FOODFIC: Halfway to the Grave - Jeaniene Frost

Forget food; this book is all about the drinks. And even though Catherine Crawfield is half-vampire, you can forget about the blood, too. Oh, there’s blood being drunk, alright – no Bones* about it – but it’s the least interesting beverage on the menu.

You might be surprised to hear that in this very fresh, modern piece of paranormalcy, the drink that caught my attention was moonshine. 

One of the scenes in HttG is when vampire-hunter Cat has to get information from a ghost about recent killings that she’s looking into. The ghost, who was hanged in the sixties when one of his clients OD’ed on his moonshine, will only talk to Cat if she brings him moonshine. (And yes, she does tell him, You’re dead and you’re still an alcoholic. That’s so dysfunctional. Cat’s an easy heroine to like.)

So the cool thing about the scene is the delivery of the “white lightning”: Cat drinks it, and the ghost passes through her throat at the same time so he can “taste” it. And it’s not just a “float-through” – her throat is left burning from both the ghost and the liquor. 

I just love when paranormal authors (sorry – authors who are themselves normal, but write about the paranormal) find a new angle for an old concept. Frost actually makes up quite a few of her own rules in her vampire/ghost/ghoul realm, and all of them are easier to swallow than moonshine. :)

*You have to read the book to get that.
**Most of the books discussed on this blog are YA, but this book is ADULTS ONLY.

FOODFIC: Please Welcome Alberta Ross, Author of the Sefuty Tales

  

Then one day her Gran said she was old, dying, and must soon leave her.  The princess felt such sorrow at these words and begged to be able to do anything to ease her going.  'Anything?  Only one thing,' said the old lady, 'the princess must go outside the city walls and find the roast and bring it back.'  If she found the roast, the princess would find a magic so powerful that her life would become a wondrous thing.

So Ria, the Storyteller in the second of the Sefuty Chronicles, relates the story of the first Chronicle. Ria’s self-imposed mission is to turn recent and painful history into ‘Once upon a time’ stories to ease pain and hurt, already in this second book the prosaic is turned into magic.

Ellen’s Tale, the first of the Sefuty Chronicles, does indeed deal with roast lamb.  In a city that for fifty years has been living off manufactured food pastilles Ellen’s great grandmother, survivor of the Great Climate Wars, longs to taste ‘real food’ again before she dies.  Ellen is sent out to do her bidding.  Aided by Bix who is a genetically manipulated soldier she begins the quest.  Bix takes her to a village where food is farmed; this is where she will find roast lamb.

Ellen has never eaten anything other than the pastilles, she struggles with ‘real food’.  On her first day there she finds she is expected to eat it.

I tried.  I choked and spluttered.  I disgraced myself.  The temperature was too high, the texture was so strange and the taste was indescribably horrible. 

And

I tried the food a second time.  A small mouthful as Bix advised.  Held it in my mouth.  It filled my mouth and not only stayed but seemed to expand.  It intruded into the whole cavity.  I was aware of roughness and grease …. Oh Gran, you never warned me.  It was horrid.  It was disgusting.  It was impossible.

Food of course is only a small part of what she has to struggle with on her course to a new life with Bix, because of course they fall in love and are then separated.  It is a love story of sorts!

The series is called the Sefuty Chronicles and the word Sefuty itself is taken from food security.  Se for security and fu for food, as it is pronounced.  The Sefuty Line is the route taken to transport food for the City.  Heavily mined and patrolled by the Feral Soldiers, such as Bix, it is a magnet for those who are starving, outside the walls.  The countryside outside the City walls is one devastated by war, reliant on the vagaries of weather and luck to be able to produce food.  Millions have died of starvation in the back story and survivors are on the edge of extinction.

Ellen and Bix will need to learn not only how to eat ‘food’ but also how to grow, harvest, and preserve it.  With no fossil fuel there are no tractors, fertilisers or pesticides.  Farming has crashed back to the labour intensive methods of a bygone age and, as then, a bad harvest caused by adverse weather, disease or pests could mean disaster. Food, and the lack of it, plays an important role in the whole series written and still to come.

And the ‘roast lamb’? Well, it’s my absolute favourite dish.

Thanks for stopping by and sharing some Food For Thought, Alberta!

You can find Alberta at:

http://www.albertaross.co.uk

http://sefutychronicles-albertaross.blogspot.com

http://www.didyoueverkissafrog.typepad.com

http://sefuty.livejournal.com/

http://twitter.com/albertaross

FOODFIC: Please Welcome Melissa Ruttanai, Staff Blogger at Shrodinger's Mouse

I’m a dedicated roadtripper, and my husband and I plan at least two trips a year in our car.  Most recently, we had a 7 day trip from lower New York up past Buffalo, crossing over to Toronto, driving east along the Thousand Islands, hitting Montreal and scooping down I-87 for the southern leg home.

When we got to the Canadian/US border, the patrolman peered into our backseat, eyes skimming over bags, boxes, Tupperware, and utensils.  She must have thought we had some eating disorder.  We’d more snacks than clothes.

But isn’t traveling always better with food?

In George Martin’s Game of Thrones, the story follows the multiple perspectives of ten characters.  And in almost every chapter, meals create mouth-watering backdrops to the action.  Three of the characters are in constant motion, up and down the countryside.  One, the exiled Princess Dany finds herself married into a strong tribe of nomadic horsemen.

Here, the feasts are decadent, lasting until dawn.

Each day, the khalasar caravan moves across the grasslands and great plains.  At night, battalions of slaves erect palatial tents made of fine silk and sweetgrass.  Then, like magic: the evening meal begins.  Roasted suckling pig with honey, stewed vegetables, and crisp summerwine. Martin depicts these scenes with care, and I’m off running for a glass of wine just to keep companionship with the moment.

But how realistic is this?

Dany’s lord-husband, the Khal commands 40,000 men, who follow where he leads.  40,000!!  How many wagons would it take to feed these men, let alone their wives and children, or the slaves, servants, and seductive dancers they have each night.

Well, it’s fiction after all.  The Khalasar is a powerful warlord and like the real warrior kings of Asia, Africa, and Europe, what the ruler wants he gets.

Then again, I remember being pinned to the door during our road trip, sitting precariously next to a cooler full of ginger ale and hummus, on top of which teetered a mountain of chips, pretzels, peanuts, and apples.  If we were part of the Khalasar caravan, I’m not sure where we’d pack the suckling pig!

Thanks for stopping by and sharing some Food For Thought, Melissa!

You can find Melissa at http://www.schrodingersmouse.com

FOODFIC: The Killer's Cousin - Nancy Werlin

 

Ah, beef stew. It pretty much guarantees the ultimate feel-good family dinner, doesn't it? Not the stuff in the can (although I’m not at all against Mr. Dinty Moore), but the home-cooked love-fest of beef, carrots, potatoes, and thick gravy…

Well, if you’re Davey Yaffe and you’ve just been sent to live with your mother’s estranged family in another state after your lawyer-father got you acquitted of your girlfriend’s murder and everyone agrees you need a fresh start in a new place, it doesn’t mean much.

It takes Aunt Julia two full days before she’ll even be in the same room with Davey, and when they finally all sit down for dinner, Davey is as hungry for human interaction as he is for the savory stew. And he gets little of either.

This meal is the perfect look into the family dynamic; when Davey thinks, I wanted more, but [it] was out of reach and somehow I was reluctant to ask, he means not only the beef stew, but affection, acceptance. He’s not only tortured by the fact that the comfort food is just out of reach, but that the comfort itself is as well. 

After that opening, you have to hope that the meals and the relationships will get better for Davey, but then there’s the ghost upstairs and she’s hungry, too…

FOODFIC: Fat Chance - Leslea Newman

I have to tell you, our narrator Judi almost lost me right at the beginning of the book when she complained about summer, saying, There wasn’t anything to do except sweat and eat ice cream. Not because she's overweight with horrible eating habits, but because – here it is – Gasp! – Horrors! – I don’t like ice cream. 

However, she lured me back in soon after with a night of Oreos that I can relate to oh-so-well; she explained how, at 51 calories each, 2 cookies was permissible, but when she slid down the slippery slope to 10 – 510 calories! – it was catastrophic. Like Judi, I knew perfectly well in the 8^th grade that if I had the small bag of Doritos and a can of diet Mountain Dew for lunch, I could cruise through the whole afternoon on a boastful 250 calories and stay awake through history class.

In fact, I actually challenge you to find a teenage girl who’s not a mathematical genius when it comes to calorie counting. The experts say, Calories in, Calories out – it’s simple math. Well, it’s a simple statement alright, but dieting’s effect on the female psyche is infinitely complex.  If you were to trade spelling bees for competitions on teen magazine diet and fashion advice, you’d have more contenders than American Idol.

Judi has one particularly poignant diary entry: I mean, who cares if two trains are rushing toward each other at a hundred miles per hour from Point A to Point B, so what time will they meet in Chicago? Here’s the only word problem that I care about: If a certain 13-year-old girl…weighs only 129 pounds and she goes on a diet and eats only 800 calories a day, how many days will it take her to weigh 115?

 

I won’t tell you how our tortured (and not uniquely so) young narrator’s story ends, but I will say that it’s one that will be retold over and over – in fiction and reality – until we fix our priorities; food should rule only our stomachs, not our minds.

FOODFIC: The Singer of All Songs - Kate Constable

There is a saying in Penlewin that hunger is the finest sauce.

Calwyn, the 16-year-old novice ice princess, has never been truly hungry in any sense of the word. She lives in the quiet paradise of Antaris, protected from the outside by impenetrable walls of ice. She sings chantments, cares for the bees, and eats warm bread with precious honey. Her life is golden.

Until a mysterious man (aren’t they always?) crosses the wall and opens Calwyn’s eyes to new possibilities. Before she even realizes what she’s doing, she follows him out of Antaris and leaves behind the safety of honey for wild rabbits and birds they roast themselves with mountain plants for seasoning. She’s finally getting her first real taste of life, and it’s so delicious she exclaims, The air tastes like – like queen’s jelly! (Highest of accolades.)

And, of course, now that she’s drunk the elixir of freedom, there’s no going back – not even with evil sorcerers, pirates, and erupting volcanoes on the Outland menu. 

I haven’t even mentioned the secondary edible icon – the apple, which plays its own symbolic role. There is expectedly an apple orchard in Antaris, and the obvious predictor of Calwyn’s exit from her homeland is Darrow’s carving of one fruit globe into a map of the world. His piercing of the apple skin serves to crumble the illusory walls of her perceived paradise and things will never be the same.

Fortunately, this is only book #1 of the Chanters Trilogy, because Constable has barely dipped her spoon into Tremaris, and we have many unchartered lands and exotic tastes to explore.

FOODFIC: The Art of Racing in the Rain – Garth Stein

From the beginning, we know we love Denny best because Enzo does. And we learn to love Zoe and Eve as he does, too. But the grandparents – particularly Maxwell – we’re not sure about. Until – you guessed it! – we see him feed Enzo. 

“Want a treat, boy?” he asked, holding out a pepperoncini.

Oh, and did I mention that Enzo is a dog?

And this is how the pepper goes down: I took the pepper from him and immediately felt a prickly sensation on my tongue. I bit down, and a burning filled my mouth. I quickly swallowed and thought I was done with the discomfort…but that’s when the pain really began. My throat felt as if it had been scraped raw.

I could go on about how the pepper also felt coming out, but I won’t; I’ll just share the lesson Enzo learned: Since that time…I have never accepted food from someone I didn’t fully trust.

Since we all know that you can tell everything about a person by the way he treats animals, I can’t think of any better way Stein could’ve given insight into this character and also set the stage for the entire second half of the book. I almost feel like I should’ve written *spoiler alert* because that one pepperoncini scene tells so much!

So I think I’ll have to stop there or else I really will ruin the ending for those of you who haven’t read this book yet. And I will think of Enzo every time I pass a Papa John’s from now on :)

FOODFIC: City of Ashes – Cassandra Clare

Jace Wayland is drinking scotch.

Jace is a shadowhunter. He’s unshakable – his hands had always been as steady as his heartbeat; he’s amusingly arrogant – “I prefer to think that I’m a liar in a way that’s uniquely my own;” he melts girls with his touch – she felt herself go fluid and pliant, stretching upward to twine her arms around his neck the way that a sunflower twists toward light.

And he orders scotch?

My problem with this is not that he’s too young* for such an old-man drink, nor that he lacks the sophistication to pull it off (see “amusingly arrogant” above); it’s that I feel scotch is a “wanna-be” drink. It’s what people order when they want to impress someone or portray themselves as something other than they are.

The beauty of Jace is that he is who he is – he says what’s on his mind and he does as he pleases. So I say, let him drink something bold (tequila?), rugged (a black lager?), or wild (Jaeger?). Or maybe give him a strawberry margarita and God help the barfly who teases him for it!

As for me, I’ll stick to wine so that you'll think I'm wonderfully worldly and refined. :) Cheers!

*I, of course, do not condone underage drinking (Jace is only 17), but I’ll leave that discussion for another time so as not to drift too far from my point.

WELCOME HUNGRY READERS

When you think of Lady and the Tramp, you go right to that romantic scene behind Tony’s with the big, beautiful bowl of spaghetti that ends in their sweet doggy kiss, right?  Can you even describe any other scene?

Thousands of fans flock to Port Angeles’s Bella Italia where Bella had mushroom ravioli with Edward.

The first thing visitors to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter do is grab a butter beer.

You might be thinking that such scenes or details were only significant in the movies, but I disagree. I think those things – more specifically, those digestible items – only made it into the films because they first resonated with the readers of the books. 

Maybe it’s the relatability of characters when they make choices that we also make in our daily lives (as opposed to whether or not to turn into a vampire) that speaks to us. Or maybe it’s that we like to think that if we eat lamb chops and mashed potatoes, we can be strong enough to win the Hunger Games, too. 

Or maybe it’s just because people are HUNGRY – for love, for power, for money, for lunch!

Whatever the reason, the food depicted in a book does something for us, and the purpose of this blog is for us to read, read, read…and then ask,  
                                              But What Are They Eating?