Loving Spoonfuls: Tasty Women’s Fiction

Losing Oneself is finished. Written, edited, critiqued. Finished.

It is ready to go into the query world…and I’m happy to send it off as I have another lovely book I have started writing.

But first. Losing Oneself—it’s tasty women’s fiction. Full of the yummy flavors of the South.

Honest: I am a tad fixated with novels that embrace food. From Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake to Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Bringing the smells, tastes, flavors of the kitchen into books, to me, ups the senses. It can make a book damn sensual.

Losing Oneself is ripe with Southern comfort cooking. Main character Olivia is a chef in San Clemente, California, and then in a fictional coastal town in Oregon. In both restaurants, she cooks what she knows, and what should have provided comfort to her: gumbo, red beans and rice, hush puppies, and homemade pickles. Writing this book brought me back to my momma’s cooking. To me, it is comfort and smells like home.

While I’m not a chef, I dabble in the kitchen, experimenting with soups crafted from what’s in my kitchen, cookies that don’t have to be cooked, and crispy kale so divine I have the entire family eating it. I rarely follow recipes, or not a single recipe. Instead, I do a bit of a mash up or just wing it. I rarely write down the recipes of my newly crafted meals, which my son finds unfortunate as I can never repeat a meal. (Though as you see from this photo, one is written on the back of a ticket for a club—written in brief, Mom’s Apple Pie!)

That’s changing—here and now…and going forward. In honor of Losing Oneself. The beginning of my recipes under the category (What’s Cookin’).

Enjoy!