The Cake Mix Doctor and an eager St. Louis chowhound are among those filling the Viking Cooking School author tent at Saturday’s Big Read. The free lit festival features a troika of food authors, including C. Marina Marchese. Her book, Honeybee, is the story of a woman falling in love with honey and beekeeping. She’s bowled over by the taste of fresh honey, transfixed by the queen of the hive and stung a few times along the way, too. After taking wine classes to enhance her skills as a honey taster, she winds up becoming an artisanal honey entrepreneur with Red Bee Honey. Her book includes recipes, tips on using honey as a cosmetic and an appendix that’s a guide to a whopping 75 varieties of honey.
Anne Byrn has more ways to make you look good in The Cake Mix Doctor Returns! By simply adding a note of sweet butter, sour cream, canned pumpkin, coffee or any number of other novel ingredients to store-bought cake mix, Byrn demonstrates how to add a burst of moistness and flavor. Another Taste of Restaurant Tuesday is KMOX-AM personality John Carney’s second collection of recipes from the kitchen of local eateries. It includes 200 recipes from kitchens extant and gone, including those at Portabella, Lagniappe’s, Monarch, Wildflower, Miso, The Crossing, Café Mira and more.
Marchese reads from and signs her book at 9 a.m., Byrn at 10:15 a.m., and Carney at 1:15 p.m. Big Read will be held on the campus of Clayton High School.
– Byron Kerman, who will be reading his contribution to
the Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish anthology at Big Read
This article appears in Oct 1-31, 2009.