It never fails, as the temperature drops I seem to developed this weird urge to make homemade soup—even though I don’t much care for soup. And I’m talking the long version of homemade soup, with made-from-scratch hours-of-simmering chicken stock before I even get to the soup part.
I’ve had varying degrees of success making stock/broth. I think I tend to use either too much water or too little chicken parts…or maybe the two are synonymous? Anyway, I’m giving it a shot yet again.
As I roast a chicken, intending to separate the meat from the bones, I realized when I’m writing or developing a story, I often create a character that is skilled at cooking, maybe because I want to be skilled at it myself—work in progress.
In my paranormal romance series, Shadow Quest, Marik is a master chef and runs his own kitchen on Marada. He can take simple ingredients and make them sing for your pallet. One of the more interesting dishes Marik created was his signature shroomeak salad. Which, to me, looks a lot like this Candied Pecan, Pear, & Pomegranate Salad.
Zoey, from The Demon’s Retribution is great at baking. When she’s stressed, it’s almost an uncontrollable compulsion to bake one delicious morsel after the other. Below is one of my favorites: Chocolate lava cake. Yum! One day I’ll try to make it at home. However, I already excel at ordering it at restaurants.
In my dark fantasy novel, A Wicked Desire, Knox makes Cora breakfast: pancakes and bacon. Nothing culinarily miraculous, but pretty damn good for a vampire.
When cooking isn’t an option, my characters make up for it in adventurous eating. In A Wicked Desire, while stuck together on an air ship, Knox and Cora sit down at a restaurant and order practically everything on the menu, taste testing. Later Knox orders grilled octopus and makes Cora try it.
Not sure if I would ever want to eat octopus, myself, I don’t even like calamari, but then, my characters are so much more brave than I am.
Anyway, whichever part of the world you are in, I hope you are keeping warm and that you have something yummy to munch on. Scroll down to the comments and tell me what’s your favorite winter dish?
Books by Kiersten Fay
