Food. Glorious Food!

Food is so important in storytelling. Who else remembers the orphanage food scene in "Oliver"?
Food sets the scene in so many ways. It employs the senses - taste and smell. How it looks, the crunch of it, the slurp of a villain - it adds both to characters and setting. Personality is revealed in the foods we enjoy and share. A sense of where we are is established by the food we eat.

My books tend to feature food. Not to the extent some books do, where they actually share recipes in the back pages, but I do like to imagine my characters eating. Interesting discussions happen over a meal.

If you write fantasy or historical fiction, or are simply interested in history, What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank by Krista Ball is good reading.

I love imagining great restaurant food. It's an excuse to check out menus online, and then, inspired, make up my own perfect meal - without messy cleaning up or the frankly impossible price.

I also share food ideas from my own life. If my characters are in a rush, I try to think what I'd cook in such situations.

It's interesting to read contemporary novels from different eras and see how eating trends shift. Stirfries, pasta, pizza, bbq, all have their time, and then, become dated. Have you ever read a novel where the character uses a pressure cooker? It's so 1950s. Food is a subtle way to position a novel in time.

Last, but not least, food is sensual. In a romance novel, as the characters dance towards intimacy, food can play a major role. It is sharing, indulgence and celebration.

I guess I'd better wind up the post with a recipe, except ... I really don't feel like cooking, today. Nope, not even fictionally.

Anyone want a donut? And while you contemplate that sugary-overload, do you have a book you love for its food?

Devouring the Story

Very few things get me more excited than books and food. Seriously, half the people I follow on social media are authors or passionate reviewers. The other half are interesting eaters and/or experimental cooks. A few are both, and I swear, if smartphones took it to the next level and allowed me to “sample” the foods these people tweeted about, well…let’s just say that nobody would ever ask to borrow my phone.

When I started writing RUNNING IN THE DARK, I knew that I had a lot of research ahead of me. I whimsically (okay, there was a reason for it, but at the time I didn’t know I was writing a sequel, so it was mostly whimsical) sent my characters off to Chile. The problem with that? The next book had to be set in Chile and I’d never freaking been to Chile. Hell, I’ve never been to South America. My travels – extensive though they may be – have been firmly grounded in the Northern hemisphere.

So I researched, but not a “now I shall sit down with an Atlas and encyclopedia and take notes about land mass and major exports” kind of research. It was a guerilla affair. I surfed public transportation sites and local community concern blogs. I scrolled through photos and videos posted by people who’d recently traveled to Santiago. I watched music videos by local bands. Seriously, while I normally caution people about performing Internet research, this time the Internet was an amazingly source of Genuine information.

It wasn’t genuine in that it was all true. A few of the “facts” relayed in the travel journals turned out to be incorrect. Sometimes people mixed up the names of neighborhoods or foods or roads. But their feelings about adventuring into this new and wonderful place were genuine. And, because everybody has to eat, food is one of the first steps that visitors take into a new place. The language might be difficult, the streets tough to navigate, the customs strange, but good food is always good food.

I love the stories that regional cuisine tells. Though food we discover what lives outside the cities we visit, which particular kind of grain or variety of squid. We taste the multitude of cultures that have grown out of, landed upon or merged into a specific area.

So, basically I spent a week surfing pictures of and recipes for empanadas (is it possible to gain weight by looking at pictures? I swear I did.). Then I read encyclopedic entries on “proper” Chilean cuisine, after which I surfed menus at restaurants in Santiago to determine what dishes were actually available or appeared to be popular.

RUNNING IN THE DARK isn’t a food journal. The main character, Sydney Kildare, doesn’t have a lot of time to sit down and enjoy a meal and she’s not much of a cook. But, in the background of the story are the flavors and spices of the city. And, seriously, if I ever get the opportunity, I’m going to Chile, fork in hand.

What are your favorite eating destinations? Are you able to bring the recipes home, to recreate the feeling of your adventures?

***

Blurb

After surviving a vampire turf war in Alaska, vampire courier Sydney Kildare is back behind the wheel and working under an assumed name in Chile. She doesn't speak the language, doesn't know the city and—worst of all—has to drive a crappy car.

What she does have is Malcolm Kelly, her sort-of boyfriend and manager of the city's vampire population. But with Malcolm preoccupied by bloodsucker business—and a gorgeous vampiress from his past—Sydney feels more alone than ever.

But Sydney has more than her love life to worry about. She's got vamps on her tail, mysterious deliveries that leave death in their wake, and old enemies targeting her to get to Malcolm. Turns out he's got a history more deadly than she ever imagined, and she'll have to use every skill in her arsenal to stay alive...

About the Author

Regan Summers lives in Anchorage, Alaska with her husband and alien-monkey hybrid of a child. She is a huge fan of the low profile. She likes books, ottomans with concealed storage, small plate dining, libraries, Corporal Hicks, some aspects of pre-revolutionary France, most aspects of current Italy, and books.

Her Night Runner series, including Don’t Bite the Messenger and Running in the Dark, is available wherever e-books are sold.

Website  -  Twitter  -  Facebook  -  Amazon  -  Barnes & Noble  -  Carina Press

Lazy or Efficient?

I am, at heart, an energy efficient person. Some might call this trait laziness, but if it weren't for people like me, we'd never have wonderful inventions like the cotton gin, the car or the, oh, I dunno, the apple slicer, to free up our valuable time for other tasks. Happier tasks. Writing and reading books, for example. (apple image from Wikipedia)

No longer do those of us who like our apple in lovely, biteable wedges have to spend 4 minutes chopping at it with a sharp knife. We can do it in 30 seconds with an apple slicer and return to the couch where our book awaits. Quit laughing. Those 3.5 minutes might make all the difference in finishing the chapter before the kids get off the bus.

In fact, clever devices like the apple slicer can inspire us to greater heights of efficiency. I just prepared a big pot of beans, something I didn't want to do because I was in the middle of a scene, but hey, we gotta eat. The bean pot called for beans (check), diced tomatoes (can! no salt added!), diced bell pepper (frozen this summer!), seasonings (packet!) and chopped onion. Man, I hate chopping onions. I'm a delicate flower, you guys. My lacrymal glands get so irritated when the onion mist hits me, it's unsafe. I can't see what my fingers and that aforementioned sharp knife are up to through all the tears.

So I looked at my three little onions. And I looked at the apple slicer. And I looked at my three little onions. And I looked at my apple slicer. I think you can do the math here, and then I had time to write this blog post without *any tears*.

Whether my experiment will be a success remains to be seen. The pieces of onion weren't exactly a fine dice. It may mean certain people under the age of 10 yell about how much they hate onions since they can actually SEE the onions in the beans. And it may mean I'm kind of awesome.

Which got me to thinking about my writing. (Arrogant much?) Well, that and the fact I'm supposed to blog about my writing, seeing as Here Be Magic is a writer blog and all. I do this efficiency thing in books, too. I look at an apple slicer -- or, say, an alpha male werewolf -- and I think, "How is this device used? Why is it used this way? Can I use it differently? Will it be efficient? Will I cry? Will I lose sight of the knife? And will the chunks of werewolf that remain be too big for the story?"

Pack and Coven, my February Carina release, has an alpha male werewolf. Who is kind of an onion. He'd rather gnaw off his own foot than be in charge of a pack. That sounds like WORK. And the female protagonist is a lot older than he is and frequently bosses him around. She's an onion that needs to be sliced, too. (Onion image by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Ayla87)

Again, it remains to be seen if onions chopped with an apple slicer are delicious or if an alpha male werewolf who doesn't want to boss anybody around is popular with readers. The reason the apple slicer is not commonly used on onions might be because it does a crappy job, and the reason alpha male werewolves are not usually protrayed as less than commanding might be because readers don't like them that way. But, as with the onions and the beans and the ten minutes I gained today, I'm willing to take the chance, and I hope readers will too.

You can meet Harry and June here in the first chapter at my site: http://www.jodywallace.com/snips/packandcovenexcerpt1.htm

Jody Wallace
So much cyberspace, so little time!
www.jodywallace.com  / www.meankitty.com

PS The bean soup with apple-chopped onions was not hated.
PPS If you like holiday stories, I have a free holiday short you can find out about at my site and a contemporary holiday romance that just went on sale today, November 29.