/ en-US Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:09:26 -0700 60 / 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg /author_blog_posts/23986742-please-welcome-julia-park-tracey-author-of-the-bereaved Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:09:26 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23986742-please-welcome-julia-park-tracey-author-of-the-bereaved
In the New World, aka America, colonial porridge was quickly replaced with cornmeal mush, a food that indigenous folks had eaten for centuries. (And we’re still eating it today as polenta, grits, and cornbread.) Colonial settlers called it samp, and settlers traveling often took Johnny cake (cornbread) because it was easy to make over a fire.

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posted by Shelley Workinger on August, 18 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23905705-please-welcome-susan-stinson-author-of-spider-in-a-tree Fri, 21 Jul 2023 07:24:46 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23905705-please-welcome-susan-stinson-author-of-spider-in-a-tree
It’s the summer of 1741. The Rev. Mr. Jonathan Edwards, a fourth-generation English settler, calls Leah, a woman kidnapped from Africa and currently enslaved in his household, into his study. Leah comes in carrying a cup of chocolate and a piece of gingerbread.

They are in Northampton, Massachusetts, where I live now. This is a scene from my novel, Spider in a Tree. Jonathan is recently back from preaching his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God� in Connecticut. Leah, who has just been preparing a barrel of shad to be preserved for the winter, is soon to be married to Saul, a man enslaved in the household.

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posted by Shelley Workinger on July, 21 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23885760-please-welcome-robert-mckean-author-of-mending-what-is-broken Fri, 14 Jul 2023 09:47:26 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23885760-please-welcome-robert-mckean-author-of-mending-what-is-broken


The fragrance of freshly milled wheat berries has a depth and liveliness unlike anything else, flowery, sweet, beery, faintly green and earthy. As the grain shatters beneath the grating stones and the new flour empties from the mill, an aromatic dust cloud wafts up speaking of a symbiotic relationship between human and grain that reaches back thousands of years. Peter Sanguedolce, who eats too much because he loves food too much, who eats too much to escape the sorrows that engulf him, who eats too much simply to eat too much, finds himself in Mending What Is Broken bewitched by the complicated, painstaking process of baking whole grain sourdough bread: nursing the starter into life, invigorating the preferment over several days, mixing flour and water and waiting through the autolyse period for the flour to hydrate, incorporating the flour and preferment and performing a series of stretches and folds to tease out the gluten. Then hours of bulk fermentation and shaping—Peter mimics the experts� floury hands in the photographs in the numerous bread-baking texts he’s bought—and the long overnight snooze in the rattan baskets in the refrigerator to encourage the flavors to deepen and complexify, before the morning’s bake at five hundred degrees—all the while praying to Fornax, goddess of the oven, that his doughs will rise burnished and crusty and make proper loaves, that is, loaves in the shape of parsons� hats.

Which they sometimes do, and sometimes perversely do not do...

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posted by Shelley Workinger on July, 14 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23845023-please-welcome-tracey-buchanan-author-of-toward-the-corner-of-mercy-and Fri, 30 Jun 2023 09:01:43 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23845023-please-welcome-tracey-buchanan-author-of-toward-the-corner-of-mercy-and
Minerva isn’t much of a cook. She’ll make a pumpkin pie if she gets invited somewhere for Thanksgiving (which, she assuredly would prefer to avoid), but she keeps her meals on the simple side. She’ll boil cabbage and fry a pork chop for dinner or let a small roast slow-cook with potatoes and carrots. The local grocery store, Myrick’s, offers the best meat in town, and, even if it’s a little on the expensive side, she’s willing to wait in line to get the cuts she prefers.

One of her favorite meals is...

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posted by Shelley Workinger on June, 30 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23689161-please-welcome-j-r-traas-author-of-the-rave Fri, 12 May 2023 06:30:32 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23689161-please-welcome-j-r-traas-author-of-the-rave
Even the hard times proved instructive. Contrasting with my grateful experiencing of many different nations� foods in my childhood and teens, my college years were�

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posted by Shelley Workinger on May, 12 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23664201-please-welcome-angela-sylvaine-contributor-to-found Thu, 04 May 2023 19:56:00 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23664201-please-welcome-angela-sylvaine-contributor-to-found
Our diarist can’t stop thinking about the sculpture. She drifts into the museum café, where the barista recommends an Italian treat...

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posted by Shelley Workinger on May, 04 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23621758-please-welcome-patricia-stover-contributor-to-cafe-macabre-ii Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:09:00 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23621758-please-welcome-patricia-stover-contributor-to-cafe-macabre-ii
This is what it is like in the Café Macabre.

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posted by Shelley Workinger on May, 04 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23576870-please-welcome-marie-white-small-author-of-stony-kill Fri, 07 Apr 2023 07:04:50 -0700 /author_blog_posts/23576870-please-welcome-marie-white-small-author-of-stony-kill
In Stony Kill, the protagonist tells the readers her tale of growing up in a wildly dysfunctional family. But like most troubled families, there remain pieces that work, influences that ground children to productive lives. In my story, it was food and its preparations. I came from a family of chefs and caterers. At ten years old, I had learned to prepare dinner for a family of six. At eighteen I was a personal chef, ironically for a publisher and his family.

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posted by Shelley Workinger on April, 07 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23484994-please-welcome-nd-richman-author-of-brothers-bullies-and-bad-guys Fri, 10 Mar 2023 09:27:18 -0800 /author_blog_posts/23484994-please-welcome-nd-richman-author-of-brothers-bullies-and-bad-guys
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posted by Shelley Workinger on March, 10 ]]> /author_blog_posts/23461847-please-welcome-julie-rowe-author-of-viable-threat Fri, 03 Mar 2023 07:50:54 -0800 /author_blog_posts/23461847-please-welcome-julie-rowe-author-of-viable-threat
It feels like every week is its own emergency these days...

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posted by Shelley Workinger on March, 03 ]]>