Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

Happy Monday! Time for another round of asking authors about their favorite meals? Why? Because the protagonist from my own fiction, the Amazing Conroy, is a foodie.

Today we have Carrie Vaughn famous the world over for her “Kitty series,” the ongoing saga of a latenight radio host who just happens to be a werewolf. If you’re a fan of these books, then you probably already know the newest and ninth of them, Kitty’s Big Trouble, is being released tomorrow! In fact, Carrie’s been having a busy year. Steel, her new YA adventure novel came out back in March, and After the Golden Age, a superhero novel was released in a month later. But Kitty fans are going to particularly overjoyed in 2011, because in addition to the ninth novel in the series mentioned above, August will see the publication of a short story collection, Kitty’s Greatest Hits. But enough about all that. Let’s get on to the food portion of this blog post.

LMS: Carrie, the last meal we had together was at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. That was pretty high up, and while the food was good, I doubt it makes either of our top ten lists. What’s your most memorable meal?

CV: I’ve had so many memorable meals I could talk about I hardly know which one to pick. But I do need to back up and explain something: for me, these meals are memorable not because of the food. Rather, I remember the location, the occasion, and the people I was with. I’m not much of a foodie — I’m one of those people that everyone hates, the skinny person who actually does forget to eat sometimes. Often for me eating isn’t a pleasure, it’s the thing I have to do to make sure I take in enough calories to keep functioning. Long story, I can talk about that another time. So while I sometimes have a problematic relationship with eating, I love meals, especially meals that are events.

Okay, I think I’ve narrowed it down to one:

About two years ago, I was traveling with two friends through the south of France. We spent a couple of days in the walled medieval city of Carcassonne. A couple of magical days, because in a chilly November we pretty much had the fortress to ourselves and spent the evenings wandering around the walls and ramparts, thinking about the Crusades and Dungeon and Dragons adventures. (Those slate tile roofs absolutely needed thieves running across them.) We found a little restaurant that looked and felt as medieval as the rest of the city: rustic wood furniture, exposed beams on a very low ceiling, whitewashed plaster walls, tapestries and wrought iron decoration. The best part: the owner cooked our meals over an open fire in the fireplace, right there in the dining room. We shared a bottle of wine, ate fresh roasted sausage and potatoes, and then wandered back to the hostel nestled in a medieval city that hasn’t changed in centuries. Perfect, really.

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Good stuff, Carrie. Though I think some Kitty readers are going to be disappointed you didn’t talk about rare meat.

Still, speaking as one of those people who is less than pleased (“hate” is too strong a word to use here) by the skinny people who forget to eat, that meal does sound pretty perfect. Thanks for sharing.

Next Monday: We begin a special month of Eating Authors as this year’s Campbell Award nominees talk about their most memorable meals. Don’t miss it; it just may influence how you vote!

Another Monday brings another installment of asking authors about their favorite meals, a weekly feature inspired by my foodie protagonist, the Amazing Conroy.

This week, we hear from Lee Martindale, with whom I shared the ToC of Low Port, a wonderful anthology edited by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller back in 2003. Lee once described herself thusly: “Poet, songsmith, teller of tales, lover, student, teacher, warrior…Bard.” As if that weren’t enough, she’s also an extremely talented editor, having put together anthologies like Such a Pretty Face, and the newly released The Ladies of Trade Town.

LMS: Lee, as a bard, I know you appreciate a fine meal. Would you share with the good folk reading this blog your best and most memorable repast?

LM: Sometimes what makes a meal “the best” is not that it’s haute cuisine or comfort food fondly remembered from childhood. Sometimes it’s a matter of something you’ve never had before, never even heard of, eaten at precisely the right time and with precisely the right company.

When the question was posed, the meal that came immediately to mind took place in July of 1993. My husband and I were driving home to Texas from having attended that year’s Mensa Annual Gathering in Orlando, and it was well into the middle of the evening when we pulled into the Howard Johnson’s in Mobile. Well enough into the middle of the evening that the restaurant was within minutes of closing. But we must have looked as tired and hungry as we felt, because the hostess seated us, handed us each a menu, and said “You folks take all the time you need. My husband’s the cook, and he’s not going anywhere ’til I tell him to” And then she recommended something I’d never heard of before: deep-fried crab claws.

My husband and I are both from the South, North Carolina and Kentucky respectively. “Fried” was what we both grew up on. But crab claws? Now, I love crab but, up until then, I’d had crab steamed or broiled or scampied, with butter definitely involved. I was a trifle skeptical. But I was also hungry enough to eat the shells, too tired to see the print on the menu, and grateful that these folks were seeing to our needs past closing time. Deep-fried crab claws it was.

Two glasses of ice and a pitcher of freshly-made sweet tea arrived. Then salads, crisp and cold, with homemade buttermilk ranch dressing on the side. And then, just as the empty salad plates were being removed, the cook himself brought out the main course.

Potatoes I can take or leave, but the seasoned, thick-cut home fries were among the best I’ve ever tasted. And the skillet-fried corn (freshly-cut from the ear, then sauteed with butter and a sprinkling of sugar) prompted me to ask the cook if he’d been peeking into my grandmother’s recipe box. I could have made a meal of that alone, were it not for the mountain — and by that I mean generous-to-the-point-of-insane — of golden-brown crab claws. Each between 2″ – 3″ in length, plump, and sent to play in a flavorful-but-not-too-spicy flour-and-cornmeal dredge before being dropped in oil of an obviously perfect temperature for an obviously perfect length of time.

My first, admittedly cautious bite was followed by a sound generally made in pursuits not involving food. A delicate crunch from the coating gave way to sweet, rich crab meat. They weren’t just good; they were addictive. Where had this dish been all my life?

The cook and the hostess sat with us, taking unabashed pleasure at our enjoyment of the meal. When we finally waved the white flag and waved off the offer of dessert – despite the fact the banana cream pie looked like heaven on a plate, the hostess casually mentioned that one of the breakfast offerings was fried crab claws and scrambled eggs. I’ll give you three guesses what I had the next morning.

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Thanks, Lee. I’m not sure which has me more stunned, the idea of deep-fried crab claws, or that you’d find such a thing at a HoJo’s.

Let that be a lesson to us all, not just to judge a restaurant by the color of its roof.

Next Monday: Another author and another meal!

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 hear from James Maxey. James is the author of the Dragon Age trilogy consisting of Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Before this he authored the Phobos Award winning superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there, he had a story in Prime Codex, the first book I published through Paper Golem. As with last week’s entry, James gives us more than just simply a meal.

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

JM: I’ve eaten a lot of good stuff in my day, but my best meal had very little to do with food. In the first half of the last decade, I became romantically involved with a woman named Laura Herrmann who, unfortunately, passed away from cancer about five years ago. Laura was in reasonably good health for a number of years after her diagnosis, but the last two months of her life were pretty rough. She had a lot of trouble eating, trouble sleeping, and very little energy to spare for anything beyond getting out of her bed and going to sit on her couch to watch TV.

About one month before she passed away, I came home and found her looking utterly depressed. It was April, a beautiful spring morning, and I felt like it might do her some good to get outside for a little while since she’d basically been trapped in the house for a month, making no trips anywhere except the hospital. I coaxed her out to my car still in her pajamas and we went for a drive through the country. Chapel Hill is surrounded by a lot of farms, and everywhere we went nature was eagerly cooperating with my plan to help her have a good day. There were wild flowers blooming everywhere, entire fields bright yellow with buttercups.

We drove around for about two hours and I could tell Laura was getting tired, but also that she’d had a good morning. We’d been more or less taking roads at random and as I was driving down a road I’d never been on before we found ourselves approaching the interstate and right off the exit there was a Sonic drive thru. Laura had barely eaten in a month. She was surviving on Ensure. It had reached the point where I’d stopped trying to encourage her to eat since it just seemed to be nagging. But, as we neared the drive-thru, I asked if she might want to get a milkshake. She didn’t,.. but she said she’d like some tater-tots. So we pulled into Sonic and had some tater-tots with melted cheese and a couple of sodas. I can still remember the potato smell that filled the car as she opened the bag. She wolfed down those potatoes with genuine gusto. I had one or two; salty, greasy, starchy… and absolutely the best thing to eat on the earth.

Laura passed away a month later. That was five years ago. And, it’s trite, but true… life goes on. Time heals. I started dating someone new two years ago and this November we’ll be married. Cheryl and I have had a LOT of great meals together, and our wedding registry is heavily weighted toward our dream cookware. We are both Food Network junkies, and we have cooking down to an art. We’ve learned to make the food we hated as kids, like collard greens and brussel sprouts, taste so good we lick the plate. And that’s with food some people won’t touch. Give us some good steaks or fresh strawberries and we can make a feast you’ll write home about.

So I’ve eaten better food, no question. But the one meal I know I’ll never forget are those tater tots, wolfed down in a noisy parking lot of the interstate.

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Thank you, James. I’m never going to be able to drive by a Sonic without recalling this tale.

Best wishes on your impending nuptials, and hey, when you’re registered, let me know and perhaps readers here will want to chip in and get you guys something.

Next Monday: Another author and another meal!