by Katherine Tomlinson

In the Beginning Was the Recipe…

I was looking for my mother’s recipe for Mincemeat Cake. It was not in the yellow binder where I keep the family recipes copied out by my sister in her meticulous art school handwriting and decorated with whimsical drawings.

The recipe wasn’t in the manila folder where I keep the loose recipe cards and the torn magazine pages and the newspaper clippings and the scribbled instructions on the backs of envelopes, school notebook paper and old invoice forms from my grandfather’s general store. (There’s even a recipe copied out on a soft paper napkin worn to the consistency of Kleenex.)

My mother had a recipe box like all good mid-century housewives and she kept many recipes in that box, but the ones she cherished the most and used the most often were in an old school binder with a coarse cloth cover that was rubbed through to the cardboard beneath. When I inherited the binder in the late 80s, it was falling apart and I transferred the contents over to the aforementioned yellow binder.

A lot of the loose recipes in the folder are starting to fade with age. Some of the oldest date back to the early 50s and the paper has browned and the ink lightened until you almost need to be a forensic documents examiner to piece together the instructions. My mother’s recipes are written out the way she talked and almost seem interactive with their asterisks and inserted comments. “I usually use twice the amount of ginger,” she notes on a recipe for ginger snaps, making me wonder why she didn’t just write out her version of the recipe.

Sometimes she addresses the recipient of the recipe directly as she did with all the family recipes she typed out and sent to me in Los Angeles when I first moved here. (“Will feed six unless they are Tomlinsons,” she wrote on her recipe for macaroni and cheese, which was the best I’ve ever had.)

Reading some of the recipes is like traveling in a culinary time machine—all those references to “oleo” and directions to melt chocolate in a double boiler, instructions rendered obsolete by the invention of the microwave. The recipes also show a high degree of brand loyalty. It was always “Pet” Evaporated Milk and the 10X brand of confectioner’s sugar. (In fact, that’s what it’s called in all my mother’s recipes—10X sugar.)

When I finally found the recipe—stuck between the pages of Jane and Michael Stern’s Square Meals, I realized two things right away. It was the recipe I remembered my mother making but it was not her recipe. The instructions were written out in a hand unfamiliar to me. It’s fussy writing, with little circles dotting the Is.

My mother had two kinds of handwriting—the elegant, grown-up penmanship she used to sign her canvases and our report cards and the messy scrawl she used to communicate with herself in grocery lists and refrigerator reminders and notes. She doodled on her notes, a habit my sister inherited.

I’ll never know the name of the woman who passed this recipe on to my mother, but she would have been a friend. Because sharing the food you love is one of the things friends do.

Somebody’s Mincemeat Cake Recipe

2 cups (1 jar) prepared mincemeat

2 cups chopped walnuts

1 tsp. vanilla extract

¼ cup rum or cognac

1 tbsp. grated orange rind

¼ cup orange juice

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup mayonnaise

3 cups flour

1 ½ cups flour

¾ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

In a large bowl, mix the mincemeat, walnuts, vanilla, rum (or cognac), orange rind, orange juice, buttermilk and mayonnaise.

Combine dry ingredients and sift into the wet mixture. Blend thoroughly.

Pour into a greased and floured tube pan (or use one that’s been sprayed with Pam) and bake at 325 degrees for two hours.

Remove from oven and cool on a rack.

Frost with buttercream icing using a cookie press.

Buttercream Icing

¼ cup butter, unsalted

1 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

1 tbsp. milk

Beat ingredients together. The mixture will be very stiff.
Put into a cookie press and press frosting designs on top of cake.

Garnish with candied fruit.

by George

A step by step guide to cooking a better bacon explosion.

When I first heard about the Bacon Explosion after reading about it on The BBQ Addicts site I knew it was a stroke of genius.  Meat sushi…how brilliant! At the time, I never thought I’d ever make one.  But life is full of unexpected surprises.  Before long, I found myself thinking about it constantly.  On a daily basis actually.  I thought about how relatively boring the BBQ Addicts made theirs.  They were the originators so I have to hand them that but I couldn’t help but feel the Bacon Explosion could be improved.  So when my friend OJ told me he was coming out to visit from NYC (he loves to eat) I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to get a few other people together and make this glorious log of meat with our own little spin on it.  I expected it to be good but let me tell you, the end result was fantastic!

The Ingredients:
2 pounds of thick cut style bacon (2 packages)
2 pounds of sausage (we used beer brats)
Your Favorite BBQ sauce
Your Favorite pork rub seasoning
Pepperoni (Deli sliced thin)
Prosciutto (Deli sliced thin)
Capiccola Ham (Deli sliced thin)
Velveeta Cheese
Jalapenos (Diced Marinated)

The first step is to weave the bacon mat.  You can use any brand of bacon you want but I think it’s fairly important to use thick cut bacon so that you can weave it well.  Otherwise the strips are too thin.  It looks more complicated than it really is…It’s relatively simple.  You just lay out 6 strips of bacon going in one direction and then weave another 6 strips horizontally to form a mat.

Try to get the mat as tight as possible but don’t worry if it’s a little bit loose.

Next throw some pork rub seasoning on the mat to give it some flavor. I used some Famous Dave’s Pork Rub.

Now it’s time to add the sausage layer.  We used Johnsonville Beer Brats for the sausage. All you have to do is take a sharp knife and slit the casing lengthwise down the sausage so you can peel it off.

Once the casing is peeled off you can start pressing the brats down on to the bacon mat.  One sausage actually fills up the mat from end to end so it’s perfect.

Fill up the mat with a thin layer of sausage. I left the last sausage whole in this picture just to show you what the sausage looks like before it’s smashed.

Next step, add the pepporoni layer.

Then a layer of the prosciutto…

and finally a layer of Capicolla…

Now here comes the fun part. The original recipe calls for pre-cooking the second pound of bacon and crumbling it up on top of the sausage layer. Instead, I decided to pre-cook a second bacon weave and lay it down on top. This weave was 5×5 instead of 6×6 like the outer weave.

Next is the cheese.  I knew I wanted to do some kind of cheese when I first started pondering my own bacon explosion but I wasn’t sure what kind to do.  I finally decided on Velveeta cheese because the thought of nacho cheese dripping out of my bacon explosion was just too orgasmic to pass up. I sliced two pieces of cheese and laid them down side by side horizontally on the cooked bacon mat.

Then last but not least I add a generous amount of diced pickled japlapeno’s on top of the cheese. I have to say, the jalapenos added a really nice kick to the bacon explosion.  Not too hot but not to mild either.  Like a jalapeno popper in my bacon explosion. The vinegar from the pickling juice soaked nicely into the meat and added some nice flavor to the explosion.

Now that we were done adding the toppings it was time to start rolling the explosion.  I was worried about this part because I didn’t want any of the meat to fall off or cheese to come dripping out.  That being said, I didn’t have any issues…everything stayed intact nicely. The trick is to roll the sausage layer first with all of the filling inside.  Seal everything up inside nicely with the sausage since the sausage is pretty much like play-doh.  Then roll the outside bacon weave seperately over the sausage roll.

Next, roll the bacon weave over the sausage roll.

Now that the whole thing is rolled up, sprinkle some more pork rub on top of the bacon explosion to give it some more color and flavor on the outside. I don’t know why, but I thought it would be a good idea to measure the finished product before I cooked it.  This thing packed a solid 3″ from top to bottom.

Now, it’s time to cook it.  The recommended method for cooking the bacon explosion is to cook it in a smoker.  I personally don’t own a smoker but I do own a grill so I turned my grill into a smoker.  I never smoked anything on my grill before but I found that it was pretty easy to do.  You get some hickory wood chips from your local supermarket or hardware store, put them into a piece of foil and wrap the foil up. Poke some holes in the top of the foil and put it on one side of the grill.  Then you turn up the heat under the wood chips so that they start smoking in the foil.  Once they start smoking you turn off all the burners except for one underneath the wood chips.  Put the bacon explosion on the side that has no burners on underneath so that it cooks indirectly.  I also added a foil pan underneath so that it catches any drippings from the bacon explosion.  Also, if you notice I put the bacon explosion on one of those grill plates that you use to cook vegetables on the grill so they don’t fall through.  I found that was a nice platform for transporting the explosion so that it doesn’t do anything crazy like fall apart or fall down into the grill.

Now you close the grill cover and let that baby cook low and slow.  Make sure that it doesn’t get too hot in there.  You want to keep it between 250-275 degrees in there.  If it gets to hot, turn down your burner.  My grill has an internal thermometer so I used that to keep track.  For every inch of meat you need to cook it for about an hour. So mine took about 3 hours to cook since it was 3″ thick. .  You’ll know it’s done when you stick a meat thermometer in and it reaches 165 degrees.

Here’s the finished product.

The cheese came out perfect and it actually complemented the meat very well. Notice the swirly layers of meat. Perfect.

We cut it up into thin sushi like slices.

You can eat the meat alone or you can serve it on a piece of bread. Enjoy!

by Katherine Tomlinson

Jenna Petersen started writing full-time in 1999 when her husband said, “You’re only happy when you’re writing, why don’t you do that?” In 2004, her dream came true when her literary agent called to say she’d just sold to Avon.

Since then, she’s been a Waldenbooks Mass Market bestseller, a Bookscan bestseller and won the Bookbuyers Best Award for Best Historical Romance. She also helped launch the Avon Red line under her Jess Michaels name.

In addition, she has run The Passionate Pen since 1999. This popular site for aspiring authors gets nearly 200,000 hits per month and contains information on literary agents, publishing houses, articles about writing and the industry, links and Jenna’s Diary toward and beyond publication. This year the site celebrates its ten-year anniversary with events and prizes each month.

GFG: Shakespeare called music “the food of love.” Do you listen to music when you write? (I can only listen to music without words, otherwise I get distracted)

JP: I don’t, actually. Like you, I can only listen to music without words and after a while, even that becomes too distracting. So I generally don’t write with anything, though I have been inspired by songs.

GFG: Flowers and candy are the traditional Valentine’s Day gifts. What’s your favorite flower? Your favorite sweet?

JP: I love lilacs for their beautiful color and heady scent. And… really any kind of chocolate is good for a sweet. I’m a traditional romance writer in that way.

GFG: What made you sit down and write your first novel? How long did it take you to finish? How long did it take you to find a publisher?

JP: I had some crackpot notion that it would be “easy” to write a romance. I was disabused of that fact very quickly. It took me about three years to actually finish it, though I wasn’t writing the whole time. That book has never been published and will never be. It took me five years and over 15 books to get published from the time when I actually started writing full-time.

GFG: You just published A RED HOT VALENTINE’S DAY in January and you have another book coming out in March. What’s next after that?

JP: Yes, my book HER NOTORIOUS VISCOUNT comes out on March 31 (it’s actually counted as an April release). Then on April 21, my next Jess Michaels release comes out, TABOO. And in November another Jenna Petersen release, WHAT THE DUKE DESIRES. Currently I’m writing a book that will come out in February 2010. It’s a Jess Michaels release but it’s untitled. So lots of being busy and travel coming up. I’ll be all over the place in the next few months. Readers can always check the News section of http://www.jennapetersen.com for more info on where I’ll be and when.

GFG: Who are your favorite authors?

JP: In romance, Kathryn Smith, Jacquie D’Alessandro, Julia Quinn, Lisa Kleypas. Also Neil Gaiman, LM Montgomery and Thomas Harris.

GFG: Tell us how you met your husband! Is he a romantic?

JP: My husband and I went to high school together, actually. So we’ve known each other a long time (we’ll celebrate 12 years married on March 21). He is very romantic. Not only is affectionate and a gift giver, but he has supported me in pursuing publication from the very start, even when it was very hard. So I definitely give him props for that.

GFG: Is he jealous of the hot heroes you create for your books?

JP: I don’t think so. No one compares to him.

GFG: What was served at your wedding reception? (If you had one.) What flavor was your wedding cake? Did you keep a slice to eat on your first anniversary?

JP: We didn’t have a wedding reception or cake. We were married in a hot pink house in Burien WA with a woman in a weird robe for witness. It wasn’t exactly a traditional wedding (but it is a good story).

GFG: Where’s the most romantic place you’ve ever eaten? Was it romantic because of the setting or because of the company?

JP: Actually this year my husband took me to a wonderful Japanese restaurant called Nishino’s in Seattle. We were back there for my brother’s wedding (which was the day before my birthday) so earlier in the week just the two of us slipped away from the family. He had made special plans for a six course meal there and it was lovely. Especially since he’d put so much special thought into it.

GFG: If you were planning an intimate Valentine’s Day dinner, what would you serve?

JP: Actually this year my husband made me dinner for Valentine’s Day. He made a wonderful filet mignon with roasted vegetables and mashed cauliflower. Not only was it healthy, but it was so tasty.

GFG: If you could double-date with any couple in history, who would it be?

JP: You know, most of the most interesting couples in history didn’t seem to get along that well. I’m not sure I’d actually WANT to spend time with them.

GFG: How about breakfast in bed? Does that ever happen at your house?

JP: My husband LOVES breakfast in bed, so this is usually my territory. I’ll make him pancakes or French toast or eggs and bring them up for him on a Saturday or Sunday morning. There’s something so nice about having yummy food just arrive and you don’t even have to get up.

You can find Jenna online at jennapetersen.com and passionatepen.com.

by Katherine Tomlinson

I don’t have a lot of pots and pans. If I had to, I could put dinner on the table with just one pot and a paring knife. And I’d have no problem eating with mismatched utensils if necessary. But take away my spices and it’s a whole other story.

I grew up in a household with a spice rack, but my mother’s culinary palette was much too broad and diverse to be contained, even in the deluxe, three-shelf version. This was in the 60s, way before the foodie revolution when pretty much the only way to get an authentic herbes de Provence blend was to make it yourself. Do you now how hard it is to find summer savory and chervil and lavender even now?

Nowadays, there are all sorts of subtle and different “curry” spice mixtures readily available. You can buy Bengal and Madras versions in any grocery, pick up green Thai curry powder or red curry paste from World Market or order complex and subtle blends from companies like chef Ranjan Dey’s New World Spices (http://www.newworldspices.com/ ). Back then, though, outside of the Indian subcontinent, “curry” pretty much meant the tin of chrome-yellow powder composed mostly of cumin and turmeric. This might have daunted another cook but my mother was made of sterner stuff. She’d grown up in the south and cooked like Paula Dean. And if she’d stayed in Virginia, maybe that would have been enough. Biscuits are, after all, the staff of life.

But she’d married an Army officer, moved to Germany and then France, traveling to Italy and Switzerland and taking the odd cooking course as she went. Sauerbraten found its way onto the menu, with crisp little potato pancakes on the side. There was a flirtation with escargot when she bought the reusable shells and single-purpose copper pan to cook them in. (The only person in the house who truly enjoyed these rubbery, garlic-infused morsels was my little sister, who was four at the time. Everyone else was meh.)

She invented a dish called “shrimp curry” and God only knows what was in it because it hit the family dinner table with a distinct “thud” never to return. I remember the sauce was disconcertingly pink and creamy but know for a fact that no coconut milk was used as a thickener, the way it is in most recipes today. I suspect mayonnaise might have been in there somewhere. My mother was very fond of using mayonnaise as an ingredient.

Her next attempt to coax the family toward more adventurous eating was “keema,” a traditional Indian dish involving ground meat and peas. My mother used ground beef (she was tired of making hamburgers) and peas. The peas were canned. The dish was greeted with even less enthusiasm than the shrimp curry had been.

My sister, who refused to eat onions, spent half an hour extricating miniscule slivers of the toxic vegetable from the keema before she even tasted it. Keema is not a dish that’s best served cold. My brother thought it looked like barf and expressed this opinion several times. Loudly. At which point, my neutrality toward the meal (it was better than stuffed peppers) became a lot more negative because, sadly, he was correct. I think the unpleasant texture might have had something to do with the canned tomatoes she’d used. To this day. I rarely cook with canned tomatoes because I hate dealing with the chunks of tomato end that never quite integrate into whatever you’re making.)

Our father, who had served in India during WWII, refused to eat it. He liked beef. And he could tolerate peas (although green beans were better) but he didn’t want them mixed up. And he really didn’t want any curry powder slipped into the mix. We ate a lot of meat loaf after that.

Despite my mother’s best efforts, curry did not seem destined to become a part of my life. And then I went to college and in my sophomore year opted out of the “food plan” that allowed me to eat in the cafeteria. I lost ten pounds because I wasn’t eating sweet rolls for breakfast every day. (The cafeteria made awesome sweet rolls.) I ate a lot of yogurt. And I discovered that you can make rice and beans taste like completely different dishes depending on the spices you use. Which is good because rice and beans are cheap. I started using spices I’d never heard of. And I discovered the secret of life. Spicy is better than bland.

Once I learned that, my destiny was set. I’ve gone way beyond the spice rack to the spice cabinet. I regularly use five kinds of pepper—white, red cayenne, dried red chili flakes, black pepper and coarse cracked black pepper. There’s probably a bottle of green peppercorns somewhere in the cupboard as well, most likely tucked behind the canister of wasabi powder or the container of dried dill weed I bought when I was making a salmon mousse and never used again.

I have seven different kinds of curry powder, all with different topnotes—saffron and tamarind and fenugreek and fennel. I make curry so often one of my wooden spoons is permanently stained yellow. And I’ve even made keema a few times.

Somewhere, my mother is laughing.

by Katherine Tomlinson

My sister Mary loved Christmas. You think it’s rushing the season when the yuletide decorations appear the day after Halloween? She kept little white Christmas tree lights strewn around her apartment year round, surrounding the space with a dotted line of luminosity that defied the darkness that often threatened to engulf her.

She started her Christmas wish list in January, appending directions and diagrams for the hopping-impaired, and revising it weekly throughout the year.

Christmas was what she called “a candy holiday,” a time she gave herself permission to eat all the wrong things … all the time. Meals were made of eggnog and sugar cookies. Dessert would be dates stuffed with cream cheese frosting. There would be candy canes. She was picky about her peppermint, would only deign to eat one particular brand. She’d stock up during the half-price sales after the holiday and mourn when her supply ran out. (And by stock up, I’m not talking about purchasing a couple of boxes; I mean she stocked up. She’d buy enough to last till February.)

She’d had her Christmas stocking since she was a girl. It was made by our mother out of red velvet, with her name stitched in white around the top, framed by a constellation of embroidered stars. She liked that stocking filled with Hershey’s kisses, packets of dried figs, and one of those Lifesavers’ Sweet Story Book collections with the butter rum and pep-o-mint flavors.

These were treats from our childhood, items that showed up year after year, along with a dozen pencils with our names on them (mail-ordered from a catalogue in the days before the Internet) and the hard, black rubber comb that seemed inevitably to lodge in the toe of our stockings. The Lifesavers’ assortment was the candy equivalent of the Crayola box with the built-in crayon sharpener—we usually got one of those as well. In recent years, the crayons and comb were optional, but the kisses were not.

Mary was a traditionalist about Christmas dinner as well, and when we feasted the season, it was with the same dishes our mother and grandmother had made. Except for pie. Neither one of us could ever manage a pie crust as flaky and light as the ones our mother made, so we gave up and opted for cookies as a consolation prize. There were gingersnaps made from a recipe out of Joy of Cooking; peanut blossom cookies with Hershey’s kisses, a prize-winner from a Pillsbury Bake-off sometime in the 60s. There were seven-layer bars. There were oatmeal cookies made from a recipe hand-written on a page of lined notebook paper so splattered with butter it is transparent in parts.

There was always pumpkin bread and banana chocolate-chip bread and orange-cranberry bread made from the instructions on the back of the bag of cranberries. One year I’d been too busy to bake and tried to substitute a loaf of cranberry bread from a high-end bakery. It did not go over well.

In fact, the only new addition to the traditional Christmas day menu—where meals melt into each other in one unbroken decadent dream—has been “Bubble Loaf,” a sweet bread drizzled with an orange/butter/sugar glaze that makes cinnamon rolls seem as bland as unbuttered white toast.

We were brought up in the south, so Christmas dinner always offered what our grandfather called “a gracious plenty.” More food, in other words, than any one family could eat in a week. We carried that tradition with us, even when it was only the two of us to celebrate. After all, why not make enough food to last until the New Year—leaving more time to play with your Christmas presents instead of cooking. And when everything was gone but the carcass of the turkey, there would be Brunswick stew to make from the bones. And of course, biscuits had to be baked to eat with the stew. (And pot pies could be made from the leftovers of both. Done right, a Christmas dinner could last until March.)

The cooking was left to me, but Mary made her own Christmas cards. They were whimsical—designs that usually featured the members of her menagerie, which at various times included an iguana, a tortoise, several frogs, a chameleon and two snakes in addition to a fluctuating number of cats. On her last card, she’d sketched her six cats, sleeping and dreaming of candy canes and fish. I discovered the prototype in her desk when I cleaned out her apartment. I found homes for all but one of the cats, and the last one came home to live with me. It puts me one cat over the line, but he’s a lovable animal, a sweet-faced marmalade tabby with golden eyes and abandonment issues.

I know how he feels.

My sister died last year, but the pain of her loss is a wound only freshly healed over. Beneath the new pink skin is tender flesh filled with nerve endings firing at random. The ache isn’t constant, but summoned unexpectedly, triggered by the most innocuous things. The scent of peppermint. The taste of salty caramel. A glimpse of Miracle on 34^th Street while clicking through to the news.

My sister loved Christmas. I loved my sister. The two feelings are now inextricably twined.

I’ll be making Bubble Loaf for breakfast Christmas morning. And I’ll be thinking of her.

by Katherine Tomlinson

Just as Cirque du Soleil redefined what a circus act is, magician Joel Ward has brought contemporary style to the venerable show biz art of magic. His high-energy, highly original act combines classical magic with modern touches, running the gamut from comic audience participation to interactive sleight of hand to flashy Vegas-type illusions.

Introduced to magic at the age of six when a magician at a school assembly chose him to be his on-stage assistant, Joel began performing at children’s birthday parties when he was 10. By age 15, Joel became the Current World Champion Teen Magician after placing 1st at the International Brotherhood of Magicians annual competition, the World’s Largest Magic Organization. That same year Joel was picked out of hundreds of magicians to appear on television with Master Magician, Lance Burton. The show, “Lance Burton-Young Magicians Showcase,” was filmed at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Joel currently performs hundreds of shows a year, including a gig this week at the Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach.

GFG: Do you cook? Can you make magic in the kitchen?

JW: I do cook! My dad was the cook in the family growing up, so I learned form him. As far as making MAGIC in the Kitchen? Maybe not. I think it’s pretty good when I am hungry, but I stick with standards. My favorite things to cook are breakfast foods.

GFG: You were born and raised in California. Are there any foods that take you back to your childhood?

JW: Yes! I grew up with my Dad’s cooking, and love the Southern California favorite, Mexican Food. The town I grew up in, Cardiff by the Sea, had this Mexican Restaurant called, Las Olas, and it has the best Mexican Food around. Other things I remember are my dad’s beef jerky, probably the best in the world, VG Donuts in Cardiff, and the world famous, “Pipes,” home of the Breakfast Burrito. You go there after your done with a morning surf and it just fills your body will greatness.

GFG: Any food you crave that you can’t get when you’re ordering from room service?

JW: All the time. Room service only has a few good things. I was living in Tahoe for a year where I was performing my show at the Horizon Casino & Resort. Since I lived at the Casino, I ordered Room Service all the time. I wish they had had better steaks and Fish, and Caviar, oh ya, and Sherbet Ice Cream. Ya that’s good. And a good fettuccini Alfredo is never a bad thing. I just remember the boring food like burgers, and chicken fingers. I think I lived off the fruit bowls for the year.

GFG: What do you eat on the days you’re performing? Do you eat before or after a show?

JW: I try to eat light on performing days. There is nothing worse then eating something heavy and wanting to fall asleep during the show. I normally start the day with a cup of coffee and something light to fill my stomach like an omelet or a bagel. Then in the afternoon I like a healthy sandwich from a place like Wholefoods or Henry’s. They have fresh avocado and good breads. Then before a show I usually have a small salad or sometimes just an orange. The orange gives me natural sugar, which I like because it gives me this burst of energy when I run out on stage.

GFG: You’re on the road a lot. Are audiences different in different cities? Countries?

JW: Yes! Every city has a different vibe. I just got back form doing a run of shows in a small town of Savanna, IL. The audiences were very quiet and conservative. Vegas has crazy audiences, mainly drunk, Lake Tahoe had a mix of the two, California usually has very fun crowds, depends on where you perform. But I think I loved performing down in Brazil the best. The audiences down there were not use to seeing magic performed live. So when it happened right in front of their eyes they were super excited. I love watching the reactions of people. It brings me back to when I was six years old watching magic for the first time.

GFG: You just got done performing in Illinois. Any favorite restaurants you hit while you were there?

JW: There are two restaurants that stood out. Dominick and Maria’s, and Poopy’s. D&M’s is a family owned Italian restaurant. It has good everything. Poopy’s is an American restaurant, but everything you order form the menu has distinctive name: The Poop Burger, etc. It’s funny!

GFG: Your performing style is simultaneously casual and elegant (You make it look so easy). How did your style evolve?

JW: I started doing magic when I was six years old. As a kid I performed as the Kid’s-Kid Show Magician. I was able to mess up tricks and just smile because I was so young that no one cared. If I mess up now, people just laugh at me. As I grew up my style has changed. As a teenager I was able to incorporate things that I liked at the time. Today I can’t wear a tuxedo and bow tie because I wouldn’t actually wear that out. Instead I wear a nice sports jacket, a pair of True Religion Jeans, a Seven Shirt, and some Aldo’s. My style now is upbeat and fun. I don’t like to be the serious type that convinces my audience that I am doing real magic. I am up there entertaining, having fun with what I do.

GFG: You’ve been performing since you were a kid. What was your most memorable show (so far)?

JW: I have done so many shows, but I think that best one I can think of was for an Orphanage in Mexico. I was dating my girlfriend at the time who is a female magician, and we both went down there to donate a show for these kids. There were about 750 people there. We had a translator because my Spanish is not perfect. It was so much fun. These kids were so happy. I loved that show. Watching people who actually really enjoy what I do makes it all worth it, even when I am not getting paid.

GFG: What was the first trick you learned? (Is there an official magician word for “trick” or is trick okay?)

JW: Some magicians called it an illusion. Trick is fine with me. The first trick I learned was how to make money disappear. My dad showed me how to vanish a coin, which he learned form a book. Ever since then I have been making other peoples money disappear!

GFG: What was the hardest trick you ever learned?

JW: Sleight of hand is the hardest. It’s the skill that allows the magician to do what he does. It is palming a coin or hiding a card. But once you master the sleight of hand the possibilities are endless because you can combine them in any way imaginable.

GFG: Do you have a signature trick?

JW: My signature routine I would say is my dove magic act. This is an act that I have toured around the world with, won many international competitions, and have performed on countless television shows. I start the act out by running onto stage listening to my video iPod. This iPod erupts into spark and I throw it out into the crowd and it turns into a bird which flies back to me. Then the rest of the act is highly visual with doves changing colors and appearing and disappearing in a blink of the eye.

GFG: On your site it says that you’re working on a show that will revolutionize magic. Can you elaborate? If not (you tease) where will it be unveiled?

JW: The Show that I am currently working on ties magic with a story line. It takes place present day in New York City. It’s a story of coming to age and finding the magic in everyday life. People live these manentous lives, going to a job everyday that they hate. My show is going to take them out of that live for a short time and show them that they can live any way they want. Magic is all around us. Real Magic. It’s waking up in the morning, a beautiful sunset, they way a tree sways in the wind. This show is going to have drama, spellbinding magic, a large cast, and some amazing special guests. One of them is Perry – The Penguin.

GFG: Is there any food you’d like to make disappear permanently?

JW: I would make PANDA EXPRESS disappear. I hate PANDA EXPRESS. It makes me so sick just to think about it.

GFG: What was the most memorable meal you ever had, and what made it special?

JW: My favorite meal to this day was at a little restaurant in North County San Diego, called, “Calypso Café.” It’s a little hole in the wall restaurant. If you pass it in Encinitas on Coast highway 101 you wouldn’t even think to go in. But it’s amazing. The owner, Gilles, is from France and has made a great restaurant. The food, French Moroccan, is unbelievable, but it’s also the atmosphere. The people who go here look amazing. They have live music 7 nights a week. Sometimes it is a steel drum artist. Other nights its blues. It’s an amazing restaurant with some of the best escargot I have ever had.

GFG: If you could have dinner with three other magicians, whom would you invite?

JW: Steve Martin, Johnny Carson, and Houdini. I know two of the three are dead, but it would be an awesome dinner. Johnny and Steve would be making my laugh, and Houdini would be talking about how great he is. It would be AWESOME!

Joel Ward will be performing at the Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach Wednesday, November 5 to Saturday, November 8, 2008.Showtime is at 8 p.m., come early to enjoy cocktails and dinner. The show will feature special guest comedians.

For more information, see: http://www.comedyandmagicclub.com/ Or click on Joel’s website: www.JoelWardMagic.com

by Katherine Tomlinson

Halloween. Some would say it’s the perfect holiday. You get to play dress-up, people give you candy and you don’t have to drive three thousand miles to spend the day with your family. But some would say that the day’s events, now mostly celebrated by children, are the remnants of darker times and reminders of darker places—shadow realms where evil lurks patiently to pounce on the living and the dead rise and walk. Places like the World of Change where Canadian author G. Wells Taylor sets his genre-bending horror novels, He’s releasing the second book of his Apocalypse Trilogy, Forsaken, on Halloween and talked to GFG in the midst of preparations for the book’s launch.

GFG: So you like to scare people. What scares you?

GWT: I am always on the lookout for movies and books that will scare me because I’ve grown a high tolerance to the usual suspects: werewolves, ghosts and vampires.

But political correctness terrifies me. When you think about it, there’s not much difference between that and criminal profiling, except you’re guessing what might offend someone, rather than wondering which someone might offend you. Cloaked in good intentions as it is, PC is much more dangerous to freedom.

As fear relates to food, I was afraid of Green Peppers when I was a boy and called them: “obscene.” I quite like them now but back then, they really set me off. I think it was the alien seedpod thing they’ve got going.

GFG: It’s Halloween. Will you be handing out tricks or treats at your door? If so, what will you be handing out?

GWT: Actually, I avoid drawing attention to my downtown penthouse apartment. (It’s the entire top floor, so I get to call it that.) At night, the alley outside my building sounds like something from I Am Legend. However, I do not sleep in the bathtub.

If I lived in a neighborhood more conducive to American gothic traditions like Trick or Treat, I would hand out cans of pop. I remember how exciting that was for me as a kid. In fact, I remember the news flying quickly from ghoul to pirate to princess any time a Halloween house was discovered that was giving away pop. We all ran for it.

GFG: Have you ever celebrated finishing a book with a festive meal?

GWT: I constantly bribe myself to do things: go to the gym, finish tasks, complete projects, tie my shoes, etc., usually with pizza slices—sometimes with potato chips. When that doesn’t work I will do anything for an action figure.

As we all know pizza slices are only edible about twenty percent of the time. So when I finish a book, I do something special and celebrate by ordering a whole pizza with the works on it. I then eat the pizza until it hurts.

On such important occasions, I’ve been known to sweeten the pot with a bottle (or two) of an Argentinean merlot by Trapiche.

GFG: You live near Toronto. Where do you like to eat when you go out?

GWT: In Toronto, I enjoy breakfast at the Queen Street Restaurant. For $3.99 you get three eggs, marinated hash browns, toast, with the entire meal covered by three slabs of peameal bacon. People race to get the hash browns before they sell out.

(Note: Peameal bacon is a Canadian favorite. According to the bbqtalk.ca web site: “Peameal Bacon is cured but not smoked …made from pork loins weighing 12-14 pounds. They are trimmed of all the fat and the bones are removed. The term peameal comes from the ground yellow peas with which the bacon was originally coated. This ensured better curing and shelf life and avoided bacterial problems. Over the years this tradition was changed to cornmeal, due to the availability of corn.”)

For dinner I enjoy Cedars, a Lebanese restaurant that has an exquisite combination plate in its far-ranging and exotic tastes, featuring grape leaves and hot pickled turnips that make your eyes roll back.

In Owen Sound, I enjoy Jazzmyn’s Tapas and Taps. I frequent this pub because my Friday after work beer goes perfectly with their special Jazzmyn’s nachos that include plump chicken strips and a wide spectrum of veggies delivered on a bed of multi-colored tortilla chips. God I’m easy to please.

GFG: It’s getting towards winter. Any cold-weather foods you particularly enjoy?

GWT: Being a full time teacher with five kids, my mother had to come up with treats and comfort foods that were easy on expense and quick to make while still being attractive to an unruly gang of squabbling children.

On cold mornings she would make us Welsh Rarebits before school. I should point out that they weren’t real Welsh Rarebits. I think she just grabbed a name we could remember.

They are easy and fast to make. She’d do up some toast and then apply a slice of Kraft process cheese (or two) before slipping them open-faced under the broiler. We’d gather around and watch through the oven window as these creations first began to melt and then develop a skin that plumped up balloon-like before rapidly browning into a tasty dome. Delicious, though you quickly learned to exercise caution going in. Those blackened cheese bubbles disguised a molten surprise that could scorch your skin to the bone. Simple, but they warmed the heart and to this day I tear up when I burn my mouth on them.

GFG: You’ve already celebrated Thanksgiving this year (Canada celebrates Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October), but the winter holidays are coming up. Any special holiday foods you’re looking forward to?

GWT: I do not have much of a sweet tooth, day to day, being a hot pepper and spice fan instead. But, Christmas is the one time of year that I let loose, and plow into the sweets with abandon. My sisters bake for their families at Christmas, and the rest of us delight in ripping the tops off their decorative cookie tins to get a look under the wax paper. They’re notorious for making Sprinkle-top Brownies, Chocolate Peanut Clumps, Chocolate Egg Noodle Clumps and Nanaimo Bars.

GFG: Do you cook?

GWT: I cook occasionally and my specialty is the “Super-charger.” I developed the “Super-charger” during a vitamin-deficient episode, in which my high-cal, low nutrient, take-out diet created an internal environment that left me vulnerable to every cold or flu virus on the planet. The Flintstone chewables just weren’t doing it.

I start with a jar of spaghetti sauce as a base to which I add whole tomatoes, green pepper, olives (green or black or both), mushrooms, broccoli, celery, carrots and green onion—anything with vitamins that will fit in the pot. Oh, and a jot of Trapiche merlot. I cook this slowly under a dusting of garlic powder and a few shots of Louisiana hot sauce.

It “super-charges” the body with a large dose of vitamins and nutrients that solitary writers often overlook. And once you’ve got a big pot of this, you can eat it “as is” with strips of cheese floating on it or with some modification, it can be applied to pasta, eggs (excellent faux-Spanish omelet) or rice.

GFG: What was the most memorable meal you ever had?

GWT: My most memorable meal involved cold chicken, wine, some company and a hilltop. I would say more but I’m a gentleman.

The Forsaken by horror author G. Wells Taylor is available midnight October 30, 2008 at gwellstaylor.com and wildclown.com. To celebrate the release of The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two, Taylor will extend free e-book downloads of popular Book One in the series: When Graveyards Yawn.

by Katherine Tomlinson

Joanne Renaud is a graduate in illustration from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Before moving to Southern California, she studied graphic design at Central Washington University and art at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She presently lives in Los Angeles, and is agented by Tugeau2. Recent clients include Simon & Schuster, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Inc., McGraw Hill, and Trillium Publishing.

GFG: Where did you experience your most memorable meal?

JR: It was at the Ciudad de Tui, on the Viejo de Cizur in Madrid. It was the last night in Spain for me and my friend Erika, and we’d had a long and exciting trip traveling around Andalusia and Castile (with a day’s excursion into Morocco as well). We’d been eating thriftily during the entire trip; so for our last supper we wanted to go all out, with sangria, tapas, the whole shebang.

GFG: What was on the menu?

JR: We ordered their tapas menu, and small little plates of empanadas (stuffed pastry), croquettes (fried cheese and ham), jamon Serrano and iberico, fried calamari, and patatas bravas. They brought bread and olives for our table along with an entire pitcher of sangria. The waiting staff was very friendly. They obliged our crazy American wishes, not clearing the table until I sketched everything and Erika took pictures with her digital camera.

This is the sketch of the dinner I drew:

It was really delicious, and we stuffed ourselves. The staff winked at us repeatedly while bringing back the check and gave us 10 euro extra when we asked for change.

GFG: How’d you meet your dining companion Erika Vause?

JR: We met because we’re both interested in the French Revolution. (Yes, the French Rev has spawned its own fannish subculture.) She is currently a grad student in Paris, studying debt imprisonment. She also has turned into a major foodie. She was just telling me the other day how she was enjoying cooking doe meat and boar.

GFG: You just provided the cover art for Joan Betty Stuchner’s book Honey Cake, which is at its heart a story about traditions and family and food. If you had only one recipe to pass on to posterity, what would it be? And why?

JR: Well, I know I wouldn’t pass on Mom’s old recipe for broccoli tuna roll-ups. Ugh. Her ginger beef recipe was pretty good though, although I haven’t had it in ages. The one recipe that I’ve always been obsessed with actually came from my sister’s ex-roommate. It’s a Japanese chicken curry dish, and it’s delicious.

GFG: When you’re working, do you ever forget to eat?

JR: Occasionally, although it doesn’t happen very often.

GFG: If you could share a meal with an artist, who would they be?

JR: The one artist I would really love to share a meal with Trina Schart Hyman, my favorite illustrator growing up. She passed away from cancer a few years ago, sadly.

GFG: You seem to be a fan of Roman history. Who among the Romans would you like to break bread with?

JR: Nero, of course! We could discuss the difference between liquamen (Roman fish sauce) and nam pla (Thai fish sauce). I could tell him that he looked fabulous, and he’d play something catchy on the citharaa. Then we would watch bad toga porn movies and make snarky remarks about the terrible costumes… Hopefully I’d stay on his good side so he wouldn’t poison me, what with his family’s penchant for killer mushrooms and all.

GFG: Do you have a favorite comfort food?

JR: Mrs. Grass’s noodle soup, with its golden nugget of awesomeness! I can eat it for days on end and not get tired of it. The only thing it lacks is matzo balls.

GFG: What was your staple diet when you were in art school? Were you a Ramen noodles and cigarettes girl?

JR: Not really. For the first few years I ate a lot of Art Center cafeteria food, then got sick of it. During my senior year, I started eating healthier, and became a major Trader Joes’ convert. I lost a lot of weight that way, but I wasn’t really thinking of that when I changed my eating habits; I wanted to eat foods that tasted good and made me feel better.

GFG: You studied in Ireland and have traveled widely. Do you have a favorite city?

JR: My favorite city in Ireland would be Belfast! There are hundreds of cheap eateries across the city that serves the Ulster Fry (a glorious way to clog your arteries) and my personal favorite, the curry and chip.

Outside Ireland, I’m very fond of both Glasgow (home of the Ashoka West End restaurant, where one can sample haggis pakora) and Madrid. Stateside, I like New York a lot. I try not to go crazy eating out whenever I go there. My favorite restaurants there include Il Corallo Trattoria in Soho, the Mill Korean restaurant near Columbia, and Mexican Radio in the Bowery. And speaking of nam pla, there are lots of great Thai restaurants in Queens, especially Sripraphai. Try the papaya salad, or the kao-soy with chicken.

Honey Cake by Joan Betty Stuchner (Random House) is available in bookstores today.

To see more of Joanne Renaud’s art, check out:

http://www.joannerenaud.com/
http://www.tugeau2.com/
http://suburbanbeatnik.deviantart.com

by Katherine Tomlinson

I celebrated my 21^st birthday with two cakes. One was devil’s food with German Chocolate icing that my mother made and sent to me by way of my younger brother. The other was a pound cake with pink, lemon-flavored fondant icing, an old-fashioned confection baked by my great-aunt Helen who lived in the small North Carolina town where I was going to college.

One birthday, two cakes—that’s just about the right ratio. When I moved to Los Angeles the next year, I ate my birthday meal in a now-defunct coffee shop called The Copper Penny. I ordered a slice of carrot cake. It was good. I ordered another slice to take home to the tiny studio apartment I rented in the middle of L.A.’s Korea Town. I’d been in the city for six weeks. There was no one in Los Angeles who loved me enough to make me a cake.

I felt pretty sorry for myself until I discovered that most of my new friends had never actually tasted home-made cake. Never. They were familiar with bakery cakes that come with thick, lard-laden frosting that coats your tongue with a sweet slime. Some had made cakes themselves from mixes and been happy with the results. (And really, the chocolate cake mixes on the market are great. If you weren’t raised on home-made cake.) The idea of someone actually … baking … a cake for them was an exotic concept.

Poor deprived children. As Benjamin Franklin once said about beer, “cake is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

I baked a cake for my best friend’s 25^th birthday. It was chocolate with a chocolate mousse and raspberry filling and chocolate fudge frosting. Her response was the kind of rapturous appreciation master chefs dream of.

I make her birthday cake every year now. Because I love her and because making a cake is a way of saying, “I love you.” When my brother and sister and I were little, our mother used to make these incredibly elaborate cakes for us. There was a rocking horse for my brother one summer; a butterfly for my sister; a train for me. At Easter there would be coconut cake with the coconut dyed green with food coloring and little jelly bean “eggs” hidden in the “grass.” She invented a cake filled with walnuts and sour cherries to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. (It was served warm with cherry syrup poured over it. But it was also good cold, sans syrup.)

As we grew up, I started baking more and more. Bread and sweet rolls, brownies and cookies. And cake.

I once made my sister a Buche de Noell for her birthday because that’s what she wanted. No one in France makes their own; and there’s a reason why. By the time you make the cake and the filling and the syrup to brush the cake layers and the frosting—you’ve used up every pan in your kitchen and had to borrow some from your neighbors. I have to say, though, it was pretty tasty. And she was pleased that someone had gone to all that effort to please her. Which made me happy.

There’s an old expression, “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.” I grew up in a house where that could have been embroidered on a sampler. Food isn’t love, but making food for the people you love is an act of love. And there’s no sweeter way to say you care about someone than making them a cake.

by Katherine Tomlinson

Sometimes, you’re just in the mood for a little something sweet.

You could satisfy that craving with a frothy frappe from the nearest coffee shop, perhaps, or a black and white cookie from the corner deli. In a pinch, you could even have some bread with jam.

I would have been happy with any or all of those sweet solutions until I met Severine Trannoy, an elegant Frenchwoman who thinks nothing of making her own gnocchi or going to a small neighborhood bakery just to purchase croissants.

She introduced me to these mouth-watering morsels one rainy afternoon and let’s just say, I may never be satisfied with a Fig Newton again.

Fig French Kisses

Wash and dry two small, fresh figs.

Cut them in half.

Put a small piece of goat or feta cheese on each half.

Sprinkle with a little salt and a little pepper.

Garnish with fresh thyme.

Add a drop or two of walnut or olive oil.

Finish with a drizzle of honey on each slice.

Arrange in a glass baking dish and roast at 275 degrees until the cheese begins to bubble and melt.

Serves two.

These luscious treats are as uncomplicated to make as a piece of cinnamon toast, but as rich and gooey as a Cadbury Caramello. They’re also versatile. You could serve them to guests at a dinner party as easily as you could pass them around at a backyard family barbecue.

One taste and you’ll know why the French invented the phrase Mon Dieu.