Sometime last summer, I learned that being openly enthusiastic about one particular intersection of food geekery and book geekery (namely: semi live-tweeting a complicated recipe from Diane Duane’s Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms project) could gain me small but important amounts of positive attention.

Adjacent to that, I learned that a cookbook of recipes from sci-fi and fantasy writers, compiled by Anne McCaffery, existed, at which point my brain went “I need this!”

Serve it Forth: Cooking with Anne McCaffery is not a book of recipes from the writers fictional universes in the way Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms aims to be, but a sort of writers club cookbook of the author’s favorite recipes, often ones tailored to a busy writer’s time and budget constraints. It’s not unlike those workplace or church group compilation cookbooks; if you don’t know the people putting it together, there isn’t going to be as much appeal in it. I can’t claim to know most of the authors who have contributed to this book, but as a longtime reader and somewhat published writer, there’s certainly a part of me that would like to know these people, and maybe that’s part of the appeal.

Some of that desire also nudges me to the fact that I have not read a lot of these authors, and some of them are ones that I either want to read and have not gotten around to, or are well known and have escaped my notice. And it’s a sorry fact that in my current adult life, it is a lot harder for me to read fiction for pleasure than it used to be and changing that is going to require some conscious effort.

So, cook stuff from the book, read books by those authors, and start actually populating the blog I made a point of including when I did my website revamp. Simple enough, right?

Simple, maybe, but not easy.

Nonetheless…and intermittently…Onward! The first post in the series will be up soon.

(At some point, a master post list or a link to the tag will go here.)