LeseLust & LeseLiebe

Food doesn’t play a huge role in my book The Wish List , but there is a quirky food item in it. Confession time, because I pulled it out of my own life: My heroine likes to eat Chocolate Chipless Cookies. What are they? As the name says, they’re chocolate chip cookies minus the chocolate chips. I’m not a huge chocolate fan in real life. I will eat it, but it has to have something in it—nuts, peanut butter, butterfinger filling. No fruit. I will eat brownies, but prefer them with vanilla ice cream on top, no chocolate sauce. I prefer white cake to devil’s food, vanilla pudding to chocolate, and plain glazed doughnuts over chocolate ones. I wish they made eclairs without the chocolate covering the top. Oh, and it has to be milk chocolate. I hate dark chocolate. I think most of my tastes are that of an eight year old. You should see my drink choices. When I make chocolate chip cookies, I leave out the chocolate chips. I love the cookie part, all buttery and soft, but the chocolate ruins i...

My novel Bone Music tells the story of Genghis Khan’s rise to power in 13th century Mongolia. The book is part legend, but the food and drink in its pages is real enough, and many of the same foodstuffs are still eaten (and drunk) in Mongolia today. Genghis Khan’s people ate a lot of meat. This would have come both from the herds that travelled with the clans - oxen, horses, camels, yaks, sheep, goats - and also from the wild animals they hunted on the steppes, such as deer, marmots and squirrels. At the start of the book, the boy Temujin (young Genghis) is living in exile with his family after an ambitious chief stole his dead father's people, and must find a way to feed his little brothers: I knew we’d be in trouble if we couldn’t hunt for meat. So I struggled to master Father’s huge bow, hidden by the tall pines where the river raged loud enough to hide my grunts of frustration. My arrow-making skills improved (they had to, since I kept breaking the stupid things). But, no matt...

Regan McHenry and her husband, Tom Kiley, will eat anything, and in the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries series, they’ve had a variety of in-home and in-restaurant meals. Regan even cooked an authentic Columbian meal to try and catch a killer in A Neighborly Killing and has been known to burn dinner because a clue occurred to her as she cooked. In her most recent adventure, The Two-Faced Triplex , Regan explains her plan for getting information about a possible killer out of a reluctant witness to Tom over samosa avocado chat at an Indian restaurant, using her fork to punctuate her thoughts. Fortunately for Regan and Tom, Santa Cruz, California, where they live and work, is a tourist community and has excellent restaurants that run from upscale French to vegan Mexican with everything in between. And there are as many Thai restaurants in the community as there are Starbucks in most urban settings. Regan likes to cook and even has an herb garden so exotic ingredients are ready for th...