SHORT ORDERS: Food Stories and Travels

About the Book

Largo FL, July 7, 2011, PR Newswire/-- SHORT ORDERS: Food Stories and Travels – is fiction and non-fiction about food in our lives. Savor these quirky, sometimes thought-provoking, slices-of-life.

Haggis embarrassment – Subway refreshments -- Brazil yesterday – Coconut lifeline -- Everglades dining -- Chocolate that couldn’t melt -- Nude on a sushi platter -- Hippie ending -- Where cookbooks get written -- Iron Chef farce -- Doggy-bag indexing – Brewsky in Greece -- French army potato salad -- Jason’s parents’ “’tinis” -- Big Easy hangover – Picnic spoiler -- Elevator passion – Blackmail beauty – Dinner table baggage artists -- Corn smut and white marble -- Imitating Indian -- Wedding pig-out -- Bush doctor’s secrets – sixty-three in all!

A selection from Martindale’s story titled, You Plan the Best Picnics:

“They met in Barnes & Noble’s Starbuck’s. Each had an expensive book to browse and never buy. However, the sky was threatening, the Friday afternoon free and the shortbread tasty. His name was Tucker, and he spotted the lovely girl first. He stared at her which he knew would make her look toward him, and she did. Instantly their eyes bounced off each other and back to their unimportant pages. Tucker did it again. After their eyes met for the second time, he made sign language, his own. He pointed to himself, then he pointed to her table, raised his brows and waited to see if she performed some form of headshake meaning yes. She did better than that. She pulled out her empty chair and pointed to it, a bit of a smile on her face.”

Some of us eat to live; others live to eat. Soon we realize how important food is to all peoples, rich or poor, how celebratory, how labor-intense, how meager for some and extremely regional. Food matters all around us due to its history, evolution, sheer fun, traveling ways, versatility, acquisition, recipe adaptation, preparation and marketing through simple evolution.

“Marty’s writing is captivating. It has just enough humor, yet there's an undeniable flavor of real-world education with her anecdotes. There's maturity and substance to it, however youthful the stories are.”

J. Lipinski, Massachusetts

About the author:

With a background in social/cultural anthropology, broadcast media, hotels and travel writing, Martindale delves into food from its fun as well as serious sides. For over 30 years, she has contributed to several food encyclopedias, Storied Dishes, Culinary Biographies, travel, food, and trade magazines and newspapers. Martindale founded Food Site of the Day, now Foodsite Magazine, in 2001, weekly site picks, articles, special archives, reviews, frequent blogging and menu sampling. Though a native New Englander, she now lives on the west coast of Florida after spending many years in New Mexico and Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

About the Author

My mother, Virginia Sanborn- Burleigh, was a school teacher, and when she had youngster-me in her kitchen, she became a cooking teacher. Any time we wondered about a food item, we turned to the “Food Goddess” of the time, Fanny Merritt Farmer, founder of the Boston Cooking School. She kept it local; I was born in New Hampshire and we lived in the Providence-Boston area, a land of baked beans, clams with bellies and maple syrup.

Mom was also an early believer in the fact we are very much what we eat and dragged me frequently to her Nature Food Store when there were no others around. From about the age of eleven, plus 4H Cooking Club, I started cooking and was quite certain everyone else could cook. I later learned life is not that simple for too many.

Our family didn’t hand down recipes. If we liked a dish, we looked the recipe up ourselves. It was not until quite recently I realized my grandmother and her maid cooked a lot of Thomas Jefferson’s favorites.

I left Rhode Island on my wedding day for an Air Force wife’s life in Waco, Texas, and I loved the homemade pimento cheese, pinto beans with Cheddar, chopped pecans in tuna salad and my first tastes of Mexican food the southwest offered me. A year later, Uncle Sam sent us to New Mexico for ten years, and I learned to cook everything Mexican we liked from a little New Mexico Extension Service cookbook. Poaching whipped egg whites for Natillas and smoking-hot deep fat for sopapillas were my largest challenges.

Next, it was ten more Air Force years in Biloxi, Mississippi, where fresh shrimp was cheap and the romantic foodways of New Orleans were only an hour away. Here we learned very late evening meals were a nice way of life, so were gumbo, red beans on Mondays and huge muffalettas for return trips from The Big Easy.

We retired in Tampa Bay with our almost-grown kids, JoAnn and Brad. Our eating fare changed to beans which were black, Latin American foods, grouper and stone crabs.

Up until this time I worked mostly in radio as a copywriter and broadcaster, owned a small print shop and did a stint in hotel marketing and banquet planning. It was a very late time for me to plan higher education for myself. I did, however, and ended up in Gainesville FL, the University of Florida, and a cultural anthropology major. I had published a few articles, but it was time to “educate it.”

Once back in Tampa Bay I wrote business articles regularly and soon I was taking exotic trips to the Caribbean which moved me into travel writing. This was a land of sugar apples, pumpkin soup, coo-coo fish and warm cucumber dishes. Two short trips to Brazil introduced manioc crepes, feijoada and acaraje. When one mixes anthropology with a lot of travel one soon sees how very major food is to all peoples, rich as well as poor, how celebratory it is, how labor-intensive, how meager for some and how varied according to regional natural sources. I then found myself writing more about food -- food’s history, evolution, sheer fun, travels, versatility, acquisition, recipe adaptation, preparation, marketing and its many, many incarnations.

And now, I have written my first book, SHORT ORDERS, short-short stories, because I am an articles and copywriter.

Marty Martindale