On Saturdays or Sundays, you can check out a snippet from my latest writing efforts. All snippets are copyrighted. These excerpts from my writing are first draft, unedited words, and may not appear in the final work.
I’ve got food on the mind if this week’s snippet is any indication:
Del enjoyed the hot, tasty food and the cheery warmth of the farmhouse, which hadn’t changed much since her childhood. She ate slowly, enjoying the crunch of the vegetables and the unmistakably Worvani flavors. The cook back home in Kalento and even the palace cooks were very skilled, but their attempts to replicate the Worvani dishes of Del’s childhood always lacked some small but vital component. Del no longer asked them for her favorite Worvani dishes, preferring to eat the foods the cooks knew how best to prepare and leaving her memory of these other foods intact.
Here, though, in this kitchen that still smelled of the same combination of fresh herbs and stuffed pasties, the Worvani stew tasted just as rich in flavor as her memory had insisted for the past decade. Even Ma Julla seemed unchanged — perhaps a few more wrinkles, but she still had alert eyes and a hint of the scent of fresh-washed linens about her. Del resisted the inclination to reveal herself to the older woman, to embrace her, and to share all her troubles the way she had as a child, when Ma Julla would hold her on her lap as they rocked slowly in the big gliding chair that still stood in its corner by the large window and profess the greatest interest in the various rocks and toys that Del had brought for her inspection.
Are there any childhood memories of people, places, or foods that you have never been able to find duplicated anywhere else?