Food
Book Talk: Romance writer Debbie Macomber serves up a cookbook
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-08-26 15:07
American writer Debbie Macomber is a best-selling author of romance and other women's fiction but now she is serving up a new genre to satisfy her readers -- cookery.
Macomber, 60, a prolific author for Canada-based publisher Harlequin with more than 150 novels to her name, branched away from traditional romance about seven years ago to focus more on women's relationships, particularly in her Cedar Cove series.
But readers of the series set in small town America, which has just had its ninth book "92 Pacific Boulevard" published, wanted more and kept writing to Macomber asking for recipes for the food mentioned.
Ever responsive to readers' wishes, Macomber has just released her first cookbook, "Debbie Macomber's Cedar Cove Cookbook," with recipes like cowboy eggs with smoky black beans and lime-avocado salsa and roasted garlic white pizza.
Macomber spoke to Reuters about writing and this weekend's transformation of her home town of Port Orchard, Washington, into the fictional community of Cedar Cove to raise money for local charities:
Q: Why a cookbook?
A: "Readers would write me for the recipes. I'd mention the food and the recipes wouldn't be there and they wanted them. I love to cook and I love to eat so I understand this interest."
Q: Are the recipes all your own?
A: "No, it is a mixture. There are some of my own recipes that I gave to a recipe developer to write up, and all were cooked in a test kitchen. If I didn't have a recipe for something in the book, then she would also develop a recipe for it."
Q: Is there a theme to the food?
A: "It is all basic, good, home cooking. The way the book is set up is that the grandmother in the series is collecting recipes to give them as a gift to her granddaughter."
