Excerpt

Here's a bit I wrote today. The working title of my novel is Mix Tapes for Boys and Girls, but that title doesn't get the foodie-thriller concept across. Is foodie thriller officially a new genre yet?

Sarah is one of two sisters whose parents recently died in an auto accident. The sisters have inherited their parents' wildly successful restaurant in Sonoma. The younger sister, Sarah, has always been in the restaurant business and is trying to decide how or whether to continue what her parents started.

Now it was chocolate pasta. Sarah had these obesssions and had to follow them where they led her. For a ravioli made with sheets of fresh cocoa pasta she wanted more than the toothsome, rich pasta she had so far. She'd added coconut oil and a spot of vanilla to the egg, cocoa, flour, and sugar dough before kneading it and letting it rest in the refrigerator. The coconut oil made the sheets of pasta seem even richer and more chocolaty. Now Sarah was after a filling with softness and crunch or firmness. The filling had to be something special. Something like passion fruit cooked in the style of a lemon bar, cockaigne, with the crunchy sugary-eggy crust on top a good batch of brownies has, stuffed with a small lump of very melty chocolate. She would serve a pitcher of warm chocolate sauce alongside, a dish of icy-cold whipped cream, and a bowl of toasted almonds, peeled, like eggs in a nest.

Eggs reminded Sarah of the pastries she loved at dim sum restaurants: rice-flour buns (like pork bow) but filled instead with a sweet yellow paste that was somewhere between custard and pudding. Maybe she could stuff her chocolate ravioli with multiple treasures: a firm lemon curd, or a gelatin, meringue, and cream “ice-cream cake” flavored with vanilla or rum or bourbon. If the center were cold enough, it wouldn’t melt in the boiling process. She would poach them gently in coconut and rum and water; as the chocolate wrapper bloomed in the simmering bath the filling would retain its shape and chill on the inside.

Sarah would serve the dark, rich pasta in heated bowls with chocolate sauce, their center fillings a cool and firm surprise and the cold crème Chantilly harmonizing. the warm alkaline darkness of the pasta. That was it: four of the ravioli would have a firm, cool filling, but one would explode like a warm egg. She’d serve five, each different, just two inches square so there wasn’t too much to eat (and just enough to share and still be satisfied). And one of the five would be the egg surprise. Two inches square would be just enough for any of the foodies to be able to pop onto their tongues and chomp down on if they didn't feel like sharing and did feel like showing off. And then they’d play the guessing game with the non-egg ones, which were all different: “Mine’s ginger, with candied, toasted black sesame seeds,” “Mine’s orange blossom honey,” “I can’t pin it down: it’s some kind of cognac, I think.” “Oooh, mint chocolate chip. My favorite!”

It would become the thing to do that fall in Sonoma. People would love Sarah’s creations, and here she saw a glimmer of a new possibility: a dessert place. Never mind trying to compete at dinner: she could have a happening dessert place, café, and lounge (with the camera obscura for entertainment, as well as the occasional live band). Free wifi, outlets eveyrwhere, open from 8am to midnight, and you could eat any meal of the day there. And she'd serve food that was satisfying. People who like fish for breakfast could be happy, as could the ones who would want the oatmeal bread pudding or coffee and a plain croissant with raspberry jam on the side. For lunches there would be sweet caramelized onion pies and purees of roasted vegetables baked in timbales with more roasted vegetables as a garnish; everything at once among the sweetest and most savory foods they had ever tasted. That rice, mango, and coconut cream dish like the one at The Slanted Door in San Francisco would be perfect. Every time people ate there, they wouldn’t be able to help commenting on how it was a dessert café, yet they wouldn’t feel at all limited in their choices, ever, the way they do when they sit down to look at a menu at a family restaurant and realize that the restaurant no longer offers the food from the breakfast menu. Or the way they do when they dutifully eat their entire dinners but never leave room for dessert but always wish they had.

I could call it Life’s Too-Short Café, Sarah chuckled to herself. Here her thoughts swung back to her mother, whom Sarah missed so badly it took her breath away. Her mother reminded her of toast and Ovaltine. I could make it a real menu item, she smiled. Always have it on the menu, with the trademark R in a circle after the name and everything. People might come in and say they like Horlicks better, or Hershey’s syrup or something, but toast and Ovaltine would always be on the menu in memory of my mother. Sarah made a mental note to demo how much butter to put on the toast to the staff: it had to be a lot.

Soundtrack: kd lang singing "I Want It All" on All You Can Eat. That's the album with the picture of a sew-on patch that says "My parents went to Los Angeles and all I got was this lousy patch."