Chocolate, Blueberries & Coffee Draws Foodie Authors to Salon
By Rusty LaGrange, High Desert Branch
Salons hosted by members in their homes, give a different perspective to a shared interest, growing friendships, and an expansion of ideas. At the Food Salon hosted by Mary Langer Thompson, August 29 — “Chocolate, Blueberries, Coffee: Super Foods, Super Writing” — we nibbled on a variety of finger foods while sharing our aspect of food topics in our blogging, cook-books, chapters in our books — and basically anywhere food took center stage.
Mary’s newest quest for tasty and nutritious food stems from her need to keep her husband, Dave, bouncing back after a recent health scare. As she wrote about it earlier this summer, she attained a health certificate focused on nutrition from an online college course.
Most of us had less lofty goals, but our interests in foods help shape how we write. Jenny Margotta shared her recipes from her cookbook she co-edited with her late husband, John. They had opposite tastes in some cases, and their differences are shared in opposite pages of their cookbook.
I use food stories related to the Old West in my website. I mix old recipes with how the food was used, stored, and recipes developed. There were no published cookbooks until the 1910s so most favorites were handed down through family and friends. I also shared the chuck wagon history used in the first cattle drives.
Even in the novels that Mary Ruth Hughes and Tess deGroot shared, certain passages within their stories placed their characters around a table either discussing the meals or using the dinner table as a meeting place.
We then let our imaginations fly thinking of all the food-oriented scenes Hollywood has incorporated in features, TV series, cartoons, documentaries, and iconic films — who could forget Lady and the Tramp’s spaghetti plate scene; A Christmas Carol; Dickens’ Oliver Twist begging for some more? And, of course, the strained smiles of relatives surviving another Thanksgiving feast. If you wish to have a copy of Mary’s resource list on foods, just contact her at mh_thompson@hotmail.com to receive an electronic list.
This piece appeared in the September 2019
edition of High Desert Branch’s newsletter.