Shelley Workinger's Blog, page 17

Please Welcome Laurie Boris, Author of The Call

Living the Dream; Eating on the Cheap

Life isn’t easy for anyone chasing the professional baseball dream. It especially isn’t easy for minor league umpires. In my novel The Call, Margie Oblonsky gets her start in the minors as an umpire in the early 1980s. Aside from the challenges of being one of the first women behind the mask, low pay and constant travel means cheap food, as Margie can find it.

Fortunately, her family has always been humble, so she’s thankful for whatever’s on the table—usually Mom’s hamburger casserole or spaghetti and meatballs with homemade marinara. Luxury was steaks on the grill and ice cream for dessert. This is what Margie dreams of when she’s on the road. This is what brings her comfort when she visits her mother during the winter, during the long, nail-biting months while she’s waiting to see if she’ll still have a job in the spring...

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/09...

Please Welcome Deanna Sletten, Author of Miss Etta

With a novel set during the years of 1895 to 1912, you can expect that the characters would eat simple, homestyle cooking. That is the case with my new novel, Miss Etta. The main character, Emily Pleasants, has lived two separate lives. Her current life (1911) as Emily, a small-town schoolteacher, and her past life as Etta Place, the wife of the famous outlaw, the Sundance Kid. She’s dined on rabbit, fish, and venison while living on the run, and she’s also dined in the finest restaurants in San Antonio, New Orleans, New York City, and Buenos Aires. She’s also enjoyed the most basic and delicious foods in a homestyle restaurant in her new town of Pine Creek, Minnesota.

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/09...

Please Welcome Jolene Stockman, Author of The Jelly Bean Crisis

How do you eat your jelly beans? Randomly? The best ones first? Or last?

Poppy has a system. She arranges her jelly beans by color and flavor, then eats them in order: saving the best for last. It’s how she eats her jelly beans, and it’s how she lives her life. Until now.

My contemporary YA fiction, The Jelly Bean Crisis, follows a straight-A student who pulls out of school for 30 days to try and find her true passion.

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/08...

Please Welcome Mary Elizabeth Summer, Author of Trust Me, I'm Lying

“I like my froofy drinks froofy and my blue-collar brew as bitter as burned oven scrapings.” ~Julep Dupree

Her favorite haunt is Café Ballou, a coffee shop within walking distance of St. Agatha’s, the fancy Catholic private school she attends. She’s at the Ballou more often than not, especially once her father goes missing and her apartment turns not as safe as it used to be...

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/07...

Please Welcome Lori Ann Stephens, Author of Some Act of Vision

I’ve never thought about the food in Some Act of Vision, but what a great question to ask about characters: But what are they eating? I suppose the title of Chapter Two is most appropriate for today’s guest post: “Eat Something.” Jordan Walker is a ballet dancer, and as a former dancer, I can attest to the strange relationship that dancers have had (historically) with food. I think it’s getting better now, but when I was a teenager, food was a topic fraught with anxiety and wish-fulfillment. I was always hungry—I loved food, and especially sweets—but my anxiety about the way my body was supposed to look according to magazines and other dancers made me love-hate food. I’d love whatever it was I was eating, but later “hate” that same food when around my friends. Thankfully, things have changed since the 80s, and we’re raising girls and boys with smarter approaches to body image.

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/07...

Please Welcome Christopher Minori, Author of Little Idiots

Samm is like every other detective tracking their target. That is, if every other detective is a demon banished from Hell and their target is an escaped rabid soul! At its heart, the comedy-fantasy world of Little Idiots is a detective novel where demons are the good guys, humans are ridiculous and angels have bad attitudes. Samm is nothing more than a horned Sam Spade, and like any hard-boiled detective, food never touches his lips; he subsides on cigarettes and booze.

And man, does the booze ever flow. Alcohol is Samm's solution to all problems - get beat up by demon mafiosos? Have a drink. Angel trying to assassinate you? Have a drink. Your apprentice bringing home Cerberus' stray puppies? Have a drink. And put newspapers down on the floor. Lots of newspapers.


More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/07...

Please Welcome Karen Rose Smith, Author of Murder with Cinnamon Scones

What are my characters eating in Willow Creek, Pennsylvania, deep in the heart of Amish country? Anything sweet or hearty that will accompany tea.

Daisy Swanson and her Aunt Iris co-own Daisy’s Tea Garden in Willow Creek. Many of the foods my characters enjoy are based on Pennsylvania Dutch cooking.  Daisy at the tea garden tries to give them a twist, as does her kitchen manager, her best friend from high school, Tessa Miller.  Daisy’s Tea Garden offers sweet and savory items from potato and leek soup, carrot-grape-pecan salad to lemon tea cakes and cinnamon scones that are involved in solving the murders in this small community.  In each novel I include at least three recipes that have appeared in the mystery.

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/07...

Please Welcome Gabi Stevens, Author of The Wish List

Food doesn’t play a huge role in my book The Wish List, but there is a quirky food item in it. Confession time, because I pulled it out of my own life: My heroine likes to eat Chocolate Chipless Cookies. What are they? As the name says, they’re chocolate chip cookies minus the chocolate chips.

I’m not a huge chocolate fan in real life. I will eat it, but it has to have something in it—nuts, peanut butter, butterfinger filling. No fruit. I will eat brownies, but prefer them with vanilla ice cream on top, no chocolate sauce. I prefer white cake to devil’s food, vanilla pudding to chocolate, and plain glazed doughnuts over chocolate ones. I wish they made eclairs without the chocolate covering the top. Oh, and it has to be milk chocolate. I hate dark chocolate. I think most of my tastes are that of an eight year old. You should see my drink choices.

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/06...

Please Welcome Back Katherine Roberts, Author of Bone Music

My novel Bone Music tells the story of Genghis Khan’s rise to power in 13th century Mongolia. The book is part legend, but the food and drink in its pages is real enough, and many of the same foodstuffs are still eaten (and drunk) in Mongolia today.

Genghis Khan’s people ate a lot of meat. This would have come both from the herds that travelled with the clans - oxen, horses, camels, yaks, sheep, goats - and also from the wild animals they hunted on the steppes, such as deer, marmots and squirrels.

At the start of the book, the boy Temujin (young Genghis) is living in exile with his family after an ambitious chief stole his dead father's people, and must find a way to feed his little brothers...


More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/06...

Please Welcome Back Nancy Lynn Jarvis, Author of The Two-Faced Triplex

Regan McHenry and her husband, Tom Kiley, will eat anything, and in the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries series, they’ve had a variety of in-home and in-restaurant meals. Regan even cooked an authentic Columbian meal to try and catch a killer in A Neighborly Killing and has been known to burn dinner because a clue occurred to her as she cooked.

In her most recent adventure, The Two-Faced Triplex, Regan explains her plan for getting information about a possible killer out of a reluctant witness to Tom over samosa avocado chat at an Indian restaurant, using her fork to punctuate her thoughts.

More:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2018/06...