In other news: two new short stories!

[naomikritzer]

In this month's issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction you can find my short story "Cleanout," which is about family secrets, and all the stuff you find when you clean out your parents' extremely cluttered house.

In this month's Clarkesworld, you can find my short story "So Much Cooking" (also available in audio) which is about a food blogger writing during a novel flu pandemic.

This is my second publication in Clarkesworld this year -- if you missed it, you can also find my short story from a few months ago which explains why there are so damn many cat pictures on the Internet.

Enjoy!

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I loved "So Much Cooking".

[naomikritzer]

Thank you!

So very Minnesotan

[carbonel]

I dove into "So Much Cooking" and was totally immersed until I got to the end. I loved it, though I course I want to know what happens next.

Re: So very Minnesotan

[naomikritzer]

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[birdfigment.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed "So Much Cooking". Thank you for sharing it.

"So Much Cooking"

[megan chaudhuri (from livejournal.com)]

Hi Naomi,

I thoroughly enjoyed "So Much Cooking" at Clarkesworld! You combined three of my favorite things (infectious diseases, food blogs, and snarking on conspiracy thinking/panaceas) into one. I look forward to checking out your books - please keep writing! :)

When you were working on this story, did you try making those recipes yourself? I'm tempted to try making the eggless pancakes recipe for my lactose-intolerant mom.

Re: "So Much Cooking"

[naomikritzer]

Thank you!

There are recipes in the story that are things I make regularly, and recipes that are based around things I've made in the past. However, I did not test the pancake recipe. It is based on a selection of recipes for eggless pancakes that I found while googling, combined with my personal experiences making dairy-free pancakes. (I had to avoid dairy for a year and a half when my younger daughter was a baby, because cow's milk proteins seemed to make her colicky.) My DF pancake recipe was the Joy of Cooking pancake recipe (which is already a little non-standard, actually, but I prefer it), with soy milk swapped in for the regular milk and canola oil for the melted butter. It worked, but was a much touchier recipe. The pancakes were more likely to stick to the pan, more likely to fall apart when flipped, and less willing to brown nicely. My husband was much better than I was at getting them to come out edible.

I can tell you that mashed fruit as a substitute for eggs in quickbread works fine. (We've done that, as a way to make the quickbread a lower-fat food.) There's nothing that binds quite like egg, though. My guess is that these pancakes would be a pain in the ass, but the protagonist is good enough in the kitchen that she just turned down the heat and used a little extra cooking spray and was perfectly happy with the results.

For dairy-free pancakes under normal circumstances, I would suggest trying a standard recipe and just doing the soymilk substitution. For an egg substitute under normal circumstances, I would suggest Ener-G egg replacer (which I've also used in the past and worked fine).

(Since writing this story, I eye the Ener-G in the store every time I pass it and think, "...maybe I should buy that just in case.")