak paneer, served with naan flat bread and cokes. Our drinks took ages to come. The food took even longer. Probably an hour and I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Finally, it arrived, tossed on to the table unceremoniously by the surly teenage waiter doing his time in the family business.

My husband’s favourite restaurant in Cape Town is Bukhara. We’ve eaten there many times, including on our wedding anniversary. It’s highly reviewed. It’s appropriately expensive. It’s very, very good. Their food can’t touch the fare we had in this pokey little corner café.

It’s impossible to describe how good it was. So impossible, in fact, I now suspect that the restaurant is not real – and that’s why the name escapes us. Because we slipped into another dimension, some kind of Kashmiri Faerie perhaps, where they served us flavours beyond mortal imaginings that would ruin our palates forever. It probably all comes at some terrible yet-to-be-established price.

Whatever that price turns out to be, it was worth it.

—
* barbequeing corn on the cob
** bride price, a reverse dowry, that’s widely practiced in South Africa.

= = = = =

Wow, talk about your instant immersion, with pictures no less (courtesy of Angela Shaw)! Thanks, Lauren. I’ll be dreaming about wandering that market and hoping I can find the restaurant.

Next Friday: A special ooops-there-are-five-Campbell-nominees-and-only-four-Mondays-in-July-this-year edition, as we squeeze in our remaining nominee (and meal) just before the voting deadline. Don’t miss it!

Welcome to the third installment of our special Campbell Award Nominee addition of our regular Monday feature in which I ask authors about their favorite meals. All month it’s been my treat to query members of that select group of writers who are vying to be the one to walk home with the coveted John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer plaque (not a Hugo) at this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, NV.

This week, we hear from Dan Wells. Dan is the author of I Am Not A Serial Killer, as well as Mr. Monster, and the forthcoming I Don’t Want to Kill You. He’s also one quarter of the Hugo-nominated podcast Writing Excuses (along with Hugo-nominee Howard Tayler, former Campbell nominee Brandon Sanderson, and recent addition and Hugo-nominee Mary Robinette Kowal).

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Welcome to round TWO of the special Campbell Award Nominee addition of our regular Monday feature in which I ask authors about their favorite meals. It’s not enough that only one of this group will come away with the coveted John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer plaque (not a Hugo), but I’m making them wax rhapsodic about good eats.

Today it’s Lev Grossman’s turn. Lev is a journalist turned novelist. Somewhere in there he also found time to be a book reviewer, for which The New York Times said he was “among this country’s smartest and most reliable critics.” That praise notwithstanding, he’s been busy writing modern-day fantasies such as The Magicians, as well as the forthcoming The Magician King.

LMS: You know the drill, Lev, what’s your best, most memorable meal?

LG: All right. Here goes. As it happens I can not only tell you the most memorable meal I ever ate, I can tell you the most memorable bite I ever took.

I didn’t grow up in a foody household. My father is from the midwest and prefers diner food. Ketchup on everything. My mom is English, and although she did in fact overcome her national handicap and become a highly skillful cook, food was just never very important to her. I think it’s partly that, as an ardent first-wave feminist, she felt that working in the kitchen was too symbolic of women’s oppression by the patriarchy. Which, fair enough.

So while they ran a very cultured household, they never considered food to be a form of culture. It was something to be gotten out of the way. And when I married for the first time, I married a woman who wasn’t interested in food either, and didn’t cook.

But over time I began to suspect that I was interested in food. I liked cooking, though I was awful at it. I liked to eat in restaurants alone, and think about what was going on in the kitchen, and what was in the dishes, and how they were made, and where the ingredients came from. But I was a bit ashamed of it. It wasn’t how I was raised. I pushed it all away as not interesting, or respectable, or worthwhile.

Until one day, I couldn’t anymore. I enrolled in a cooking class, just to see if I could learn, and because, dammit, I wanted to. This was at a local restaurant, where you cooked alongside the chefs in the kitchen. One night we were making scallops with a Bearnaise sauce. Well, I’d never had scallops before, or not that I could remember, and I’d never had Bearnaise sauce either. It’s a tricky sauce to make if, like me, you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re liable to curdle something or break your emulsion or what-have-you. I curdled and broke pretty much everything I could. But eventually I got it together.

And I sauteed my scallop, which was a nice fat dayboat scallop. When it was ready the chef (her name was Chef Abby) said to me, listen, don’t even bother to plate this up. I’ll tell you the best way to eat it: just stick a fork in the scallop, right out of the pan, stick it in the Bearnaise, then stick it in your mouth. You won’t be sorry.

Reader, I wasn’t. Scallops with bearnaise sauce is just one of those perfect, eternal dishes. The sweetness of the scallop balances with the citrusy tartness of the Bearnaise, and both are mellowed and enveloped by the creamy butteriness of the egg and butter, and all that is supported on the pleasantly fleshy matrix of the scallop. As I took that bite, billions of neurons fired in my brain that had never fired before, neurons that had been waiting their whole life to fire. I think I dropped the fork and put my hands on my face while I tried to process what was happening.

That scallop changed a lot of things for me. All at once, in that one bite, I realized that I cared about cooking, and food, and that was OK. Food is important. I realized I wanted to be happy, and nobody was going to tell me what I should or shouldn’t enjoy.

A lot of things happened in the wake of that scallop. Bad things at first: for example, I ended my first marriage. But very good things have happened too. Now I’m married again, to a woman who loves food as much as I do (and cooks way better than I do). We live in a big house which we fitted out with a kitchen that takes up a third of the whole first floor. We cook together every night, with our children whenever possible, and it’s wonderful.

I highly recommend that dish, scallops with bearnaise sauce. Just proceed with caution. It could change your life.

= = = = =

Lev, it’s like we’re the same person (except I didn’t go to Harvard and Yale). My first wife was raised all meat and potatoes, but my second wife trained as a chef. She’s the one that introduced me to the joys of scallops, so I can certainly appreciate your most memorable bite.

Hmm, actually, for your sake, let’s hope we’re not the same person, cuz in my year I lost the Campbell.

Next Monday: Yet another of this year’s Campbell Award nominees and, of course, another mouth-watering meal!

Welcome to the first of our special Campbell Award Nominee addition of our regular Monday feature in which I ask authors about their favorite meals. All month long we’ll be hearing from that select group of writers who are vying to be the one to walk home with the coveted John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer plaque (not a Hugo) at this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, NV.

This week, we hear from Larry Correia. In addition to being a gun dealer, firearms and certified concealed weapons instructor, and accountant, Larry is the author of Monster Hunter International, and Monster Hunter Vendetta, as well as Monster Hunter Alpha due out later this month.

LMS: Welcome, Larry, and congratulations on the Campbell nomination. You know the question, right?

LC: What was the best or most memorable meal I remember having? Wow. That’s an interesting question. I love to eat. Absolutely love it. I’m an adventurous eater. I’ll try pretty much anything, as long as it is considered vaguely edible, somewhere, I’ll probably eat it. My wife put herself through college running the international kitchen at our university, so she’s a really good cook, and can do excellent Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Indian, you name it. I seek out interesting food wherever I go.

However, the single tastiest thing that I’ve ever eaten was a simple hamburger. I grew up on a farm. When I was about eight years old, I was run over by a very angry cow. This was a Brahma/Holstein mix, which is an odd combo anyway. I was helping my parents herd them into a pen, when psycho cow turned around and banzai charged me. It wasn’t enough just to run over the eight year old fat kid… Oh no. She had to stop and dance on me for a while. I got a bad case of hoof to the face. My face lost. Badly. Later, when we ate that particular cow, I remember that the beef was delicious, perfectly seasoned with just a hint of vengeance. My burger tasted of victory.

My most memorable meal however has to be the Wall of Flame Challenge. The following account of this adventure has been copied from my blog.

Imagine going into a Chinese restaurant. Now imagine that they have a sign saying that if you do this certain little challenge, you get the meal for free, your picture on the wall, and a fifty dollar gift certificate. Your picture goes on the Wall of Flames… Sounds neat, huh?

LIES!!!

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. My picture was on the wall at Fudruckers for their 1 pound challenge. (1 pound after cooking burger, w/ giant basket of chili cheese fries and a huge milkshake) I didn’t even break a sweat. I got the t-shirt to prove it. (ironically, the biggest 1 pound challenge shirt available was a Large).

I love this place in Layton called China Wok II (1266 South Legend Hills Dr). I eat lunch there all the time. The food is cheap, really good, and the service is always great.

So today I tried this “Wall of Flame” challenge. How hard could it be? There are five pictures on the wall. So five people managed to do it and not die screaming in horrible fits of agony. Piece of cake.
The challenge. Any of their regular dinners, “spiced up” a bit. With one bowl of rice and one glass of water. You’ve got a half an hour. You can’t get up to leave until you are done. You have to eat the whole thing. Easy, right?

Except that the “spices” they use did not evolve on Earth. You know the spice made out of giant Dune worms that makes your eyes turn weird colors, travel through time, and knife fight Sting? No, this is worse. These spices are made from a pepper that evolved on a strange alien world of fiery death pain suffering. This pepper laughs at jalapenos. This pepper makes the habenero it’s bitch. This pepper has no name, and the ancient Middianites who discovered it referred to it only as – TERRIBLE SHRIEKING DOOM – before it destroyed their entire civilization. This pepper exists in multiple quantum dimensions at one time. This pepper divides by zero.

Are you guys getting me yet? Can you feel it? It is watching you…

So one of these pepper seeds was discovered and brought to Layton Utah. (it was probably discovered on the moon, hell if I know). The seed was then planted in a giant tub, but instead of soil, it was placed in a fine dust made of ground habeneros and napalm. It was watered daily with shoggoth tears. Villagers sacrificed chickens to the Seed. The Seed sprouted (henceforth to be known as the Sproutening) during a lunar and solar eclipse (at the same time!) under Halley’s comet. The pepper grew, and soon replaced Pluto as the ninth planet in the solar system.

My coworker, Dan, decided to try this too. We did not know about – TERRIBLE SHRIEKING DOOM! The owner tried to warn us. He told us that yes, there were five pictures on the wall, but that was out of the 160 people that had tried it so far. (none of them are smiling in those pictures either). It is currently unknown how many of them still live. (one is still in an insane asylum).

The owner said that if you could make it about 5 or 10 minutes, then everything would be fine, because that is when you would start to go numb. (now there’s something to look forward to!) Some people had actually eaten their napkins. Some had gone mad from the pain and gnawed their own limbs off. I was warned not to drink the one cup of water, because water only made IT angrier, and we really didn’t want to make IT any angrier. Satan won’t put these in Hell’s cafeteria’s because he decided that these would be cruel and unusual punishment…

This thing is stupid hot. Only a fool would willingly put it in his mouth.

So there I was, and they bring me out something that had started life as General Tso’s chicken, before it had been covered in a sauce that looked suspiciously like fresh asphalt. Somebody had been screaming in the kitchen a few minutes ago. I think they might have gotten some of the fumes in their eye. But the screams had stopped… Abruptly.

You know food is scary when in order to be eaten, it can’t just be free. They have to give you $50 to eat it and put you on a wall so that you can declare you are more badass than everyone else. You know all those statues of Julius Ceaser? Yeah, it is because he ate one of these once. Pompey Magnus was like, dude, I can’t compete with that. It’s all you. I’m going to Egypt.

I ate a piece. Hot… but not too bad. Kind of like getting pepper sprayed. Nothing I can’t handle. I look over at Dan. He’s playing it cool… I take another bite… still okay… but then a single air molecule hit the Lovecraftian sludge on my tongue and it awoke. Oh yeah… that is starting to hurt. One of my other coworkers (who was smart enough not to put poison alien pepper spores in his mouth) looks over and remarks about how fast my eyes have turned red. It burns. IT BURNS!!!!

At this point I’m about five bites in. Involuntary tears are coming out of my eyes. My hands are starting to shake. Bite six, the hallucinations start. A submarine came out of the floor. The walrus that got out asked me for directions. Man, I’m tripping out. Bite seven… wait… that was my napkin. Bite seven. My brain said “Screw this!” and shut down.

At three minutes and thirty seconds, I surrendered. I made it to the bathroom and blew my nose for awhile because the contents of my entire skull had turned to water and came running out my nose. Dan made it six minutes, which makes him twice the man I am.

Now, for the five men on the wall, they are manly men amongst men. They are titans. I salute them. I tried to pay homage to the Wall of Flame. I might still have still been hallucinating, but I believe the pictures were of George Washington, Vlad Dracula, Miyamoto Mushashi, Optimus Prime, and Christopher Walken.

So, if you are as manly as Christopher Walken and you like to eat molten lava for fun, you need to go to the China Wok. It was literally the hottest thing that I’ve ever eaten. (well, attempted). Now if you’ll excuse me, that walrus is still lost.

= = = = =

Thank you, Larry. And thank you for invoking Christopher Walken here on my blog. Maybe all you needed to make it through the Wall of Flame Challenge was a little more cowbell. I’m just saying…

You know, I’m a big fan of Chinese food, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to enter a Chinese restaurant in Utah without hearing the echo of TERRIBLE SHRIEKING DOOM!!!

Next Monday: Another of this year’s Campbell Award nominees and, of course, another meal!