recipes

Hello. I love, read, and write fantasy fiction. Oh, and I’m a vegan.

When I sell my fantasy novels at Comic Cons, I’ll usually sneak a little reference onto the bottom of my table white board, such as Vegan, or Vegan-friendly. In my mind, this covert signal will draw vegans to my table, whispering, “I am one too. Tell me, sister, about your fiction.” Like that first moment of connection in a dystopian novel. This doesn’t happen. Instead, people skip all the other great things on the board, point right to vegan, loudly state, “Look, it says veggan!” and then laugh. This hasn’t dissuaded me from the attempt. About half of those times, someone will ask, “Vegan-friendly fantasy fiction? What’s that?” They laugh. Then when I start to answer, they leave. Even more often, they point and laugh, then turn away.

In my mind, whenever someone asks what could be vegan about fantasy, it proves to me that they’ve never been a vegan reading fantasy. In addition to a lot of the violence and war in the genre (it’s usually a central component, even outside of grimdark), the best scenes feature someone riding their steed in a fine leather vest to grab a hock of ham. I’m not even sure I know what hocks are, but I have concluded they are key to the development of fantasy heroes. So, you know, my fiction is just focused a bit differently. In fact, I think that diversity and exploration is what fantasy is all about.

I’m not here to get into all of that, though. I’m here to talk about one of Cat’s and my favorite subjects: yummy food. Now, I’m not an authority on gourmet cuisine. Go to a vegan restaurant or check out many amazing online vegan chefs for that. (I’m particularly fond of Richa Hingle.) Hey, I’m not even a great cook. But I haven’t eaten meat in almost a quarter century, so I can definitely speak to “what we eat.” Don’t worry. This is just a quick blog to spark some ideas. But if you don’t mind eating plants, here are five simple foods you could give a spin.

I’m not the world’s best cook by any means. If given the option, to steal more time for writing I will order in or use prepackaged dinners. But there are things I make when I need that extra comfort that take-out or microwave meals won’t provide. It was no surprise that one of my favorite home-made meals made its way into my novel Chaos Wolf.

In that scene, Jordan is due to present herself to the alpha werewolf of the Black Oak Pack for one final test. Alpha Shane has made it clear that if she can’t prove that she is in control her shapeshifting, he will kill her. She has just confronted Montgomery, her vampire mentor, about information he has withheld from her. Her trust in him is shaken when she needs his support the most. She’s exhausted emotionally and physically and needs something she can look forward to beyond mere survival. So she cooks.

Jordan doesn’t toss something into the microwave that warms up in two minutes. She doesn’t reach for the take-out cartons from the dinner the night before. She chooses to make a meal that will take a half hour to prepare and ten hours to cook.

In an act of quiet defiance against all of those who think she’s going to fail, Jordan chooses to hope that she will be there to eat it when it’s done. In her mind, it’s not her last meal, but her next meal to look forward to when she returns home.

I have made crockpot short ribs many times. It’s a recipe my mother taught me, and now I make it for her. I can throw it in the slow cooker when I leave for work and it’s ready when I get home. Any crockpot with a low, medium, or high heat setting can be used. I make it when I know I’m going to have a rough day and want something comforting when I get home. While it won’t win any plating awards on cooking shows, it is a delicious and satisfying meal.

Crockpot Short Ribs

3.5 Lbs. Bone In Short Ribs
6 Russet Potatoes
1.5 lb. Carrots
2 large Yellow Onions
3 Tablespoons Garlic Salt
7 Quart Crockpot

1. Peel and slice half the potatoes into coins and cover the bottom of the crockpot.
2. Cut the carrots into chunks and layer over the potatoes. I cheat here by using bagged baby carrots.
3. Cut your yellow onion into eights and layer over the carrots.
4. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of garlic salt on top.
5. Repeat with another layer of potatoes, carrots, onions and garlic salt.
6. Place the ribs on top of all the vegetables. Sprinkle with the rest of the garlic salt.
7. Cover with lid and cook on low heat for ten hours. If you want to do it the “fast” way and don’t mind tougher meat, cook on high for four to five hours.
8. By the end, the fat on the ribs should have melted and the potatoes and carrots will be tender. Remove the bones and serve in a bowl.

Does Jordan get to enjoy her meal? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

About the Author: Sheryl R. Hayes can be found untangling plot threads or the yarn her cats have been playing with. In addition to writing, she is a cosplayer focusing on knit and crochet costumes and works full time at a Bay Area water company. You can follow her at her blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Here’s a sneak peek at Chaos Wolf:

Bitten by a werewolf. Taught by a vampire. At this rate, she’s going to start a war.
Literature major Jordan Abbey ordered a double mocha latte, but it wasn’t supposed to come with a side order bite by a love-sick werewolf. When a vampire comes to her rescue, gut instinct tells her he has questionable motives. But he’s the only one she can trust to help get in touch with her inner animal.

Within a week, her smart mouth lands her in trouble with the hostile alpha of the local pack and the stiff-necked vampire elder. She now has less than a moon cycle to master shape changing… or else. And the besotted werewolf who started this whole mess is stalking Jordan and killing her friends. He won’t take no for an answer.

In the Northern California town of Rancho Robles where the children of the Wolf and the Bat share an uneasy coexistence, one woman makes an epic mess of the status quo.

Chaos Wolf Excerpt

He gestured toward the couch. “Would you like tea, coffee, or soda?”

“Soda, please.” Although she wasn’t thirsty, accepting what he offered seemed the polite thing to do. She sat down on the leather couch and rested her elbows on her knees. “Don’t you only drink”¦ um”””

“Blood?” Montgomery finished the question for her. “No.” He stepped into the kitchenette. “I can and do drink and eat other things. It’s kind of like eating junk food. There’s no nutritional value. I enjoy the flavors and textures. I don’t like to do it too often, though.”

Jordan tilted her head to one side. “Why not?”

His lip curled into a half smile. “I can’t digest matter like when I was mortal,” he explained. “I have to purge it in a different way.”

She blinked, puzzling it out. Understanding dawned on her face. “Oh”¦ Oh!”

One red-and-silver can in hand, Montgomery stepped out of the kitchenette. “When I last saw you, you were hightailing it out of here, never to return.” He gave her the soda and took a seat in the chair sitting at a right angle to the couch. “What happened?”

Jordan stared down at the soda and rubbed her thumb over the frosty top. “After I left, I went home. I didn’t tell anyone about you.” She gestured in Montgomery’s direction. “I went out to try to forget what happened. When I came back, I found out my roommate’s boyfriend had been mauled to death.”

Montgomery stiffened. “Did you see the werewolf?”

“No,” Jordan said. “I didn’t even think he was real until”¦” She paused and shivered, sloshing the soda in the can. “All I could think about was finding you.”

Montgomery’s lips moved to form a curse. “Did you come directly here?” He stood up and crossed the small space separating the chair and the couch. “Focus. It’s important. Do you think you were followed?”

“No. The police took me and Molly to the station. We’re not allowed to go back to our apartment until sometime tomorrow after the super gets someone in to”¦” Jordan’s voice broke. She swallowed. “Clean up. I spent two hours getting on and off buses to make sure I wasn’t followed.”

Montgomery sat down on the couch. “Good thinking. If the werewolf was following you by scent, that should have thrown him off your trail. If he was tracking you by sight, you would have spotted him. Or he would have broken in here by now. You’ve been lucky.”

“Lucky?” Jordan’s shoulders tightened and her fist clenched, denting the can inward. “I’m being stalked by something out of a horror film and you think I’m lucky?”

“Yes,” Montgomery countered. “If you had been there instead of your friend, the werewolf would have finished what he started.”

“Finished what he started?” Jordan put the soda on the table unopened. “You make it sound like he let me live.”

“He did,” Montgomery stated, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

She stared at him with an open mouth. All the movies and books she had seen taught that a werewolf would rip out her throat as soon as look at her. The female victim never survived the attack. “But why?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet?” Montgomery appeared nonplussed by her reaction. “He wasn’t trying to make a meal out of you, Jordan. He was claiming you as his mate.”

Universal Book Link

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Imagine a Hellmouth. No, not the one in Sunnydale, California””a medieval Hellmouth, straight out of a manuscript illumination. Pointy teeth, flames, unhappy people.
When I decided that I wanted to write a book about a medieval woman who leads a raid on Hell, that was the sort of underworld that immediately came to my mind. A mouth, though, implies a throat, and a stomach, and, well, everything else.

So I had a Hellbeast on my hands, a creature that spends centuries underground, but occasionally makes an appearance on the surface. It’s a little like a platypus, but without the bill. And a lot bigger.

Within the Hellbeast, there are revenants. But there are also humans””some have been altered in various ways, and some are extremely long-lived, but they are humans nonetheless. This led me to an unusual world-building question: What do people eat in the underworld?

Within the last few years, an industry has sprung up aimed at people who don’t know how to cook but yearn to do so. The basic model of such companies is that they deliver kits for making a homemade meal: the ingredients, with any pre-work like peeling or trimming already done, and a set of instructions that includes step by step photographs pretty enough to be in a food magazine.

I tried one of these services a year or two ago, lured by a good coupon deal, and did get some value out of it, but cancelled the subscription before they could start hitting me with the non-coupon costs. For someone utterly foreign to the idea of cooking, these might be useful to show how easy it is to create a tasty meal, or for someone scared of failure, they might build confidence. But the amount of wasteful packaging was striking, and that seems a bad thing to me. I don’t like creating garbage, because among other things, it means I must expend effort taking it out, but also because it’s bad for the planet.

The average American generates 4.3 pounds of garbage per day. That’s over a pound and a half over what the figure was in 1960. So we’ve gotten, overall, less efficient rather than more, while at the same time depending on resources that are diminishing.

Every one of the kits came in cardboard packaging around a styrofoam box with two large ice packs. I stuck a few of those ice packs away for re-use but there are only so many ice packs any household can use and they’re not recyclable because they’re filled with some sort of chemical solution. Every ingredient was packaged separately, down to tiny plastic bottles holding approximately a teaspoon of soy sauce. If I had weighed the garbage against the end result, I would have found the garbage far in excess of the end result.

I think people should know how to cook, because it’s a skill that helps them make their life better in a number of ways. I freely acknowledge that people with few resources will have a harder time cooking, yet be in a position where the practice would benefit them tremendously. Some low-cost appliances can be of much use here, like a rice cooker, hot plate, or toaster oven, but using those efficiently takes skill and knowledge. These kits aren’t going to teach people some important basics, such as how to shop economically/efficiently, how to store ingredients, or how to prepare food.

One of the things I’ve been doing this month is cooking more in an attempt to wean Chez Rambo away from a too heavy reliance on eating out. The other day I made us eggnog French toast for breakfast (take your basic French toast recipe and swap in eggnog for the milk, add a little cinnamon and fresh nutmeg) and with it, a hearty helping of fake bacon.

The bacon was…less than good. I took the leftover bits and figured I’d amp them up a bit to add to a bag of baby spinach and see what I could do, salad wise. I crumbled the bacon and cubed some stale bread, then sauteed all of it in a mixture of half butter, half hot chili oil (maybe a tablespoon of each) until they were brown, and ground some fresh pepper over them while I was doing that.

The baby spinach got dumped into a bowl and combined with some chopped up apples and some thinly sliced jicama. I tossed the mix with a dressing made of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a little yogurt, and a pinch of brown sugar, then added some quartered hardboiled eggs. Threw the crouton/bacon bit mix over the top and voila. Huge salad, devoured quickly. This actually might be the best salad I’ve ever made, so I’m sorry not to have been more precise about how I measured the ingredients. This is my new salad theory: some greenery (preferably spinach, because I love it), some reasonably crunchy vegetable, chopped fruit (try for tart rather than too sweet), and balsamic vinagrette. Spicy croutons optional.

Last night: fettucini with a vodka and smoked salmon sauce, another big spinach salad, and roasted acorn squash. Tonight? I’ve got a turkey breast thawing, with yet another salad, and sweet potatoes on the side.