Brunch with Nalo Hopkinson on the 25th episode of Eating the Fantastic
Originally published at Scott Edelman. Please leave any comments there.
For the 25th episode of Eating the Fantastic-which is also the final episode of 2016-my guest and I brunched at Aggio during a break from the Baltimore Book Festival. Aggio is a restaurant from Chef Bryan Voltaggio which the Baltimore City Paper recently dubbed as offering the Best Modern Italian in town.
I’d eaten at Aggio before, but that was when it was still a pop-up within a different Voltaggio restaurant, Range, in Friendship Heights-where, by the way, I recorded an earlier episode of Eating the Fantastic with Carolyn Ives Gilman, which I hope you’ll be moved to download for dessert once you’re done with the entree of this episode.
My guest for this meal was the always entertaining Nalo Hopkinson, winner of the 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. And she’s more than lived up to the promise of that award, winning the World Fantasy Award for her short story collection Skin Folk, as well as winning the Sunburst Award, the Prix Aurora Award, and many others. Plus her novel, Sister Mine, won my own personal award for being one of my favorite novels of 2013.
Over gazpacho and fried chicken cacciatore, we discussed how knowing Nobel Prize winner Derek Wolcott when she was young affected her future, why Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water is “a lifesaving book,” the Lemonade Award, which she launched to encourage generosity within the science fiction community, that time she cosplayed as Lt. Uhura at her first convention, and much more.
Here’s how you can take a seat at the table-
1) Click through to the iTunes store and subscribe-and perhaps check out the previous 24 episodes while you’re at it.
2) Download episodes onto the device of your choice by using the show’s RSS feed of http://eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com/rss.
3) Or simply use the embed below.
And here’s the wonderful three-course brunch we ate while chatting-
Gazpacho (focaccia crostini, agrumanto, espelette, fennel pollen)
Heirloom tomato (burrata, pickled watermelon, black garlic bread, cucumber)
Tonnarelli Nero (Maryland blue crab, squid ink, uni, chiles, pepperoni crumb)
Fried chicken cacciatore (pomodoro, pickled vegetables, soft poached eggs)
Panna cotta (fennel, strawberry, hazelnut)
Olive oil cake (blueberry, lemon, sunflower seed buttercream)
Whew! Now I’m hungry all over again!
So what’s next? Well, now that 2016’s over-as far as new episodes of Eating the Fantasic are concerned anyway-it’s time to look ahead to 2017, when I’ll bring you the likes of James Morrow, Ellen Datlow, Richard Bowes, Craig Engler, Barry Malzberg, and many others. So why not subscribe to Eating the Fantastic now so you never miss an episode?