Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 16
December 14, 2015
Fans of Magic University: Want the bonus novella “Christmas Magic?”
As previously announced, later this week (December 16th) a limited-time digital box set that includes all the Magic University books plus a special bonus Christmas novella “Christmas Magic” will be going live for $9.99 and will only be available until February 1st.
The set can be purchased from the usual suspects (Amazon
| Smashwords |B&N | Kobo and other favorite retailers) but I know a lot of fans already HAVE the whole set except for the bonus novella!
So here’s how to get just the bonus novella. It won’t be sold separately, but I will send it to you as a thank you gift for doing ANY of the following:
1. Review any of the Magic University books on Amazon
2. Review any of the Magic University books on Goodreads
3. Link to the announcement (http://blog.ceciliatan.com/archives/2609) from Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr.
4. Make a donation to The Network/La Red, a domestic violence advocacy group who support trans, bi, and kinky individuals
5. Make a donation to the Bisexual Resource Center
6. Make a donation to any other bisexual or trans advocacy, support, or activism group of your choice.
7. Send me some Kyle or Frost fanart. :-)
Trade me a screen cap of proof you did any of the above (or a link to the proof) by emailing me at ctan.writer @ gmail.com with “Magic U bonus” in the subject line and I’ll email you back the novella as an ePub or mobi/Kindle file! Sound good?
CHRISTMAS MAGIC
It’s Christmas at Gladius House but Frost isn’t feeling very festive. Kyle will do anything he can, though, to set Frost’s world alight. The novella runs 15,000 words and contains erotic scenes.
December 13, 2015
Limited time only: Digital Box Set of the Complete Magic University Series
Going live on December 16th, a limited-time digital box set offer that includes all the Magic University books plus a special bonus Christmas novella “Christmas Magic” that takes place after the final book!
The digital box set is only $9.99 (a $35 value), a great gift for anyone who loves erotic romance, magic, and fantasy (yourself included…) whether you have a brand new e-reader to fill or not.
Pre-order the set until December 16th (or order it thereafter) at:
Amazon | Smashwords |B&N | Kobo
and other favorite retailers.
The digital box set is only available until February 1st!
“Tan has long been one of the foremost voices in writing and publishing erotic sci-fi and fantasy. With her New Adult paranormal romance Magic University series, Tan combines her favorite elements from the Harry Potter books with LGBT characters and eroticism. Her protagonist Kyle Wadsworth, studying at the secret magical university Veritas, learns to harness sex magic to combat sirens and prophecies alike. With Kyle starting out knowing less than Jon Snow, he experiences the kind of in-depth sexual apprenticeship that Anastasia Steele should have learned at the hands of Christian Grey.”—Tor.com
“Magic adds a level of spice to Kyle’s journey. … There are many very sensual scenes in the story, with a final scene that is a climax in a lot of interesting ways. The Magic University series looks like it’s going to be a fun ride with lots of eroticism. The Siren and the Sword is a delicious start.” –Paranormal Romance Reviews
“Magic University has a good storyline, and the types of magic used are very innovative and set it apart from other books of this genre. Though at times the author alludes to what is going to possibly happen, she does a wonderful job of keeping the reader guessing right up until the end. … Ms. Tan has done an outstanding job of feeding my Harry Potter obsession in a very adult fashion.” — Book Wenches
“Joining Kyle as he experienced many rites of passage, both ordinary and magical, was a delight. It was such a treat to escape to Veritas. The world of “magic users” is enticing and I look forward to spending more time at Veritas. Count me in for the whole series, it’s just that good.” — Manic Readers Reviews
November 28, 2015
The Duck Day 2015 Menu, Photos, and Recipes
For this year’s Duck Day theme we decided on the Silk Road. This was mostly because corwin wanted to figure out a theme that would encompass both duck shawarma and tandoori duck. Since both those things are quite heavy/filling, I wanted to come up with other dishes that would be lighter. Bam, I thought of the Silk Road and we were off and running.
As it turns out there was not a single “road” but a network of trade routes that stretched from the Philippines at one extreme all the way to the Mediterranean coast at the other, with some land routes and some sea routes. So the meal could start in Thailand, slip past the Philippines, hit mainland China, trek through India, Egypt, and modern-day Turkey/Israel, with dessert coming to rest in Italy.
1. Opening Cocktail: “Long Thailand Iced Tea”
2. Amuse: Duck Arroz Caldo
3. Dumpling course: a duck soup dumpling, a duck “char siu” bun, and a duck seven-spice sausage
4. Soup course: Duck wonton soup
5. First Main: Tandoori duck with kale saag paneer fritters, garlic naan, and raita
6. Palate cleanser: Egyptian mint tea sorbet
7. Second Main: Duck shawarma with homemade pita, labneh, zhoug, and babaganoush
8. Cheese course: rose-water candied dates stuffed with bleu cheese, various cheeses, with homemade crackers, honeycomb
9. Dessert: Olive oil cake with pistachio gelato and candied citrus
10. Followed by tea/coffee and mignardises (hibiscus marshmallows, pistachio white chocolate truffles, dark chocolate truffles)
(If you’re not familiar with the Duck Day tradition, here’s the tl;dr — corwin doesn’t like turkey all that much and always wanted to make duck and his mother never would. So when he went to college in 1986 he decided to make duck for Thanksgiving and has been doing so every year since. This year we got lucky and only 14 people out of our guest list could make it–we’ve had as many as 28, which is the max we can fit into our house for a seated, plated, coursed meal, which this is. Not surprisingly, it’s SOOOOOO much easier to cook for 14 than for twice that many.)
To just see lots of photos of the meal and prep, take a look at my November 2015 Instagram feed, where I also have some small videos. To see descriptions of the dishes, recipes, and embedded photos, keep going under the cut:
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2015 at 12:43am PST
Opening Cocktail: “Long Thailand Iced Tea”
One of corwin’s favorite things is Thai iced tea. Try as we might it never comes out quite like it does in the restaurants, no matter how much sweetened condensed milk or thai tea powder we add. corwin is known for his killer thai iced tea ice cream, though, and he wanted to see if that could be adapted to a cocktail.
Far as he could tell from research, there is no single spice mix which is canonically “thai tea.” Some have tamarind, some don’t. After reading up, corwin made his own blend (including star anise, cinnammon stick, cloves, and cardamom), steeped black tea for a short period of time and the spices for a long period of time, and used it as a base for this cocktail, which also included a little heavy cream and a South African creamy, fruity liqueur called Amarula and finished with a grated Bali Long Pepper(corn). (To me Amarula tastes a lot like jackfruit, though the marula and the jackfruit are not even in the same biological order of plants.) The cocktail was basically one of those things to wake up your tongue with many different flavors.
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 7:50pm PST
Amuse: Duck Arroz Caldo
Arroz caldo is a traditional filipino rice stew that I had for breakfast every day when we went to the Philippines to visit my family when I was 11 years old. Many recipes I looked at call it “congee.” It’s not congee. Congee is mild and does not kick you in the face with ginger flavor; arroz caldo should. Congee also tends to have the typical Chinese consommé-like broth, also mild, whereas for this I wanted a very dark, rich base like the one I remembered from when I was a kid. I started by browning 4 duck legs in the bottom of a dutch oven, about 4 minutes on a side, to make a dark fond. Then I added 4 cups of duck stock (with only 14 guests this year–a smaller number than usual–we could do more with the dishes). To recreate the ginger kick, I simmered chopped, crushed ginger in it. After it had simmered an hour I still wasn’t happy with the broth so I pulled the legs out, chopped a lot of chunks of meat off, browned them severely in another pan, and then added it back into the broth. Added some more large chunks of crushed ginger, too, and then added the rice. I used about a cup total, about 2/3 regular jasmine rice and 1/3 “Sweet” rice (glutinous rice). A small dash of fish sauce also enriched it. After about a half hour it had the flavor I wanted. I pulled out the large chunks of everything but left the browned bits of meat in. In fact, right before service I made matchstick slices from some of the drumstick meat I had saved out, crisped it in a pan with oil, and used it as a finishing element.
Since this was an amuse, it was served in a teacup, finished with the crisped meat, crisp fried garlic, minced scallion, and a sous vide quail egg. (Thanks to ChefSteps whose “sous vide egg calculator” told us if we wanted liquid yolk but jelly-set white we wanted a 65-degree quail egg done for 13 minutes! Handy.)
Our one vegetarian diner received a serving of rice porridge in which I’d cooked fresh shiitake mushrooms, made with the all-vegetable stock corwin had made earlier in the week.
Some arroz caldo recipes I used to reference: Kawaling Pinoy * Serious Eats
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 9:06pm PST
Dumpling course: Dim sum:
a duck soup dumpling, a duck “char siu” bun, and a duck seven-spice sausage
The secret to making great soup dumplings and filled buns is basically get Andrea Nguyen’s Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More
book. Seriously, I’ve made probably a dozen recipes from this book and it’s far superior to any other book or reference I’ve had when it comes to making won tons, shu mai, and many other favorites.
The trick with soup dumpling is to use agar agar or gelatin to make the soup into a choppable solid that will liquify inside the dumplings when you steam them. To make a duck version, replace the chicken soup with duck soup (duck stock simmered with ginger and scallion, salted) and replace the pork with ground or minced duck leg meat.
Likewise for the char siu duck buns, replace the pork with duck. corwin made hoisin sauce from scratch. It comes out so much more delicious than the stuff from a jar. Hoisin sauce: from a previous sauce he’d made he had left over whiskey that prunes had soaked in. He combined that whiskey with brown sugar, chinese black beans, sesame oil, rice vinegar, homemde sambal and honey, simmered it until the beans were soft, hit it with the stick blender, then reduced it down.
So on this course corwin made the fillings and I made the doughs and did the assembly. This was the only course I didn’t feel was perfect: the steamers weren’t going hard enough and so I felt the dumplings and buns didn’t cook quite right; they seemed slightly gummy to me. Everyone else thought they were great, though. (And they did taste fantastic! Just could have been better, I thought!)
The third thing on the plate was corwin made a duck emulsified sausage with five-spice powder, but instead of five spices he used seven, so I’ve been calling it seven-spice powder. Five-spice is another one of those things where different recipes disagree on which five spices are in it. We went with cinnamon, clove, Szechuan peppercorns, ginger, and all three of the licorice-y tasting things: star anise, regular anise seed, and fennel seed.
Emulsified sausage is a bit tricky and difficult because if you don’t keep it very cold while you’re making it, the emulsion breaks and reportedly turns into a disgusting gunk that is inedible. corwin’s emulsion did not break. The process included lots of ice cubes in the emulsion, stuffing into hog casings, and then sous vide cooking the sausages to firm them up. Try imagining a kielbasa, but with the texture of a hot dog and the flavor of duck and five-spice, and you get the idea. It was then sliced and browned before plating.
Served with home made sambal (red chili paste) and some Chinese yellow mustard and a bit of cucumbers lightly pickled in sesame oil and rice vinegar. [Our vegetarian got all the sides and some fried wonton chips to dip in them.]
Homemade wonton soup with mini duck wontons & fried wonton strips #duckday
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 9:07pm PST
Soup course: Duck wonton soup
Back to Andrea Nguyen’s ASIAN DUMPLINGS for this one, again with duck stock as the base of the soup, simmered with ginger and scallion. I must have reduced the soup more than I realized while either simmering or heating it up because it came out saltier than intended–meaning for once corwin didn’t add soy sauce to his serving of soup. The only ways I veered from the recipe were not only replacing the chicken broth with duck and the filling of the wonton with duck, I made “mini” wontons of 2×2-inch homemade skins instead of the usual 3×3 inch. A smaller wonton means not only scaling down the area but also the thickness of the skin. I used the Atlas pasta machine and took it all the way down to notch 6 (Nguyen says do it to 5). I made the wontons a few days in advance and froze them. When it was time for service I put them into boiling broth with slivered snow peas and paper-thin slices of carrot. On the side were fried wonton strips: I had taken all the little bits trimmed from the skins as I’d made them and deep fried that into crispy curls and strips.
For our one vegetarian guest I made an egg drop soup and served it with fried wonton strips. She described it as the best egg drop soup she’d ever had. It might have helped that I did it with mostly egg yolks instead of whites, and corwin’s veggie stock is incredibly flavorful, too.
Sheets of dough waiting for me to cut them into wonton skins.
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2015 at 12:38am PST
I'm hand making duck wontons from my homemade skins.
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 24, 2015 at 12:18am PST
What to do with the scraps of wonton dough.
A video posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 12:43pm PST
Moving down the Silk Road to India. Tandoor duck, saag paneer fritters, garlic naan, raita. #duckday
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 9:09pm PST
First Main: Tandoori duck with kale saag paneer fritters, garlic naan, and raita
We’ve been getting a LOT OF KALE and other greens from our farm share this year. Out of the Jerusalem cookbook comes a recipe for Swiss Chard Fritters that corwin experimented with throughout the farm season and it works perfectly well with kale. He invented a way to make it Indian by looking at a saag paneer Food Network Recipe from Aarti Sequeira. First he made his own paneer (Indian cheese) from scratch. Then he put onions, ginger, and garlic into a pan and slow-cooked them sofrito style for 45 minutes, then added all the spices and the cayenne and cooked it more in ghee. Then he drained all the excess butter out to use later to fry the fritters in.
The onion sofrito was then put in the food processor with the blanched kale, eggs, and a bit of matzoh meal to become something I could hand-form into balls and fry while he made garlic naan on the spot.
The tandoori duck was made by him mixing up his own version of the tandoori spice mix (based on a recipe from Food.com) and marinating boneless duck leg pieces in yogurt and the spice mix overnight.
Raita: There are a lot of raita recipes out there, too, some which add garlic, coriander, cilantro, or lots of cumin. Some add green onions. Some say peel the cucumber. Some say don’t. Since in this dish it was meant to be a contrast to the spicy tandoori and garlicky naan it seemed best to go on the light side of flavor. I peeled the cucumbers and only used a few minced mint leaves and a dash of cumin. Using a really good yogurt like Side Hill Farm was really the most important thing.
Palate cleanser! Egyptian mint tea sorbet.
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 9:10pm PST
Palate cleanser: Egyptian mint tea sorbet
I looked up a lot of recipes and as usual didn’t think any of them were quite right, I decided one from Wolfgang Puck came close though. I brewed three cups of strong gunpowder green tea (a dark green tea with very tightly rolled leaves the size of pinheads) with about five or six fresh sprigs of mint in the pot, then took out the tea leaves and mint and soaked a fresh batch of mint sprigs in it for another half hour or so. I made a sugar syrup of one cup water and two cups sugar and then added it to the cooled tea, and left out the lemon juice suggested by Puck because it tasted just fine without. I let it sit around to cool but forgot to chill it. Fortunately our ice cream maker handled it just fine.
I served it with 2-3 fresh mint leaves in the dish with the scoop of sorbet.
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 9:49pm PST
Second Main: Duck shawarma with homemade pita, labneh, zhoug, and babaganoush
Having now arrived via Silk Road in The Levant (a term that at one time meant “everything east of Venice,” including what’s now modern-day Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Israel), this dish is 100% corwin. He baked the pita from scratch, made his own sheep and goat labneh (by hanging sheep and goat yogurt until it was basically like cream cheese), zhoug (apparently now Israel’s national chili paste, a green chili paste), and burned the eggplants to make babaganoush. Oh yeah, and duck breast marinated in a shawarma rub for a full day and then smoked on the grill outside and then finished on the cast iron stovetop grill inside and sliced. (Our vegetarian got everything but the duck breast.) Most guests put everything inside their nicely puffed pita while others used knife and fork. Pretty much everything in this dish was based off the Jerusalem cookbook except the babaganoush which is corwin’s own recipe: roasted garlic, fresh squeezed lemon, eggplants burned (yes burned whole) over flames, salt and pepper. Turns out burning the eggplant is really the key: merely smoking them doesn’t come out as good.
Burning the eggplant for baba gannoush #duckday
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2015 at 12:41am PST
Finishing off the duck shawarma on cast iron. #duckday
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 11:29pm PST
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 11:32pm PST
Cheese course:
various cheeses, with homemade crackers, rose water candied dates stuffed with bleu cheese, whole honeycomb, rojik.
We totally stole the idea for the dates from our friends Shariann and John, who had us over for dinner recently. In fact I took their recipe but to make it really perfect for the cheese plate I pitted the dates and then re-stuffed them with bleu cheese before rolling them in rose syrup and toasted sesame seeds.
Also on this plate: rojik. When sold it looks like of like a light blue dildo wrapped in plastic. But corwin was assured by everyone in the checkout line at the Armenian grocery that it’s awesome: walnuts wrapped in grape molasses. So he bought one and we sliced it for this plate.
Note one of the cheese was so deliciously runny it had to be served in a spoon.
PITTING DATES:
When the dried dates are huge and gorgeous like the ones we bought it turns out I could just grab the pointy end of the pit with a kitchen tweezers and pull slowly to pull out the entire thing. Especially after the first few, which then made the tweezers really good and sticky. No need to cut the date open at all. To get the bleu cheese in, I just stuffed it in using a chopstick.
corwin made the crackers. These came out perfect and the two secrets are no yeast and use the pasta machine. We’ve tried crackers many times and haven’t ever been quite happy with them, until now. Our friend Tamar saw me complaining about how hard it had been to get crackers right on Facebook and pointed me at a Washington Post article about them. I pointed corwin at that, the Everona Market recipe in particular, and a couple days later he got out the pasta machine and voila. The last trick: you have to watch them like a hawk, because at that thinness even 30 seconds too long in the oven will burn them. I’d say about 70% of the ones we baked came out great and the other 30% that were “overdone” we snacked on anyway throughout the days leading up to the meal.
Olive oil chiffon cake, pistachio gelato, candied etrog lime & tangerine rinds, almonds. #duckday
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 11:40pm PST
Dessert: Olive oil cake with pistachio gelato and candied citrus
Olive oil cake
I knew since our dessert course was going to land us in the mediterranean what I did NOT want to do was something overly expected like baklava. Besides, I’m not that huge a fan of baklava and also it’s very filling and heavy. I knew by this time in the meal we were going to need something not so heavy. I lit upon the idea of olive oil cake while eating at one of our fave Italian restaurants, Giulia, where they have some of the best housemade pasta. (In fact they’ve gotten so popular it’s hard to get in these days!) I didn’t want to do it in the style they do, though. Light, I thought, light, yet olive-oily. Does such a thing exist?
I went to the Internet to look and found many many things called “olive oil cake.” Many describe themselves as “dense.” Nope, not what I wanted. Some had corn meal. Some were rich in eggs. Nope nope. I was trying to think, could I do the equivalent of a light butter pound cake but with olive oil instead of butter? Or was it fated to be a dense result by dint of the liquid oil somehow?
Then I hit upon a description of the formerly secret “chiffon cake” invented by a cook in Hollywood in the 1920s: His secret was “salad oil.” Chiffon cake sure sounds sumptuously light, don’t it? Could I replace the vegetable oil in chiffon cake with olive oil?
I asked Google and came up with a great recipe at ChefSteps.
I had not heard of ChefSteps until this month and I’ve already bookmarked two things on their site. Yes, they said, using olive oil works perfectly and they also gave a nice history of chiffon cake.
I ran a test recipe by halving the recipe (their site has a handy re-calculation feature! Thanks, ChefSteps!) and then baking it in muffin tins. The recipe insists one must use bleached cake flour to have the proper pH. I used unbleached for the test since that’s what I had on hand, and I upped the citrus juice slightly (adding a quarter cup tangerine juice to the lemon juice) and using tangerine zest. It came out AMAZING, fluffy but sumptuous. Drizzled with the awesome fresh-pressed olive oil Sam brought us from Portugal three months ago it was perfect. The only thing I changed for service is the ChefSteps recipe says to mix sugar and salt to sprinkle on the cake. Normally I like salt with sweet but this just didn’t work. The olive oil already adds a savory richness; the salt is overkill. Instead I baked the individual cakes in small size muffin tins that I had prepped with butter and granulated sugar. The recipe just made 18 (3 tins of 6 each). They baked for about 15 minutes but even though the internal temp on the minicakes read 203 degrees, they were still slightly wet so I kept them in until they were brown around the edges, about 3-5 minutes more.
Pistachio gelato:
To accompany the cake I wanted pistachio gelato. corwin is the ice cream meister and he looked up a recipe from David Lebovitz that required something called Bronte Crema di Pistachio which from the description appeared to be something like peanut butter made from pistachios by gourmet elves in Sicily. We couldn’t find it under that brand name but we did find something at Formaggio called Pistacchiosa. Ingredients: pistachios, olive oil, sugar, salt. If we hadn’t found that, we would have tried making pistachio butter from scratch.
I used Pistacchiosa but otherwise stuck to the Lebovitz gelato recipe, which has no eggs and no cream in it, using a cornstarch and milk base instead. All the richness comes from the olive oil in the pistachio butter. And boy was it rich. Fantastic. It came out a bit browner in color than it might have if we’d used the Bronte brand, but I didn’t really care. The flavor was the thing and it was by far the best ice cream I’ve ever made. We may experiment with trying to create our own pistachio butter next.
And I candied citrus peels for the first time! corwin found an etrog at Whole Foods. This is a wacky ritual fruit from Israel that is now being grown in California for gourmet purposes instead of ritual purposes. (Apparently it’s the main flavor ingredient in Absolut Citron?) It’s like a Buddha’s Hand without the fingers, just yellow and shaped like a supple lemon. It turns out to make the very best candied citrus peel. I also did lime and tangerine but the etrog came out the absolute best.
I started by looking at a recipe at AllRecipes.
But I ended up following the instructions from Jacques Pepin on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWr4kDoYNsQ
The tangerine peels were thicker than the others so I blanched everything three times, then boiled them for about 8 minutes, which was when the sugar syrup had hit around 200 degrees, and then moved them in the sugar syrup, and cooking until pieces started to turn translucent. I pulled out the ones that had turned translucent and patted them in crystallized sugar and then moving them to a wire rack to dry. Since they don’t all turn at once it means picking out maybe 6-10 pieces at a time.
Mignardises! White choc pistachio, dark choc, and hibiscus marshmallow. #duckday
A photo posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 26, 2015 at 11:41pm PST
Mignardises: hibiscus marshmallows, pistachio white chocolate truffles, dark chocolate truffles
I made two kinds of chocolate truffles. Regular dark chocolate dusted in cocoa, and white chocolate in ground pistachios. corwin wanted to add a homemade marshmallow and we discussed rose water or orange blossom water flavoring, either of which would have made an aesthetic match for the rest of the meal. But when he found hibiscus petals on sale at the Armenian market in Watertown we went with hibiscus.
Hibiscus Marshmallow
We’ve got one diner who can’t eat egg white protein so these were made with unflavored gelatin instead. I started with gelatin sheets that dated from 2011. According to David Lebovitz’s blog, where he references the Gelatin Manufacturers of America, gelatin never goes bad and only carries an expiration date because the packaging may degrade. Well, the label on the bag is in my handwriting so I know the 2011 date is correct, but when I put the gelatin sheets into water they didn’t bloom. They remained essentially just wet unbloomed clear gelatin sheets, softened but not something I could imagine was going to turn into marshmallows when whipped. (As it turned out, I discovered the plastic bag they had been kept in was partly melted with a hole, probably from being too close to the stove, so perhaps degradation of the packaging was in fact to blame?) I threw it out and went to the store during the 5-7pm grocery-store-pocalypse on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and thankfully snagged the VERY LAST bottle of corn syrup in the store (because it turned out we were out of it) and also picked up a fresh box of Knox unflavored gelatin.
In the end I adapted Alton Brown’s recipe for homemade marshmallows, except I halved the quantity and made a 9×9 square pan instead of a full rectangular baking pan. Because even with 14 guests to eat them, 9×9=81 marshmallows!! Alton Brown’s recipe uses no egg white. Its only flavoring is vanilla, dashed in at the end of the whipping process. I wanted hibiscus, though, so I referenced a recipe I found at Cupcake Project for Manishewitz grape wine flavored marshmallows which replaced all the water in the recipe with Manishewitz. So I used the Alton Brown recipe but replaced all the water with hibiscus syrup.
I made the hibiscus syrup using a recipe I found by Lauren Rothman at Food Republic for making “sorrel” as a basis for rum punch. This is basically a sugar syrup that included hibiscus flowers, sugar, brown sugar, lemon peel, ginger, lemon, star anise, and water, which I then set aside most of to make into drinks later, but I took a cup of it and made THAT into a much more syrupy sugar syrup (what Brown called “culinary napalm”) which whips into the gelatin to form the marshmallows. The end result was a fluffy pink, delicate-tasting flowery marshmallow.
A video posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 25, 2015 at 5:26pm PST
The chocolate truffles are super-easy. I followed the basic Tyler Florence recipe on Food Network, and I use 8 ounces Callabaut chocolate as the base and the Droste dutch cocoa for the dusting. It’s basically half cup heavy cream heated until just simmering, then pour that over the shaved chocolate in a bowl and cover it until it melts. (He says 10 minutes. Took more like 15 in my kitchen in November and I had to nuke it on low power 2 times for 20 seconds after that.) Add 1 tsp vanilla, stir until smooth, then it says to let it cool for 30 minutes to an hour until room temp. Then “whip with electric mixer until smooth and light colored.” Mine never gets light colored. Then refrigerate an hour or two just until it’s firm enough to scoop. I put on nitrile gloves, scoop the balls onto a wax paper lined baking sheet and then form each scoop into a better-looking ball, roll it in the cocoa powder in a shallow dish, and voila.
The white truffles I followed a different Food Network recipe, from Ina Garten, but I replaced the hazelnuts with pistachio and I leave out the Bailey’s liqueur, and I don’t do the dark chocolate decoration step.
It was fascinating to see how certain ingredients like ginger and star anise were in nearly every dish we made and yet NONE tasted the same. Even the tandoori and the shawarma and the duck bun, which had striking similarities in form factor and elements really don’t end up resembling each other in the end. Also it was amusing that I think I made four (?) different sugar syrups in the course of the prep. (Tea sorbet, pistachio gelato, candied peels, and marshmallow all required it, and maybe I’m forgetting something…)
November 17, 2015
Join the Cecilia Tan Author Newsletter list, get a free ebook
Many of you know me as a writer of BDSM-themed fiction. In fact my very first published story was called “Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords.” To encourage readers to join my newsletter email list, I’m giving away a copy of the ebook EDGE PLAYS, which collects all the stories/novellas set in the same universe as that short story except for those on sale elsewhere.
So if you’ve read any of the books of Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords, The Velderet, or Royal Treatment, this collection has three new tales for you, and if you haven’t read them, it gives you some sample chapters to try out!
To join the newsletter, visit my website at http://blog.ceciliatan.com just try to navigate away from the site again and a subscription box should pop up. Put in the info it asks for and then it should provide you with special download links for PDF, epub, or Mobi format ebooks.
If for any reason it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, you can always email me at ctan.writer @ gmail.com and once I verify you’re on the list I can email the files to you, as well.
Offer good until December 1st only!
November 13, 2015
Hyper Local: The Native Harvest of Damon Baehrel
I’ve had the immense privilege to eat with some of the great chefs of the world. Some of them even came out of the kitchen to speak with us, like Carme Ruscalleda at Restaurant Sant Pau (three Michelin stars) and Fina Puigdevall of Les Cols (two stars). Many, including those two, go to great lengths to include local ingredients and traditions in their cuisine.
None, though, go to the lengths of Damon Baehrel.
This past Monday corwin and I celebrated our anniversary the way we often do: with a gourmet meal. This time, thanks to the diligent efforts of our friend and fellow culinary adventurer Scott Edelman, we made the trip by car to upstate New York for one of the peak culinary experiences of a lifetime. Scott, his wife Irene, and our friends David and Diane joined us. (World Fantasy Con had just finished up in Saratoga Springs, not too far from there.)
“I’m not in the food business, I’m in the happiness business,” said Damon Baehrel at one point during the course of the seven-hour meal we spent with him. His chef clothes are brown and embroidered with the words “Chef/Grower.” Baehrel is more than that. He’s his restaurant’s sole employee, playing the part of farmer, cheesemaker, waiter, charcuterie expert, host, chef, et cetera. He is quite literally chief cook and bottle-washer.
Irene, corwin, me, Damon Baehrel, David, Diane, Scott, snapping a photo after the fantastic and amazing meal
He’s also one of the friendliest, most energetic people I’ve ever met. I had no idea what to expect, but the moment we set foot in the door of his farmhouse restaurant his warmth and effusiveness set me at ease. “I really appreciate you being here,” he said, and it felt completely sincere. “Diners like you make it possible for me to live my dream on this land.” This is a person who loves life and loves what he’s doing, which is living a lifestyle that makes him almost monkish in his devotion to his art.
Almost everything that hits the table in a Damon Baehrel meal was sourced from the 12 acres on which the restaurant sits. The delicious bread made from acorn and goldenrod flour? Those acorns had to be harvested two years earlier and painstakingly leached of bitterness before they could be ground into flour. The grapeseed oil you dip the bread into? Pressed by hand from grapes grown right on the property. The sea salt sprinkled atop the bread? Damon brought 100 gallons of sea water home from a trip to Maine and evaporated it himself.
By the way, when I say pressed “by hand,” I mean it: no machinery was used. Hand-turned presses and rocks seem to be Baehrel’s preferred tools. To make the pine flour that was in several dishes he had to cut down a pine tree at just the right time of year, remove the bark, and scrape the spongey new growth layer from the trunk by hand. Then add in another year of leaching, soaking, drying, baking, and grinding. He makes his own vinegars. Some of the saps from the trees are salty and used for curing.
It’s not just the ingredients, either. Baehrel has invented and perfected some unique cooking techniques using stones. “I find there’s an unpleasant metallic taste to food cooked on [regular pans,]” he told us. Many dishes, like the cured goat sausage, were then smoked: the goat sausage in witch hazel twigs, lending it an incredible perfume-like aroma and flavor. The sirloin we had as a final meat course had been “glass cooked”–on a stone under a glass bowl with a hot light on it for three hours. It was much like the effect of sous vide only without the water and vacuum bag. The meat was fork tender and perfect.
The whole meal was not just astonishing for its effort and sourcing, though. It was very top level haute cuisine, on the level with these Michelin-starred restaurants I’ve been mentioning. I’d put Damon Baehrel head to head with Barbara Lynch or Thomas Keller any day–theoretically speaking since Baehrel will never have time to go on Top Chef or Iron Chef America. His restaurant is usually open five nights a week, seats only 14, and he’s closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. But with the sheer amount of work he does to prepare ingredients all year round, I don’t think those days are any less work. For example, between phases of the meal, we were served sugarless ices (sugar doesn’t grow in upstate New York, so he uses stevia plant tea, powdered maple seeds, and other naturally sweet plants to sweeten with). One of the slushes was flavored with the horns of the sumac tree.
Another was clover. He had to pick a hundred pounds of clover to make 50 servings of the ice. And he picked it at night, so the clover wouldn’t wilt.
He told us he only sleeps three or four hours a night. I am under the impression that Damon Baehrel never stands still for very long. Before opening his farmhouse restaurant back in 1989, he tells us he was a motocross racer and he took his (modest) earnings from that to buy the 12-acre plot. He and his wife and father built the farmhouse that houses the restaurant with their own hands, ran a catering business for a while, and then decided to make a go of putting a restaurant in.
At first it was just a regular “bistro” type of place. “That first night, I’d made up a menu, and 13 out of 14 people all picked the same appetizer, the clams casino, and they all picked the beef entree. I thought oh no, how am I going to make this work?” he told us. “So I started sending some of the other things out as ‘extras’ for people to enjoy, a squash blossom here or there, and lo and behold, they enjoyed the extra things more than the things they’d ordered.”
He’d essentially stumbled onto the tasting menu concept by necessity. After that, the idea to make it truly farm-to-table was an epiphany. “Once I realized that I had everything I needed right here, once I knew what I really wanted to do, I didn’t sleep for three days.”
Every detail is perfect, too. On the table are what look like pitchers of water: they’re actually a clear and delicious tree sap (birch and sycamore, I think?). In the water goblets at each place setting is a sphere of ice with lime leaves frozen in it. (“My lime tree doesn’t give limes, but at least it gives leaves,” he says.)
Many of the early starter courses to our meal were some form of a crisp or a cracker (such as acorn flour and butternut oil, formed and baked) with a slice of charcuterie or cured salmon. Since he has such a limited supply of salt (100 gallons of seawater only turns into about three large jars of salt) his curing is done in pine needles and can take years. Need I mention that all were delicious? The chargers and some of the plates were slices of trees he had cut himself. He also built the table with tree trunks for legs on which a display of the Native Harvest elements sits. (The gorgeous wooden dining tables and comfortable chairs, meanwhile, were hewn by an Amish crafter who handled all communication by paper mail. “Makes me with no cell phone not seem so bad,” Damon said.)
He also makes his own wine, but isn’t legally allowed to serve it. Instead we had some truly wonderful pairings, while Scott and Irene, who don’t drink alcohol, were given pairings of juice and sap, including elderberry, sycamore, and I don’t remember what else.
In the car on the way home we did piece together from memory the basics of 24 courses–the usual meal would have been 20 courses, Damon said, but since we weren’t pressed for time, he asked if it “would be okay” to slip in a few more. Yes! Bring it on! The charcuterie plate was one of the best we’ve had and included guinea fowl, venison, goose, and tamworth ham. (Some of the meats come from a farm he co-owns several miles away.) He’s also an incredible cheesemaker. We had a cheese plate with 12 cheeses, gorgeously accompanied with cayuga and champagne grapes, late-season raspberries, sorrel leaves, and chard.
And he’s self-taught. He worked in kitchens here and there, he said, but nothing like culinary school is in his background. He’s re-discovering and re-inventing (or just plain inventing) techniques for making the ingredients, but then on top of that he’s clearly got world class cooking skills. The seafood courses were as delectable and amazing as anything we had in Sant Pau by the ocean (the seafood is the one thing that is trucked in daily). We had peeky toe crab on barberry, mahogany clams in pine oil, prawns on cherry sap, and lobster with goldenrod. We had a slush made from Queen Anne’s Lace, and one from sumac and lemon verbena. A nugget of the turkey leg came in a miniature crock with baked pine bark crunches you would have sworn were fried potato.
The food is difficult to describe because one inevitably resorts to comparing it to what it wasn’t. For example, powdered lichen tastes like onion. Shaved burdock root is like potato. On the other hand, powdered lavender verbena tastes like nothing else in the world.
Some of the ingredients, like acorn flour, we know of being prepared and used by Native Americans. Others Damon discovered by accident. One day he was collecting sap from the trees and the branches were in his face. He accidentally bit down on a bud and discovered what he expected to be bitter was actually delicious. Only at certain times of year for one or two weeks are certain things edible. All year round he is collecting, harvesting, and preparing the many saps, flours, powders, roots, mushrooms, stems, barks, and so on.
“How do you keep track of it all?” corwin asked him. “Spreadsheets?”
Damon shook his head. “It’s just a way of life.”
Hardest to describe were the desserts. The only butter or cream in the meal was in the small ramekins on the table for us to butter our bread with: one cow butter, one sheep butter. He doesn’t get enough dairy yield to be able to make his sauces thick or rich with them so instead they are enriched with elements like rutabega broth and hickory nut oil.
Lest I mislead you with that description, let me assure you this isn’t anything like when you have a “gluten free brownie” and it tastes like wall plaster and rubber bands. Everything was sumptuous and pleasing to the palate and senses, especially the desserts. He described one as “faux” creme brulee, because the creme was made from duck egg and some non-dairy nut “milk” and the sugar crust was made from crystallized maple sap: it was one of the best creme brulees I’ve had.
And then there was the “chocolate” course. Something that resembled a very thick chocolate pudding was spread across the plate and garnished with slivers of dehydrated apricots, preserved peaches, and crushed pine nuts. What it actually was? Hickory nut and acorn “coffee” (i.e. roasted and steeped) that was then left to dehydrate and thicken until it transformed into something that I would have simply sworn was an exotic single-source chocolate. I licked the plate.
I feel a little like I did as a child after walking through the woods with my mother after a rainstorm at my grandparents’ farm. It was an incredible feast for the senses, the sounds, the scents, the animals, the flowers, so many things to see! And yet when my grandmother asked me when we came in what we saw I could only remember a few things to tell her (a red eft, a spiderweb, a frog that was still in my pocket…). Some experiences that are so rich in sensory impressions are like that.
Seven hours later we left Damon Baehrel knowing we had met one of our generation’s true originals.
For more reading:
Scott’s blog entry on the same meal we ate: http://www.scottedelman.com/2015/11/12/attempting-to-describe-the-indescribable-damon-baehrel/
Damon Baehrel website: http://www.damonbaehrel.com/
(He’s apparently just finished writing a book that will be published by a small press–none of the big publishers felt right to him, and they wanted to shoe horn the book into their categories. It’ll be titled Native Harvest and should be out in the 2016.)
Bloomberg Business, Dec. 2013 “Damon Baehrel, Chef of Most Exclusive Restaurant in the U.S., Opens Up”
Daily Mail UK, Feb. 2014 “Gordon Ramsay, eat your heart out! Self-taught chef ‘overwhelmed’ as his restaurant racks up FIVE-YEAR wait list”
Fox News, June 2014 “‘Damon Baehrel’ is the hottest restaurant you never heard of”
November 9, 2015
Launch Day: Daron’s Guitar Chronicles Volume Eight! (price goes up 11/11!)
And here it is! The latest volume of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles is live!
This is volume eight of the ongoing web serial, which is collected into ebooks as each arc of character development is completed.
Volume 8 runs 78,000 words the ebook edition is $2.99 for the next 24 hours! Then the price will jump to the regular $5.99! (Paperback also available, of course…! In fact, if you’re a reader of my blog, buy it from THIS LINK and use coupon code “UY5664FU” to get 20% off!)
Buy the ebook at:
• Amazon
• Smashwords
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo
• iTunes/iBooks
More info (& the cover art…) below the cut!
TONIGHT!
• Chat with Daron tonight from 8-9pm in the chat room on Daron.CeciliaTan.Com (See the popup in the lower right corner of your browser screen for the chat room!)
• Also tonight!! Cecilia Tan will livestream from 9-10pm eastern on her YouTube channel (Direct Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vzienFR-g)
Remember to post your questions for either Daron or ctan to answer in chat! Post here or on the Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1507687612887454/
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Volume 8 finds Daron trying hard to stay true to his heart. Life can be tough when you’re a talented musician whose life is controlled by gigantic mega-corporations. Daron is trying hard not to think about that, though, when he invites Ziggy to spend Christmas with Daron’s chosen family: his mentor Remo and the guys from the band Nomad. Ziggy’s career is taking off at rocket speed; meanwhile Daron spends a few months living in New York City working with one of the music industry’s hottest producers and then takes a gig to hit the road with Remo and his band Nomad. Even with the industry pulling them in different directions, Daron and Ziggy’s paths keep crossing. Can they rebuild a relationship without music tying them together? And what is that mysterious song Daron keeps hearing on the radio?
November 3, 2015
Chat live with Daron (and Cecilia Tan) on November 10th
Spread the word: this time next week I’ll be prepping for two live chats to celebrate the release of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles: Book Eight.
From 8-9pm eastern on Tuesday November 10, Daron & I will chat with fans in the chat room on the DGC website itself: http://daron.ceciliatan.com and then from 9-10pm I’ll be doing a video livestream from here in my office (Direct Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vzienFR-g) where I’ll take questions, read an excerpt, and share a cool thing I did that I hope will be squee-worthy, that kind of thing.
Please submit questions! Leave them in comments on the Facebook RSVP page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1507687612887454/ or drop by the chat and ping me with them live in the Youtube chat window!
If you’d like to make sure you get your ebook that day, pre-order it now from all the usual ebook-selling places and you’ll get it for half price! $2.99 now through Nov 10th and then it goes up to $5.99 regular price!
• Amazon
• Smashwords
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo
• iTunes/iBooks
October 28, 2015
Recipe: Almond Bourbon Ginger Apple Crisp aka what to do when you don’t like apples
Almond Bourbon Ginger Apple Crisp
by Cecilia Tan
Here’s another “what to do with seasonal harvest ingredients” recipe. This one is the result of me trying to find a recipe for a cooked apple dessert that I would actually like. I don’t like cooked apple desserts very much, and I only like some varieties of raw apples a little–and corwin likes neither but he’ll deign to eat a dessert if I make one. We get apples in our farm share, though, so it’s important to experiment in order to use everything up and prevent waste.
There are two main objections people seem to have to cooked apples: texture and flavor.
The flavor I dislike is the one that reminds me too much of the apple juice in a plastic cup with a foil top that we were forced to drink as kids in grade school. I’m also really not fond of grocery store apple sauce. Blecch. That sort of apple-y flavor is also one of the things I hate about some chardonnays and champagnes. Gack.
The textures I dislike are either rubbery or mealy. When the apples are at all rubbery it makes everything around them seem slimier. Ick.
The first attack on the flavor problem was simple: use the farm share apples (macoun or honey crisp?) and not grocery store apples.
The second was add a lot of complementary flavor profiles that I like: fresh grated nutmeg, fresh ginger, bourbon, ginger liqueur, vanilla, and toasted almond did the trick.
Freshly grated nutmeg is almost nothing like the pre-grated/powdered stuff, which even the expensive kinds may as well be grated particle board. Take the whole nutmeg pod and go at it with a microplane grater. It smells fantastic and doesn’t take a lot to make an impact. (Also great on eggnog, by the way.)
Once you have freshly grated nutmeg, you may discover, as I did, that cinnamon is actually the wrong flavor to go into something like this. Getting rid of cinnamon was one of the best decisions I made.
The texture question came up in previous experimental versions: the solution turned out to be make the apple pieces very thin, and add some corn starch, and pre-cook the apples a little.
In a previous version of this I didn’t put nearly enough booze. This may seem like a lot, but it’s going to cook off and leave something amazing behind:
So here you go:
Ingredients:
“filling”
4 small/medium apples or two huge ones
3/4 cup good-tasting bourbon (I used Jim Beam)
1 shot of ginger liqueur (Canton, King’s Ginger, whatever you have)
1/2 to 1 tablespoon grated ginger
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon corn starch dissolved in 1/2 to 3/4 cup water
fresh grated nutmeg
“topping”
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup sliced almonds
3/4 cup almond meal (I used Bob’s Red Mill brand)
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 stick butter (1/8th of a pound)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Peel and core the apples, then chop or slice them into thin pieces, no need to be neat, just try to avoid thick chunks. Toss them with all the other filling ingredients. Sprinkle a little sugar in if they’re very tart apples. Then pour all that in a 9-inch glass pie pan and put it in the hot oven for about 20 minutes. It should be hot and bubbling after 20 minutes with most of the booze cooked off and the apples getting soft. Your kitchen should also smell amazing at that point.
While that’s in the oven, make a streusel-type/coffee-cake-type topping with the oats, almonds, almond meal, brown sugar, and butter. If the butter is soft, I just mush it all up with my hands until everything is in little clumpy balls. (If the butter is frozen because, like me, you forgot to take it out of the freezer, I would nuke it for one minute on 50% power and then use my hands anyway.) I don’t think it works as well to melt the butter: you need it a little solid to clump everything together. I think I may have decided partway through the process to sprinkle in more oats and more brown sugar to get the texture right.
Once the apples have done their 20 minutes in the oven, pull it out and sprinkle the topping evenly across the surface. There should be some gaps between the clumps. Put it back in for another 20 minutes or until the almonds look nicely toasty.
The resulting thing has a crispy, nutty topping that gives you something to bite on, while the apple part has basically turned to a melded apple mush that is nonetheless still far superior to apple sauce.
I imagine it could also be made in individual ramekins very easily.
Serve hot, as is or with vanilla ice cream. Also good with just a little heavy cream poured over.
I think it’d also be great with pears or with peaches, but since the point of the exercise was to use up apples, yeah. I could also see experimenting with rum in place of the bourbon (I wonder if a reposado tequila would be good?) and other liqueurs instead of the ginger. (Gran Marnier?)
Sorry I don’t have a photo of the finished thing–we were too busy eating it! Also apologies on the inaccuracy of some of the ingredients: when I say 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup I may have started with 3/4 of a cup but didn’t add all of it, or started with 1/2 a cup and then thrown in a bit more, just depending on my instincts. I’ve faked my way through this recipe a few times now and it’s pretty forgiving as long as you’re in the ballpark.
October 19, 2015
Meet Axel Hawke: Hero of rock star romance TAKING THE LEAD by Cecilia Tan
On January 26th 2016 my new series, Secrets of a Rock Star, will launch. Each book in the series will feature a different member of the band The Rough, starting with Axel Hawke, the lead singer. As a preview to the series, I thought I’d share my visual references for Axel.
Axel was an “army brat” (Air Force, actually) who used music as a way to make friends (or as a refuge when all he made was enemies) while his family moved around not only the United States but Japan, Germany, and England. When he was 10, during the stint in England, he met Mal Kenneally, a guitarist, and they dreamed of starting a band. Axel’s parents divorced when he was 12-13 and he and his mother settled in Massachusetts.
At age 16, Axel ran away from home when his mother discovered he was singing in a band and all his bandmates were over 18. When none of his bandmates would take him in for long, his band broke up and Axel ended up in England with Mal again, where they got up to much trouble. His mother eventually convinced him to return to the US, he finished high school, and was in his sophomore year in college when it became his turn to take Mal in. They started The Rough and the band’s popularity soon took off.
In fact, when TAKING THE LEAD begins, it’s the night of the Grammy Awards and The Rough are nominees for Best New Artist.
Here are some of the visual references I used for Axel while writing TAKING THE LEAD. I was quite taken with Mig Ayesa but I wanted my lead singer to have bleach-blond highlights, so here are a couple of rough photoshop versions, blond-izing him, mixed in with Jared Leto in his blond rock star phase and a blond model whose name I didn’t find:
A random blond model with a very Axel expression on his face.
More below!
E366497 22: Jared Leto poses for photographers at the Details-Artisan Entertainment party in Hollywood, Ca., March 24, 2000. (Photo by Chris Weeks/Liaison)
Mig Ayesa is not actually blond.
Mig Ayesa made blond in Photoshop.
Mig Ayesa not blond here but imagine he is.
Axel also has a dragon tattoo. Actually he and Mal have matching dragon tattoos. Axel’s dragon wraps around his upper arm and onto his chest where it has his nipple held in its teeth.
Example of a type of blackwork dragon. Axel’s is much longer and skinnier than this.
Here’s a very very rough sketch of where Axel’s dragon tattoo would be:
The actual cover design has a model with blond highlights, but then they gave him the “wet look” which made his hair dark again! But you all know what he looks like now. ;-)
TAKING THE LEAD can be pre-ordered right now from all your favorite places, including your favorite local bookstore: Taking the Lead at Indiebound • Amazon: paperback or ebook
• Barnes & Noble: paperback or ebook • Kobo: ebook only • iTunes: ebook only • Google Play: ebook only
October 15, 2015
Cover reveal for Daron’s Guitar Chronicles Volume 8! Gay web serial collected
Thank you to everyone taking part in the Daron’s Guitar Chronicles: Volume Eight cover reveal! This is volume eight of the ongoing web serial, which is collected into ebooks as each arc of character development is completed.
Volume 8 runs 78,000 words and is available for pre-order right now! Pre-order price is $2.99. Book 8 goes live on November 10th and then the price will jump to the regular $5.99!
Pre-order at:
• Amazon
• Smashwords
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo
• iTunes/iBooks
More info (& the cover art…) below the cut!
LAUNCH EVENTS: WEEK OF NOVEMBER 10th
• Bloggers: Sign up to be part of the launch to host an excerpt, Q&A, guest blog, review, etc here: http://rockstarlit.com/content/darons-guitar-chronicles-volume-8/
• Mark your calendars for the next chat with Daron: November 10 8-9pm in the chat room on Daron.CeciliaTan.Com (See the popup in the lower right corner of your browser screen!)
• Also Nov 10th: ctan will livestream from 9-10pm eastern for book launch of Vol. 8. (Direct Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vzienFR-g)
Volume 8 finds Daron trying hard to stay true to his heart. Life can be tough when you’re a talented musician whose life is controlled by gigantic mega-corporations. Daron is trying hard not to think about that, though, when he invites Ziggy to spend Christmas with Daron’s chosen family: his mentor Remo and the guys from the band Nomad. Ziggy’s career is taking off at rocket speed; meanwhile Daron spends a few months living in New York City working with one of the music industry’s hottest producers and then takes a gig to hit the road with Remo and his band Nomad. Even with the industry pulling them in different directions, Daron and Ziggy’s paths keep crossing. Can they rebuild a relationship without music tying them together? And what is that mysterious song Daron keeps hearing on the radio?
In case you’re wondering how long these books are, I can tell you right now these eight books do not add up to as long as the seven Harry Potter books! If my ten-year-old nephew can read all of Harry Potter, I’m pretty sure most adults can handle reading Daron’s Guitar Chronicles. :-)
And now the cover! It’s of course a challenge finding cover models with any resemblance to our main characters, so here’s another with no face, but this time I thought it was appropriate to show some skin, eh?
And here’s the full paperback version:
