Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen’s Falafel Recipe In You Are Not Alone, Cassandra and Jane follow Shay, learning more and more about her life, her likes, and her dislikes…that she works out frequently, and loves the Greek restaurant close to her apartment. They ever learn her favorite dishes. It’s there where Shay begins to doubt […]
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Leesa Cross-Smith’s Pasta alla Norma Recipe
Leesa Cross-Smith’s Pasta alla Norma In This Close To Okay, my character Tallie encounters a man named Emmett on a bridge in the rain. He’s considering suicide and Tallie is a therapist but doesn’t tell him that. Instead, she plays him some music and talks to him, listens to him, shares her heart with him. […]
Ladee Hubbard: Elizabeth’s Lemon Cake
Ladee Hubbard: Elizabeth’s Lemon Cake The Rib King is set in the early 20th century and tells the story of an African American domestic servant in a wealthy household who creates a meat sauce that becomes a national sensation. Food is an important emotional core of the novel and a lot of my research involved considering […]
Diane Chamberlain’s Gold Nugget Cake
Diane Chamberlain’s Gold Nugget Cake In the 1940s, World War II was in full force and food rationing was a normal part of life so the government could ensure that everyone was getting an equal amount. In spite of this, women came up with unique and quirky menus that we simply don’t see today. When […]
Stephanie Thornton Plymale’s Herb-Roasted Cornish Game Hens
Stephanie Thornton Plymale’s Herb-Roasted Cornish Game Hens I grew up homeless and was in the foster care system for much of my youth, so it’s hard to overstate how much my family, and the home we have created, mean to me. Designing beautiful spaces and sharing time in them with my loved ones is something […]
Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s Irish Soda Bread
Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s Irish Soda Bread This loaf, often known as “a cake of bread”, is one of Ireland’s staples. Because the ingredients are so few and the rise is vital, people can get obsessive about which kind of flour gives the best result, and whether or not a handful of oats should be tossed in […]
Ellen Alpsten’s Tsarina Borscht (Beet Soup)
Ellen Alpsten’s Tsarina Borscht (Beet Soup) Catherine I grew up on a nourishing and simple Baltic Russian cuisine, allowing her to withstand a lifetime of hard physical labor in a harsh climate. Northern and Eastern European, Caucasian, Central Asian, Siberian, and East Asian cooking traditions influenced this cuisine, which combined plentiful fish, pork, poultry, caviar, […]
Ellen Feldman’s “Paris Never Leaves You” French Omelette
Ellen Feldman’s Paris Never Leaves You French Omelette Food plays a unique role in my novel, Paris Never Leaves You, not only for its intrinsic appeal but as an expression of Vivi’s search for her identity and the conflict between Charlotte’s past in Paris and their current life in New York. At one point, Vivi […]
Gail Tsukiyama’s “The Color of Air” Macanese-Style Portuguese Chicken
Gail Tsukiyama’s The Color of Air Macanese-Style Portuguese Chicken The Color of Air takes place in Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai’i in 1935, brimming with the influx of workers who had immigrated to the islands from China, Japan, the Philippines, and Portugal to work on the sugar and pineapple plantations. In my Japanese […]
Natalie Jenner’s Classic Victoria Sandwich Cake
Natalie Jenner’s The Jane Austen Society Classic Victoria Sandwich This is a very classic British cake recipe from the BBC Good Food Magazine (May, 2005) which is super easy and quick to make. If you prefer, you can skip the icing filling and just spread strawberry jam between the two sponge layers. In The Jane […]