Announcing Food of the World

Hello. C J here. My first cookbook Cooking With a Wolf – Food for the Busy Chef is well on its way to being done so I’m planning out my second book. The book is titled Food of the World. But what world? Earth here or my setting there? Well, both. I want both.

We in Canada like all food. Even if we tend to define food as something that will make you thinner, which it isn’t, instead of something that is pleasant to eat, which it is, we still have a stunning array of options when we make a meal. No other culture on the planet values international cuisine like we do in Canada. Quite frankly if I wasn’t born here I would have moved here anyway to try sushi and then have ice cream the same day from the same store. Sushi goes great with ice cream if you know how to pair them.

Every cuisine is here in full and I don’t think people in the international community understand that we like their food as much as they do. No matter who they are in this conversation we like their food. Indian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Moroccan, Greek, Italian, French, British, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Bubble Tea, Mexican, whatever in god’s name poutine is and smoked salmon on a bagel all make sense to us. We like food as a category here. Faced with the task of making a second cookbook out of that stunning variety of options I thought up something new.

Take every cuisine that I know or that I could know and pair them together in sets of two. But what world are we talking about? Earth or my setting? Both. Introducing Food of the World. It’s one chapter for each real life pairing of cuisines that is also the food they eat in one of the Astral’s worlds. Each world eats a cuisine based on two real life ones. Ascala is Canadian-Italian. Maha, the landmass that houses The Order of Mages, is Canadian-Mexican. Tamaril I’m still working on but it will probably Italian-Greek.

The book is getting so long in a planning sense that I’ll probably have to release it in installments. The digital version will be free and the print version will cost $35 and be for sale at conventions and through direct order or bulk order from my company. There will be a series of these that might actually not end. Each chapter might be a full book in length and will begin with a discussion of the key ingredients in the two cuisine it focuses on as well as how to make the classic dishes of both cuisines.

Then I start getting creative. The pasta I posted on Facebook recently is a good example of this. It’s a classic Italian pasta with tomato sauce but with a Greek cuisine amount of olive oil on it. The meat was Italian sausage but the addition of some of the spices was very Greek. These two sets of ingredients, recipes and techniques pair together well. They all do that. It’s time to start doing some research and then just trying things.

C J Mcpherson