In the last twelve months, I’ve traveled to China twice to participate in SF workshops organized by the Future Affairs Administration. Getting to or from China is a stressful and exhausting affair (at least if one is flying coach and traveling from Philadelphia), but each time being there was a magnificent, experiences that I will always treasure. I met wonderful people, ate (and ate and ate) phenomenal meals, and witnessed indescribable sights. I feel incredibly privileged to have been there, and not just once, but twice.

In that same span of time, this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Derek Künsken, has visited China five times, as recently as last month when he was invited to speak at the World Conference on Science Literacy. I’m pretty certain he’d gone there at least twice in the year prior as well. In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve spent more time together with Derek in China than at conventions in the U.S.

He is Canadian, but his work has taken him all over. Much more colorfully than the usual odd jobs that writers land in, Derek’s gone from molecular biology, to working with street children in Latin America, to a career in refugee issues. And fortunately for us, he brings this fascinating blend of experience to his fiction.

Up to now, most readers have only known him for his short fiction, but he’s graduated to novels. Derek’s first book, The Quantum Magician, was originally serialized in the Chinese magazine SFWorld back in the autumn of 2017. That was great if you read Mandarin. The rest of us have had to wait for the novel’s English release, which happens tomorrow. I ordered mine weeks ago.

LMS: Welcome, Derek. World traveler that I know you to be, what meal stands out for you?

DK: Perhaps the most memorable was a plato de carne I got after dark one night in a darker part of downtown Bogota. I’d been working at the Canadian Embassy at the time, but some evenings, I was volunteering with an NGO that worked to try to get minors in the sex worker industry off the streets and into safety. I would do these evening patrols with my friend Patricia and our job was to make contact with the teen sex workers we found on the streets, and try to persuade them to come to a center where they could sleep, get food, clothing, medical attention and social workers.

Now, a kid you just met is going to take time to trust, especially if they’ve recently taken drugs. Patricia and I were walking in the center of Bogota after dark and on side street I spotted three boys of maybe 13 or 14, a little high from glue. We started talking to them, but after a bit they were looking like they were going to leave, so Patricia said “Hey, you guys hungry?”

Obviously they were, so we went to a little restaurant under fluorescent lights with plastic booths and linoleum tables and a kitchen at the back. We fit into the booth and kept on talking and as I looked at the laminated menu, I was astonished at the prices. Like 2,700 pesos for beef, rice, plantain and probably some vegetables! I liked the pictures of the food as much as the boys did. After the three of them ordered, I ordered myself the plato de carne, which got me a funny look from Patricia.

“You really want to eat here?” she said. We’d been partners on this evening shift for about six months. She was Colombian and I Canadian and I’d already stopped to buy meat on sticks and other things I found on the street, so she was maybe used to my eating, but maybe this was crossing a line?

“What?” I said. “It’s beef. Look at the picture.”

“For 2,700 pesos, it can’t be beef. Maybe horse.”

I have never paid too much attention to nay-sayers when it comes to being carnivorous, except if the food is super-spicy, which Colombian food is not. And also, I hadn’t eaten in like three hours. So when my plato de carne came on its styrofoam plate I was delighted. It was a huge hunk of dark, juicy meat covering the rice and plantain and other things. My friend Patricia dubiously watched me eat. Her reasoning might have been that most of the street children we worked with were underfed and already had parasites that needed treating. Those things weren’t true of me.

The meat was good enough. I didn’t recognize the cut, but the consistency seemed okay. It was a bit greasy. They fried it instead of grilling. After a while, I switched to the rice and didn’t finish all my overly juicy beef. The boys finished theirs and when they saw I wasn’t going to, they eagerly took my leftovers. And, in the end, the hour we spent with them talking got us enough cred that we all stuffed ourselves into Patricia’s little red Renault Quatro and dropped the boys off at the shelter.

When I got back home to my apartment, I learned a new Spanish word, because when I told my Colombian fiancé what I’d eaten she was beside herself. She wouldn’t have eaten what I had. And she agreed with Patricia’s assessment, that for 2,700 pesos, it couldn’t have been beef. I insisted it was and she said the only way that could have been beef would have been if it was carne de carranga.

I didn’t know what carranga meant. She said an animal is butchered in an abbatoir and sold to grocery stores and restaurants. If an animal just dies of sickness or old age, it’s not supposed to be eaten by people. She explained that’s a pretty basic food health law. But sometimes that kind of meat makes it into really divey places, places like the quarter where I’d been, places that only charge 2,700 pesos.

I never got sick, so I maintain all these years later that her suggestion was preposterous. It wasn’t my best meal. But it wasn’t horse. Or a cow that had died of a stroke or a heart attack or swimmer’s ear. The restaurant where I ate had obviously discovered a sound business model by finding savings and efficiencies which it in turn passed on to the consumers. And I learned a Spanish word I never otherwise would have. And the size of the meat! I regret nothing.

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My September is turning out to be one of those months that just race by, which would be fine except the work that needs to happen this month is not likewise zipping along to completion. On the other hand, August already seems to be receding into the distance, which is a shame because the Worldcon overflowed with so many wonderful things crammed into just a handful of days.

If that sounds like the opening of a segue to you, give yourself bonus points. One of my favorite events at each Worldcon is the morning Stroll with the Stars. I always meet interesting people and afterwards I’m saddened that the hour has gone by so swiftly. I met Amber Royer, this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, on this year’s stroll, and discovered that her first novel, Free Chocolate, had only recently come out from Angry Robot.

So we chatted, we strolled, we shared some chocolate. All in all, a sweet start to the day. And I’m happy she accepted my invitation to drop by and share a meal, so you could meet her too.

LMS: Welcome, Amber. What stands out as your most memorable meal?

AR: At a point in life when we were totally broke, my husband and I decided to take up mystery shopping as a way to finance date night. It got us into some swanky places, and led to a few anxious days waiting for reimbursement for triple digit meal tabs before the credit card bill came due. But we never got scammed, and we always got paid… eventually.

I highly recommend mystery shopping as training for writers who have trouble with details and descriptions. You have to get things right, and often, the companies involved want blow-by-blow descriptions – that still retain objectivity.

One time, we accepted an assignment at a restaurant inside an upscale hotel. I signed a confidentiality agreement, so I can’t tell you which one, or where, just that it was some of the best food I ever had – but at the same time, that “best meal” was one of my husband’s top five worst meals. Ever.

See, when you’re mystery shopping, you are basically going undercover. You don’t want special treatment, and you don’t want to be one of those annoying customers who have a problem with everything. In fact, if you are too obvious in your behavior, and you get tagged as a shopper, the company may decide not to pay you.

Which is why I immediately got nervous when we arrived at the place, only to find out they were shooting a cooking show, starring the restaurant’s chef. There we were, supposed to be all suave and invisible, but there’s a hand-written sign on the door stating that by entering, you’re agreeing to be interviewed and/or filmed. I relaxed when I realized the wait staff’s attention wasn’t on us – the way it was supposed to be – but on the cameras. They were going to certain tables and interviewing diners, but we were on the other side of the dining room.

When they finally took our order, I went with classics that are better the longer they cook, like the roasted chicken, but my husband went for fussier dishes, since the restaurant was supposed to be top rate. Only, nobody was paying attention. The waiter recommended some kind of lamb dish, then came back to let us know they were actually out of it. When the appetizers came, my husband’s softshell crab was a weird temperature (not hot, not chilled, just that memory-of-having-been-hot perfect for breeding bacteria) and the polenta under it had turned to something resembling stucco. But he didn’t send it back, since we were already so freaked out about calling attention to ourselves – potentially on camera. So I shared my appetizer – can’t remember what it was called exactly, but it involved meat-covered potatoes – and we carried on.

When the entrees came, the hubby’s sea scallops were so overcooked, we could have used them for hocky pucks. He started making frowny faces at the waiter’s back – and I was giving him desperate looks that meant, we still have to be discreet. Though I was wondering, at what point is it weirder NOT to send stuff back rather than just not eating it. But that just made me more nervous. So I shared my chicken – which was amazing – and the waiter didn’t bat an eye when he came to clear away my husband’s second mostly-untouched plate.

The dessert, which we ordered to share, actually was good — though the hubby grumbled that if he’d ordered his own, it probably would have been burned – and the booze (some of these mystery shops actually require you to order alcoholic beverages) took the edge off the situation, so we were able to laugh about it while still at the table.

We were honest in the report, which I hated to do, since it was so obviously NOT an ordinary day for that waiter, but the company hired us to be objective. So that’s what we had to be. They wanted a blow-by-blow of what actually happened (in such detail that reports for that company take about three hours to write). If nothing else, the whole mystery-shopper experience taught me one thing: you have to structure your writing to meet audience expectations, and that’s true whether it’s a shop report, a blog post, or a novel.

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For those of you who have been paying attention and/or are of the Jewish persuasion, we are nearing the end of the Days of Awe. They started back on the 9th of September, the evening of which was Rosh Hashonah and the start of the year 5779 by that calendar. Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The ten days between are typically spent in contemplation of one’s past deeds, repentance, and pondering what can be done to rectify past transgressions. Heavy stuff indeed. I’ll be spending the day in quiet reflection, so it’s just as well that I prepped this post back on Friday, especially as I don’t have a clever segue.

This week’s EATING AUTHORS guest is the second of my three mentees from past Nebula Conferences, and I’m very pleased to have Caitlin Seal here to celebrate the launch of her first novel. That novel, Twice Dead, is book one of The Necromancer’s Song, and it comes out tomorrow. Caitlin had a bit of scare a few months back when an Amazon glitch started canceling pre-orders and informing the people who had placed them that the book had been canceled by her publisher. Nope. Never happened. And I don’t want to even imagine the kind of panic that must have caused. Instead, let’s just get right to the meal, shall we?

LMS: Welcome, Caitlin. What stands out as your most memorable meal.

CS: Recently my husband and I celebrated our five year anniversary by eating our way through a two week trip to Japan. Our meals ranged from quick bites grabbed at chain cafés, to multicourse traditional meals at ryokans, to a western-style dinner served by a gregarious American who ran an inn in Nikko.

While every meal was memorable, the one that sticks out most for me was a dinner we ate in Nagoya near the end of our trip. We set out from our hotel that evening hoping to find some good beef. The night was warm and the sidewalks busy with pedestrians. It didn’t take us long to wander past a place advertising exactly what we wanted—thin slices of marbled beef served raw with a hot plate to cook them on. We applauded our good fortune and hurried inside.

The restaurant was near the top of a narrow high-rise. Once inside, we found the entire place was partitioned into private rooms with windows overlooking the city. Waiters and waitresses in traditional dress darted down the narrow halls to deliver covered dishes to the rooms. Each room had wood paneled walls and a phone for guests to call in their orders.

The food we’d seen go by smelled delicious. The rooms were cozy and comfortable, but as my husband and I opened our menus, we felt our stomachs sink.

We both speak and read some Japanese, and up until this point we hadn’t had any trouble ordering food. Most menus we’d encountered were written in a straightforward fashion with hiragana (phonetic characters) written above or below the more complicated kanji. This menu was more kanji than not, and unfortunately well beyond our reading level. After trying for a few minutes to muddle through, we called up the frond desk and explained the predicament.

When our waitress arrived, she was wonderfully sympathetic. We told her what we were looking for and she helped point out a few options and describe them. With her help we placed our orders for two different steak dishes, some fried potatoes, and a plate of salmon sashimi. When it arrived, the food was exactly what we had hoped for. The beef was tender and expertly seasoned, the sashimi wonderfully fresh and rich, and the potatoes crispy. And, all of it had the added seasoning of victory after overcoming our initial nerves about the language barrier.

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Words — in this instance culinary words — are losing their meaning. I refer to the cauliflower gnocchi that I am snacking on as I write this week’s installment. Let me be clear, I do not like cauliflower and tend to shy away from gnocchi because of the starch. And yet, this stuff tastes great, has reasonable calories, and is gluten free. What’s next, cocaine with fluoride?

Sorry. If I seem a little testy it’s probably because of the heat, but by the time you read this a massive cold front should have come through, dumped a lot of water on the eastern seaboard, and dropped the daytime temperatures here a good twenty degrees or so. All of which is as close as a segue as I’m going to get to the meal(s) described by T. J. Berry, this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest.

One of the things I like best about TJ is the way her writing ignores marketing demands and fits into that sliver that some times looks to be science fiction and other times is probably fantasy. I like to call it science fantasy myself, and maybe I’m biased but I’m always happy to see other people doing it.

Her first novel, Space Unicorn Blues, is a great example of this. It came out a mere two months ago. If you missed your chance to include it as part of your summer reading, go ahead and add it to the list for autumn.

TJB: My most memorable meal is actually a series of meals from a single long, snowy winter in Vermont. Our family lived on a tiny island in the middle of Lake Champlain with about 400 other people. In the summer, it was a beautiful tourist haven, with rustic country roads you could cycle along, a defunct quarry filled with Ordovician-era fossils, and quiet lake shores perfect for lazy reading days.

In the winter, however, the island’s climate grew cold and desolate. It snowed nearly every day and it wasn’t unusual for the wind chill to dip into double digits below zero. But in Vermont, people are used to long winters and one of their solutions (aside from down coats) is to lean into their community and gather in front of roaring wood fires as often as possible.

In our rural town, we assembled an international dinner club with three other couples. Each month, one couple chose a country and provided the hospitality as well as an appropriately-themed entree. The other three couples brought appetizers, a side dish, and dessert. It turns out that eight is the perfect dinner party number and there was never any shortage of conversation. We often stayed late into the night, solving all of the world’s problems as the pile of empty wine bottles grew.

On Greek night, we ate stuffed grape leaves and I stacked dozens of buttery phyllo sheets into a crunchy baklava. But the real magic of that evening occurred when our observant friends noticed I had skipped the wine. They exuberantly declared I was pregnant before I could even make the announcement of our coming second child.

On Hungarian night, we had a creamy mushroom soup, studded with dill and warmed with sweet, smoky paprika. Our host invited us to see his newly-completed sugar shack—a large shed he’d built on the property to boil maple sap into syrup. When sugaring season arrived in a few months, we would spend countless hours in the steamy sugar shack, stoking the fire and stirring the vat of condensing sap.

On our turn, we hosted Indian night, offering an immense platter of butter chicken and basmati rice. Our neighbors brought along a stunning rose-flavored gulab jamun. One couple shyly admitted they had never eaten Indian food, so the rest of us explained the ingredients and set up tasting plates with tiny portions. There were plain chicken breasts at the ready, but our intrepid food explorers loved everything they tried.

Our final dinner was a hodgepodge of countries. Someone brought a comforting and satisfying pasta puttanesca from Italy and another chose an Argentinian chimichurri over steaks, while we brought along a pavlova (which some say is from New Zealand and others claim is from Australia). It was my first time making this crispy, cloud-like dessert, which is incredibly elegant, but is probably the simplest dessert I’ve ever made.

I can think of no better way to mark the passing of the frigid winter months than eating good food in the company of good friends. We’ve since left Vermont, but I still occasionally make a tureen of that warming Hungarian mushroom soup to remind us of cold winters past and dear friends far away.

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Over the last few years, SFWA has been changing its annual Nebula Conference from a small convention with a banquet and an awards ceremony to a conference offering much more in the way of professional development (and a banquet and an awards ceremony). In addition to bringing in speakers from author relevant concerns like Amazon, Kickstater, and Creative Commons, they’ve also been promoting the tradition of “paying it forward” by pairing newcomers with more experienced mentors. I’m happy to say I’ve taken on a mentee for each of the past three conferences.

This is of course a segue into this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest because last May I had the privilege to play mentor to J. D. Moyer (which means I get to take credit for any all of his accomplishments from here on out, right?).

He’s spent a great deal of time in the music business as variously a producer, label runner, event promoter, and not surprisingly DJ. But he left all that glamor behind to write fiction and has been building up a repertoire of impress short fiction, exploring themes of genetic engineering, the sociological effects of climate change, virtualized consciousness, and evolutionary divergence. You don’t see a lot of this in popular music, and perhaps that’s why he moved to fiction (a much more entertaining explanation than the birth of his daughter). In 2016 he won the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction contest for his story “The Icelandic Cure.”

J.D.’s first novel, The Sky Woman comes out from Flame Tree Press on Thursday. Keep an eye on him, he’s going places (and I get all the credit).

LMS: Welcome, J.D. Talk to me, please, about your most memorable meal

JDM: My most memorable meal consisted of slightly burnt popcorn cooked in the plaza of a mini-mall on the north coast of Kauai. I was eighteen, and my friend and I had just hiked the entirety of the Napali Coast trail in a day. We were absolutely exhausted and famished, having run out of food (except for popcorn) that morning. It was late, and all the shops and restaurants were closed.

Camping at Kalalau beach, at the other end of the trail, we’d overstayed our rations. Kalalua was a paradise of white sand, waterfalls, and footpaths winding between palms and crossing clear brooks, all of it shadowed by soaring cliffs. A loose tribe of hippies lived there year round, evading helicopter patrols by the rangers. Ron, an ex-cab driver from NYC, was their de facto leader. One night he cooked us a delicious soup made from green papaya, local herbs, and crustaceans plucked from the creek.

Back at the mini mall near the trailhead, I cooked our popcorn on a small camp stove while my friend ran an errand. A woman approached me. I wearily looked up. For the next five minutes she berated me for hanging out in a mini mall instead of enjoying the glorious natural sights nearby. Too tired to protest, I meekly endured her admonitions until her breath was spent, all the time worrying if I was overcooking the popcorn.

It’s true that hunger is the best sauce. The burnt popcorn was delicious.

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I believe I have finally, finally, recovered from the exhaustion produced by the recent Worldcon. Or at least I’ve stopped using that as an excuse and gone back to working on the next writing project. Exhaustion aside, I’m still floating on air from the incredible reaction I received from fans over The Moons of Barsk. And it certainly didn’t hurt that two of the three dealers carrying the book at the convention had completely sold out by the time I made the rounds to sign their stock.

But enough about the Worldcon. To introduce this week’a EATING AUTHORS guest I need to harken back to a previous convention. I first met Mareth Griffith back in May during the Nebula conference when I was hanging out with some folks from Parvus Press. She’d traveled a long way to be there. Mareth lives in Seward, Alaska where she works as a naturalist and wilderness guide. Apparently this involves leading the unwary (she calls them “adventurous souls”) on epic quests involving glaciers, bears, and whales. She assures me she comes by this lifestyle naturally, having lived and worked in Scotland, New Zealand, and Northern Ireland – where she claims her nearest neighbors included two thousand puffins and the ghost of a spectral black horse. Sounds like a writer to me.

Her first novel is Court of Twilight, and it surely won’t be her last,

LMS: Welcome, Mareth. Speak to me of your most memorable meal.

MG: For the last four years, I’ve spent most summers sailing around Southeast Alaska, working as a wilderness guide aboard a tiny cruise ship. Being a naturalist with an interest in wild edibles, I spent a lot of time trying to convince passengers to eat things I find growing in the woods.

On one particular trip, a tour company from Japan had chartered the entire boat for a weeklong trip, and brought along several of their own translators. And lots of their own food – suitcases and suitcases full of food the guides had shipped over with their baggage, or specially ordered from vendors in Juneau, or had air-mailed up from Seattle. Sashimi, wasabi paste, soba noodles… It was apparently part of the charter arrangements that the tour group emphatically did not want to chance American cooking. That was, apparently, one part of the cultural experience these travelers were not interested in experiencing. So, our chef gave up his usual array of king crab and sockeye salmon for a lot of stir fried vegetables, sticky rice, and miso soup.

On the last day of the trip, the Japanese tourists and I were spending a full day kayaking around a cluster of islands north of Sitka Sound. For our lunch stop, I decided to head to a particular beach on one of the largest islands of the archipelago. Paddling through a narrow channel, the passage opens up into a small lagoon, where the remains of an old dock sit, crumbling, along the edges of a vast expanse of green. The meadow is carpeted with one of my favorite wild edible plants. Salicornia pacifica, also known as glasswort, or beach asparagus.

Even for someone who loves foraged foods, I will be the first to confess that eating certain wild greens can be about as exciting as the prospect of eating badly cooked kale. Some greens can be bitter and stringy if they’re too old, or watery and bland if picked too young. Not so with beach asparagus. The plant has a thick stalk, as slender as a soda straw, with a crunch to it like a potato chip. Growing as they do on the edges of the tide line, they’re often pre-salted like a potato chip as well. Although stir-frying them cuts down on the crunchiness, I like them best when eaten raw, with that pleasant snap and salty aftertaste intact.

On this particular beach, the asparagus grows like a carpet, covering perhaps an acre altogether. Walking through it reminds me of the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where the kids are wandering through the park, eating everything they see.

As we sat down on the remnants of the dock, and began to unwrap our lunches, I pointed out the beach asparagus, and encouraged my guests to try some. Their eyebrows went up in surprise. A few of them broke off some stalks. One lady tentatively popped one into her mouth. The eyebrows went up some more. Several more of the group broke off stalks, amidst animated discussion in Japanese.

Then, I partially unwrapped my veggie wrap and added a handful of the raw stalks. I usually do this when I’m eating lunch in the field (have I mentioned the crew food on this particular boat wasn’t the most appetizing?) but I have never had a group adopt the practice as enthusiastically or completely as this group of Japanese kayakers. Eyes lit up. Mouths opened in surprise. Immediately, everyone on the beach started disemboweling their own wraps, salads, and rice concoctions, breaking off handfuls of the beach asparagus to add to their dish.

After a moment, one of the ladies, eyeing the line of shrubbery beyond the beach, asked, through their translator, was there anything else growing here they could eat?

Oh yes!

Leaving our kayaks by the old dock, we prowled the edges of the meadow, coming up with smaller quantities of goose-tongue (salty but bitter, with a crunch almost as good as the beach asparagus), beach green (lettuce-like and mild), and venturing a short way into the forest for the cucumber-like flavors of the leaves of the twisted stalk, topping off the resultant salad with a handful of wild blueberries and crowberries.

I couldn’t understand very much of what my guests were saying amongst themselves (I was staying quite busy making sure that the plants being harvested were, in fact, edible ones) but their expressions told me all I needed to know. Even when someone didn’t like a particular plant, they only seemed even more enthusiastic about getting everyone else to taste it, too.

#SFWApro